Tagged: survival strategies

Facebook Censorship: Who owns your online presence?

Facebook censorship errorAs artists nowadays many of us spend a lot of time updating social sites, building our followerships and driving traffic to them. A few events recently have given me reason to think twice about this practice. The first was when Masalacism, friends of Dutty Artz, had their free blog shut down by Google. The second was this recent article by online marketer Glen Gabe whose stuff I like. In short he was trying to talk about a similar event on Facebook where a guy’s page with 47k fans was shut down due to a trademark dispute. Gabe was trying to post a link to a story talking about it on a blog to Facebook and Facebook blocked him from doing so saying there was a technical error (see image above). Welcome to the world of social media censorship.

One of the main reasons this is possible is that in fact, as much work as we invest in promoting our profiles and their sites at the end of the day legally we don’t own them. They do. And if they decide they don’t like how you’re using their site, they can zap you. The defense against this is not avoiding these sites but instead creating your own piece of space on the web that you actually own. In my case, you’re looking at it. I use my social sites, mainly Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic back here and if I lose both those profiles this is still a place for people to come find me that I actually own.

I setup this site for about $6.00 US a month in hosting costs and am enjoying running it. Its running the free blog hosting software WordPress which I like because it’s designed to be easy to update often. If you’re interested in doing the same I wrote a how-to post here that has step by step instructions.

Has anything like this happened to you? Have you had a profile deleted? What was your response?

Creativity: How To Turn Lack Of Time & Resources Into An Asset

Banksy Smiley Face Grim Reaper

“creativity was the ability to bring to life an image or idea regardless of resources”

- Chief Boima, Interviewed by Eddie Stats

Eddie Stats has a great interview with Dutty Artz familia Chief Boima and Vamanos from Ghetto Bassquake over at his blog Ghetto Palms for the Fader (linked below). In it came the above quote which Boima mentions in the context of film theory.

I love this idea and it brings me back to a concept that I try to bash my friends and students over the head with all the time.

Creativity is what happens IN SPITE of things like equipment, time and resources. A lot of people I know cling to the idea that as soon as they get this next plug-in, keyboard, piece of software, money, time or whatever it is that they don’t currently have that they’ll be able to accomplish their creative goals.

I am sorry to report that this is absolutely not the case.

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Haters: Learn To Love Them

Haters. Got some? Good! To paraphrase the great and funny Katt Williams: If you don’t have haters, you’re doing it wrong. Having haters means that people are noticing you, engaging with your work and having an emotional response. If that response is to get on the internet and call you a racist or a no-talent, well… First let’s look at some tactics for just processing all that acid that someone just spat at you. Timothy Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week which I reviewed below, wrote a great post about this on his blog. In that, there’s a video, check it out:

He talks about Seneca, bad reviews and crazy people leaving you voice mail. He’s clearly very happy with himself and that can grate a little, HOWEVER, he’s dropping MAD SCIENCE. Absorb it.

The next is an interesting post I found at AudibleHype.com. This one is quite relevant to us as musicians who are on the internet a lot. In the post he interviews many underground hip-hop musicians and talks to them about their approach in dealing with criticism and negative feedback. This is especially interesting because if you know the internet hip-hop scene it is an INCREDIBLY toxic, testosterone soaked, hater packed environment. I personally would rather hang out in that water filled trash compactor room from Star Wars. For whatever reason some of the braggadocio that is in the genes of hip-hop has mutated into an incredibly ugly set of behaviors on the internet that you can see on YouTube comments, various forums, basically any web 2.0 space dealing with hip-hop. This may also be that your average hip-hop listener and internet user is young, male and filled with vague feelings that they are being ‘slept-on’.

He starts with some nice and simple bullet points:

1. This is a business, not a talent show. That’s real simple but 90% of rappers will still complain about their skills getting slept on. There are seven billion human beings on this planet and every single one of us is going to die. Getting over yourself is the best business investment you can make…and it’s not easy.

2. Life is not fair because there are no rules. The main test of character you face in life is what you decide to do after you finally realize that. Is that an opportunity or a tragedy? Your call. Nobody is there to referee the game. You will have triumphs, you will have setbacks, but the game itself is never over.

3. If you really thought you were the shit, you wouldn’t need to prove it. Arrogance is actually not confidence, it’s insecurity.

Check out his article here: Love Thy Hater: How to Learn and Profit from “Bad” Feedback.j