I am suffering from social media fatigue

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly

Sigh. OK, let's start backwards, I joined Facebook so late to avoid reading people's corny posts. By late I mean very late. Also, I discovered a loop - only "friends of friends" can add me as a friend, so I added one friend and deleted him, so basically my profile is ghost and only serves to manage the official page of this blog there. X? I follow no one. Instagram - 26 people - but basically lost most of my audience when my account got hacked. Linkedin is a different story, I used to enjoy there. Now it is just a dump of all the facebook cast-offs. 

I admit though, even if the amount of people I follow on Instagram was very restricted I used to love scrolling and just calm my mind from the different causes of stress in my life, which not only all Lebanese face, but also have some very specific to my life. It was an escape and a release. Bit by bit though, with everything becoming video and AI, the compulsion to numb my brain started becoming irritating. As I try to find the latest posts about retro toys, or the broadcast of the newest men's Prada show, I had to endure an enormous amount of senseless videos, erroneous information, a lot of interjected threads stories (mostly written by AI) and so on.

So all in all, whereas I was very sheltered - no Facebook friends, no people to follow on X, relatively few additions to my Instagram original feed, and - what otherwise was pleasurable posts on Linkedin... Now I am suffering from extreme social media fatigue what's with everything becoming clogged with extra unneeded information.

I own a very old iPhone 7SE (yes, I know i must change it but I keep delaying that), but it also has two screens one after the other - yesterday I moved Instagram to the other unseen page to avoid seeing the app and (absent-mindedly) check it. Also, I own a one-thousand plus book strong library of which about 600 were already read. I took some extra books. I may or may not read them but at least my OCD personality cannot notice Instagram and be triggered. As for Linkedin, sadly the people I love to read there get lost in the new algorithm offering me posts I never signed up for. I just checked as to how many people I unfollowed and the list is humongous but the new algorithm just keeps spewing posts from people I never signed up for. 

There's too much lecturing, too much drawing conclusions - either on Instagram or Linkedin - from facts that never align. Sure like with anywhere, there is a very interesting amount of information, the problem is now finding it and sorting it when there is little time or patience for that.

I am truly suffering from information, or rather useless information, fatigue. 

Someone offered my a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce a long time ago. I shall begin to read it in earnest "I will yes" (if you know you know).

Am I too old to adapt to the new advertising?

Linkedin - from my series "Tanaklogia" dated 2013

I have been in the communication scene long enough, and I have read the words "old advertising is dead" more often than is healthily possible. Anything from the prisma buildboards (remember those rotating ones which would accomodate, not one, not two but three ads at once?), to the electronic diplays which could accommodate even more than three, to the splintering of TV into many in one household, to advent of social media, and now the explosive ubiquitous presence of AI, and so on and so forth.

When my cousin who studied arts in the US came back to Lebanon sometime in the mid-80s, he took me for a ride and in one of those small villages in Mount Lebanon he looked at the banner above a small shop and simply said "that's advertising! Anything out of the ordinary is advertising!" - the beauty of it is that the banner was one of those that simply said so-and-so shop no more no less, but the street was otherwise barren from any other such sign, which made it very striking in the middle of that road.

Today everyone is going "if they can do it, why can't we?". Everyone who is anyone is trying to keep up with - to be honest I don't even know with what. Sure, sure, I ranted about client servicing in agencies dumbing down creative work out of fear of losing accounts, I have spoken about creatives not being creative because they've been outvoted too many times, about ignorant marketing department heads who have no clue what they are doing, about impolite clients thinking they own the agency just because they end up - very very bleatingly paying their bills. But this is different, there is a huge of sense of we-lost-the-plot-and-we-have-no-idea-what-we-are-doing.

Obviously, don't let me start with Linkedin where everyone is an award-winner and each member there posting silly AI slops and glorifying mundane happenings, and trying to exalt "lessons" from things that otherwise wouldn't register on the radar because "they are building personal brands".

What am I harping about here? I am just saying that eventually, advertising purposes have not changed. Any advertising no matter what the "brand" is does 3 things: 1) introduce the product 2) tell you the product is in the market 3) invite you to try the product. Still, even those simple, ubiquitous and very simple aims end up not being fulfilled.

I am all for creativity believe me. But what is bothering me is the fact that everyone is going for style over substance. I can barely recall any ad that stood out as of late. Has there been any? I am sure there has been, but they are more and more difficult to locate and remember. And throughout it all, the fatigue gets more and more intense. 

Lebanon: Defeats should not define us.

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly based on a Hussein Hajj quote

Yesterday on Linkedin Tahaab Rais posted about a man who was writing his own headlines instead of reading the depressing ones in the press. Things like "husband loves wife today". You can read the post here. Now this has been a strange weekend for me. Not my usual deep-thinking mode. More like thoughts passing through my head as I was reading. And I added a reply to Tahaab's post. Here it is verbatim: "being in Lebanon is not exactly an easy thing these days. I thought: OK, I lost an enormous amount of money at the bank, electricity comes in batches of 2 hours a day, I have not had any serious work since (I am afraid to think since when!). Meat, water, power all of them rationed. And still - I am able to care for my elderly mother (at 86 is it not a picnic), a friend just gifted me 5 boxes of impossible-to-find meds of hers, I am still able to pay the bills (again, no mean feat!), I live in a beautiful house (I actually almost single-handedly restored in 2003), and I inherited around 1000 books from a British journalist who had to be medically evacuated from Lebanon (which I read when the power is down and summer light still up!). All this to say, OK, the world is bleak right now (specifically in a place like Lebanon), but am pulling through (certainly not easily). That old man is correct - 2020 should not define us, Defeats should not define us as well. The world goes on, so do we."

And so here we are - who would have thought I would be putting a positive spin on what happened? But - again - I can lament as much as I can about what happened, my generosity included. But this will not change things. Or the outcomes. Without any doubt, this was a case of trial by fire - not just for me - but for the whole Lebanese population. Still, it was a perfect storm as I called it earlier, with each element just feeding the others. But again, onwards and upwards.

Defeats should not define us. But that one hell of a defeat.

Claim your narrative, I claimed mine.

Recently, I saw the poster of an exhibition which dates back to 2015 which was hosted by a certain institution. The concept of the exhibition, the scenography, the artworks, the elements on the poster the whole she bang was mine. On the said poster, my name was nowhere to be found. Nowhere. 

Interestingly, I was thankfully in charge of the communication as I always am in my exhibitions. So the press material and the elements that were distributed digitally all had my name on them. 

This is but one detail of the many things that happened where my name as - intentionally or not - omitted. Still, I claim these events as ethically mine. Actually, a few years back I went into a "digital regrouping mode". There were too many sub-brands to my name, even the name of my previous blog was something that did not mention me (Beirut/NTSC). My publishing arm arm was called 7UPstrairs though it was a one-man-army. My writings were generously offered to other publications which, again, did not give me credit several times - or worse, hired me only to give me a salary reduction one week later (guess, who slammed the door behind him?). Actually even my LinkedIn profile was slightly altered so that it would not be telling the whole truth, without telling a lie. As a matter of fact, even tarekchemaly.com was a masking tape for another sub-brand which did not take off.

Long story short, the digital regrouping worked, even if it meant sacrificing brands, side-projects and withholding my name from several other publications (these days, very rarely do I accept my work to be published elsewhere but here). I understand that for many - my name is fragmented: people who follow the blog might not be aware of my art, or my research, or know that I taught at master's level for fifteen years, or the other hats I wear. But that was a deliberate strategy on my part, and I wanted it to survive the afore-mentioned "digital regrouping".

Still, the exercise was worth it. I tightened the screws of the name, the "Tarek Chemaly" brand, controlled the ramifications of the projection to any of the works that has my name stamped on it. And despite setbacks because I am in Lebanon, which the quasi-totality of the Lebanese have suffered, my price list remained unchanged. I know that others are trying to adapt to the post-crash market and totally understand them, but to me - my clients which are stationed abroad were offered the same pricing as before the crisis started in Lebanon which brought the desperate need for "fresh money".

Lately, I was talking to someone and I told him I left my teaching position because it made more financial sense to remain at home, and his reply was "you can afford it". Well, here's the deal - if I can afford it or not, including my financial machinations are all part of a image am projecting to people. What happens behind the facade is purely mine, because the narrative I claimed does not include this part. 

Claiming your narrative allows you to control how you are seen. And to quote rapper Saweetie: "However, if you don't have a voice and if you don't speak up and create your own narrative, someone else will".

How LinkedIn became a facebook/Instagram hybrid

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly from the series "Tanaklogia"

LinkedIn used to be certainly interesting. Seriously, it was worlds away from the constant bombardments of Facebook and its silly updates from "friends" and holiday greetings from "our family to yours", and far from the braggadocio of Instagram where everyone is #nofilter handsome/beautiful, dressed in their logomania attires, and living their best lives.

Just last week on LinkedIn, I saw about 15 people putting certificates of courses they just finished. I congratulate them wholeheartedly, but a closer inspection of the names of the courses and - worse - the governing bodies issuing them, leaves me cold. There were also about four copy/paste versions of the same story about the guy in shoddy surroundings who got interviewed by an HR (but he got the job, yay, because "don't judge the book by its cover"), three other identical stories about companies hiring someone with no experience but who ended up getting promoted twice (twice!), about two other people promoting conspiracy theories (one about the deep state in the US, another about Carlos Ghosn replacing Riad Salameh as governor of central bank in Lebanon). 

Oh and of course, there were half a dozen stories about people who opened a business and failed and opened another one later and succeeded. And a tone of the customary motivational quotes, and several from Brigette Hyacinth. And by the way, all those saying, "if you do not like your place, change it, you are not a tree" (original quote by Jim Rohn) let me remind you as an agriculture engineer, that changing the place of a tree requires moving its primary ecosystem with it to survive (which involves the soil it was planted in - or your previous working experience/rolodex for that matter).

Thankfully, there is a mute button. Or unfollow or whatever they call it.

But yes, it is alarming. All right, we all knew men were using the the platform to privately email women about non-business issues (and at times women posting such messages to fight back), but the amount of info on LinkedIn - serious, business-like, educational - was still abundant.

Lately though, I cannot but worry. If I wanted to see shiny happy people, I'd have gone to Facebook and Instagram.