Infomercial Existence
- CJ Farnsworth
- Feb 21, 2021
- 2 min read
What’s your brand? How are you branding?
It seems to be a writer, or to be much of anything, the demands of the day require a carefully crafted product/persona on virtual, social platforms…blogs (ahem), Instagram, Twitter…I mean, you live it…there’s a constant ticker tape running through our mind’s eye:
All of this “shameless self-promotion” (you have to say it in just that way) leaves me feeling a little naked and psoriatic. Remember when writers and artists were wonderfully reclusive and enigmatic…preserving their powers of observation, description, commentary, and creative genius for their art. We encountered art on its own terms…we came to know the writer through the work.
I’d read travel brochures, stared at pictures online, and talked to friends and relatives about Italy…none of those activities were substitutions for traveling to Italy. If I get right through it and down to it, none of those activities were actually necessary to prepare for a trip to Italy and none of them enhanced the experience of being in Italy.
Our constant, cursory connectivity distances us from not only others, but from ourselves and our experiences as well.
Because our human nature, our need to ‘know, plan, and prepare,’ has adapted to the omniaccessverse, we’ve become overexposed…our experiences diluted, our viscera compromised, our senses dulled. Not to mention the “if-I-don’t-post-it-on-social-media-did-it-actually-happen” phenomena with which we all seem enrapt.
Salinger was the first writer that awakened in me an obsession to know the man behind the story…no, the irony is not lost on me…of course, pre-internet-late-80’s trips to the local library yielded very little bloggable, Tweetable, Facebookable content…can you imagine Salinger Instagramming pics of the summer’s best Beefsteaks from his garden in Cornish??? Or Robert Frost’s Facebook album of bucolic snowy scenes across New England?
Do you notice yourself slipping into and out of persona inadvertently?
A few days ago, as I cornered my son to put toner on his adolescent skin, I found myself talking aloud through the process:
Now this is going to be soothing to your skin…it’ going to calm inflammation, tone down redness, and clarify…it has aloe and chamomile…
…as though all eyes were on me. Indeed, my son’s were rolled back in his head and until he hissed, shaking his head, “Please stop talking. Why? Like…what are you even…”
Or selecting some vodka and a mixer from the pantry:
I’m just going to finish this old Belvedere, my God, it’s been in here for years…I’ll bet since our 15 year anniversary…and I have this new Topo~Chico which I just happened to notice in the bottled water aisle at the grocery…
At least Norma Desmond “used to be in silent pictures,” the rest of us sit in our bathrobes and backyards, screens alight, filtering close-up after close-up, welcoming anyone and everyone to ‘step-right-up…’
We’ve always been rats, but there was a time when we didn’t have to live in the maze.
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