Ulysses and Social Media
Modernist Literature was not among my favorite subjects in school.
It was thick, unruly, and difficult to digest.
It took me a while to get through anything written by Marcel Proust or Gertrude Stein.
D.
H.
Lawrence and James Joyce required a level of patience and focus few could muster.
It was neither fun, nor funny.
The genius behind Ulysses, however, was not in its complexity.
Rather, it was more so in learning how to read it.
The novel was almost like a cypher; you needed to crack the code to get to the nuggets inside.
The novel was written using a very complex writing technique but once you learned the style, it was incredibly useful, beneficial, and rich.
The novel was chock full of juicy parodies, fantastic puns, and rich characterizations.
Joyce actually took enormous pleasure in frustrating the heck out of readers and critics alike.
All of his works required "work" but once you understood how to read his novels, the literary benefits were enormous.
This kind of reminds me of social media.
At first glance, it's incredibly overwhelming.
There are so many sites, blogs, communities, forums, and video destinations-you name it.
Where do you start? How do you figure out which ones to pay attention to, or which ones are of value? Do I use them personally, professionally, or both? How can businesses leverage social media? Which destinations should I focus on? What is this all about and what does it mean to me? Ugh.
At first glance it all seems very overwhelming.
It reminds me of trying to read Ulysses all over again, backwards.
You want to throw your hands up in frustration and start digging around for an abacus and an old Mark Twain novel.
As with modernist literature, social media takes time and dedication to learn, use, and apply those golden nuggets that you uncover.
As with any discipline, you cannot bypass hard work to get to the "aha" moment when knowledge slowly drips in and plan begins to crystallize in your mind.
There will be mistakes along the way (and trust me, I have made many a social media blunder) but you have to be willing to embrace the likelihood of making blunders and rejoice in the successful rectitude of a mistake.
There are infinite applications for social media but like Ulysses, you have got to put in the time to understand how the stuff works.
The good news is that playing around with social media is inherently more fun than reading a 1,000 page stream-of-consciousness novel.
Sorry to all the Joyce fans out there, but I have always been more of an Ayn Rand girl myself.
It was thick, unruly, and difficult to digest.
It took me a while to get through anything written by Marcel Proust or Gertrude Stein.
D.
H.
Lawrence and James Joyce required a level of patience and focus few could muster.
It was neither fun, nor funny.
The genius behind Ulysses, however, was not in its complexity.
Rather, it was more so in learning how to read it.
The novel was almost like a cypher; you needed to crack the code to get to the nuggets inside.
The novel was written using a very complex writing technique but once you learned the style, it was incredibly useful, beneficial, and rich.
The novel was chock full of juicy parodies, fantastic puns, and rich characterizations.
Joyce actually took enormous pleasure in frustrating the heck out of readers and critics alike.
All of his works required "work" but once you understood how to read his novels, the literary benefits were enormous.
This kind of reminds me of social media.
At first glance, it's incredibly overwhelming.
There are so many sites, blogs, communities, forums, and video destinations-you name it.
Where do you start? How do you figure out which ones to pay attention to, or which ones are of value? Do I use them personally, professionally, or both? How can businesses leverage social media? Which destinations should I focus on? What is this all about and what does it mean to me? Ugh.
At first glance it all seems very overwhelming.
It reminds me of trying to read Ulysses all over again, backwards.
You want to throw your hands up in frustration and start digging around for an abacus and an old Mark Twain novel.
As with modernist literature, social media takes time and dedication to learn, use, and apply those golden nuggets that you uncover.
As with any discipline, you cannot bypass hard work to get to the "aha" moment when knowledge slowly drips in and plan begins to crystallize in your mind.
There will be mistakes along the way (and trust me, I have made many a social media blunder) but you have to be willing to embrace the likelihood of making blunders and rejoice in the successful rectitude of a mistake.
There are infinite applications for social media but like Ulysses, you have got to put in the time to understand how the stuff works.
The good news is that playing around with social media is inherently more fun than reading a 1,000 page stream-of-consciousness novel.
Sorry to all the Joyce fans out there, but I have always been more of an Ayn Rand girl myself.