Some months ago I published a post about my return to (very occasional) posting on this blog. I said at the time that I'd go on to discuss my parallel return to twitter. It says quite a lot about my reluctance in the area generally that it's taken me until August to type up and publish something I scribbled in my notebook in March, if memory serves. Make of that what you will.
I first joined twitter as "myself" - simonphopkins - well over a decade ago. I was never an especially avid poster, but it's surprising how easy it is to build up thousands of tweets over that length of time. I didn't go much for the running commentary approach; rather I used the platform to point to things that generally interested me, mostly in the world of art and music.
Then last year I deactivated the account, for a number of reasons. Jaron Lanier's diatribe against the BUMMER industries had made a big impact on me. Meanwhile, the increasingly shrill, bilious exchanges in the culture wars were simply depressing (and of course has only become more so). Mostly though, I just didn't feel I really had anything I particularly wanted to say in public.
Of course, for professional reasons, I've had to keep up (broadly) with developments in social media over the last decade and a half. I've dabbled in most of the major platforms: MySpace (hehe), flickr (food photos - the shame of it), Friends Reunited, Facebook (< 1 year - always hated it), last.fm, tumblr, Pinterest (< 1 week) and most recently Medium. But as of this year, there's bugger all of me online; I've been very happy to restrict social media and blogging activity to Angel Academe's twitter feed and Medium page.
However, I find myself in the position of having (my my standards at any rate) a lot of upcoming live music commitments. My jazz(ish) duo with pianist Steve Morgan, Undercurrent, is back with a regular slot at the Dover Castle in Brighton. Then there's LaTina Roxxx, whom I described here recently as a wedding band on quaaludes; our fist gig is at the Purple Playhouse Theatre in Hove on August 31st. I'm also paying first guitar in the Brighton Guitar Quartet, a classical guitar quartet, whose debut gig will be in Hove in October - I'll keep you posted.
Beyond that, after years down the classical guitar rabbit hole I'm looking at finally putting some time back into Boom Logistics, not least as I have over two albums' worth of material to finish off. I'm also beginning to record and post the classical guitar repertoire I've been working on over these last few years (I started with this attempt at Piazzolla).
But, but... how do I let anyone know about any of this activity? Sure, newsletters are having a real moment. I'm a big consumer personally, and I have to say from experience that Angel Academe's newsletter is probably our best way of communicating with our wider network. But twitter is undoubtedly an important part of the comms arsenal, and it's difficult to see how an active musician trying to build an audience can avoid it. (This is probably true of Facebook also, but really, I just couldn't face that.)
Anyway, returning to the fray has been an eye-opener. I toyed with resurrecting @simonphopkins but was both impressed and simultaneously a bit dejected to see that the account had been completely deleted 30 days after I left last year. So I'm starting from scratch (sigh) as @DGMfS1. I'm going to stick to what I know and love: mostly music and the arts more widely. I'm going to attempt to steer clear of the culture wars, not least as my views are increasingly liable to get me "cancelled", I suspect.
So that's it. For the second time this year I'm saying "I'm back". Let's see where it goes from here...