What does it mean to be liked? To be followed?
It seems a racket now, doesn’t it?
Someone likes your work, they give you a follow. You check their page, enjoy their work, and give them a follow back. Then the next day, they’re gone. It’s all the numbers game. Make sure you have more followers than people you follow. Add an army’s worth of people a day in hopes they will add you back, then unfollow them all, and hope some of them stick around just to add up your numbers. Is anyone even reading each other’s work? Care about the art?
The pages seem to be the same recycled 7 word meme-shares: love, rain, strong, better, heart, ocean, pain.
The generation of instant gratification has erased the ideal of patience, of waiting for something good to come along, and in taking the time to enjoy something longer and more fulfilling. If it can’t be read in big bold short words while scrolling by, it can’t be worth all that time, can it? If it can’t be swiped left or right, double-tapped, and passed on, did you really write it?
Luckily, the soldiers of he word are strong, the soldiers like you. The people who trudge on through the slop of buzz words and “Hang in there, baby” cat posters and gifs of dogs falling in to mounds of snow. You write because words are warriors. They cut through the blackthorns of mediocrity and sail across the seas.
Has this affected how you write in this new social world?
The emergence of instant gratification meme poetry and daily motivations, what are your thoughts?
You are transparent in your need,
taking time to show your feed.
You follow and like and show your cards,
y’all don’t need fans, you need to be starred.
The words you string are not your own.
The ideas, the memories, the long-lost loves,
are his, and hers, and they’s, to loan.
Like the journey of The Fool,
they are ancient too,
why slap your name on it,
telling me it’s something new?
When you’re in it for the numbers,
the digits climb and raise you high,
to the mantle of poor ole forgettable Mr. Goodbye.
Killian Levy Writes 