It’s been a couple of days of digital bliss. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Instagram. Just silence. Silence and sunshine, as the London heatwave returns with a delicious vengeance. What is it about the heady combination of a heatwave and Wimbledon being on? I love it. It just screams SUMMER.
In the past couple of weeks, Ed Sheeran quit Twitter following a torrent of abuse after Glastonbury, a teenager died during some prank to get more followers on YouTube, and another man was arrested for dangling his baby off the edge of a skyscraper unless he got more Facebook likes.
These are of course high profile cases, but it’s clear to see that some people do really care about their personae on social media to the point where they become a lens through which they view their own self-worth. At a much lower level, you can imagine some teenager posting a photo on Instagram, waiting for the likes to start coming in, and feeling upset when they don’t, exacerbated by the fact that their friend is getting loads of likes (‘and their photo is just shit’). I am wondering how I am going to help my son (now 11) to stay focused on creating work from his own soul and being proud of it whatever happens, once he hits his teens. I’m seeing, perhaps for the first time, just how dangerous social media truly is.
I sometimes think about Ed Sheeran, how weird it must be to have reached the zenith of everything you ever wanted at such a young age. I am an admirer, not a fan. I find Galway Girl just as irritating as the next guy. However, he comes across as a very down-to-earth guy who has just stuck to his guns throughout this crazy whirlwind to which he has been exposed. His success is unfathomable to me, a once-in-a-generation mix of luck, timing, personality and (it has to be said) talent.
I genuinely felt his frustration after Glastonbury that so many people just didn’t get the whole looping thing. By being incredibly good at this technique, he had people convinced he was using backing tapes, and was subjected to the most horrendous abuse on Twitter. That’s just insane. It’s like a magician on television being accused of video trickery. But isn’t it interesting that once technology gets involved on stage and people lose the connection between the performer and their instrument, they start to sense fakery? Anyway, I was sorry to see all that – yet another example of social media at it’s worst.
The best looping thing ever done, in my opinion, was KT Tunstall doing Black Horse and the Cherry Tree on Jools Holland. It was spellbinding. You could just see it building and it was so well judged – just enough to turn the track into something extraordinary but not so much it became some kind of technical exercise. Brilliant. I also liked how she called her Akai Headrush pedal (the looper) ‘wee bastard’.