When Amy Winehouse died just over a week ago, the Internet exploded with reactions. It seemed that everybody with a blog, twitter or facebook account was in a race to make their thoughts known before anybody else. That it was important to be opinionated, and avoid any sort of subtle, middle ground. You couldn’t turn around without exaggeration.

People exaggerated their shock; they could not understand how a drug addict and alcoholic who last recorded an album five years ago could possibly have died in tragic circumstances at a young age.

People exaggerated her importance to music. A talented singer with only two albums — the last of which was released nearly five years ago — was elevated to a person who had the significance and influence of a Beyonce in 2011.

People exaggerated the extent to which Winehouse — and, by proxy, any addicted person — could help herself, and insinuated that she could have simply stopped, cold turkey, any time.

And people exaggerated the extent to which Winehouse was a victim of her addiction, insinuating that help was not available, or that nobody ever tried to extend help, or that the largest obstacle between Amy Winehouse and rehab was something other than Amy Winehouse herself.

Amazingly, I even saw her death blamed on Tory cuts to the NHS. I wish I had saved that link.

But most amazingly, I read what Russell Brand wrote about the whole thing. And now I have to say that I like something Russell Brand has done. And that’s just weird and wrong.

Brand manages to be nuanced and personal, while seeing the forest for the trees. It’s worth reading.

Photo of Lady Gaga taken by Terry Richardson. Found here.
Webcomic is pictures for sad children.

On December 20th — nearly two months ago to the day — the photography blog Pixiq published a profile on self-portrait artist Lauralyn Wilkins. Her story was interesting, her photographs fantastic, and her kit set-up minimalistic. I was an instant fan, and began following her blog, The Big Ugly.

Over the weekend, I read Lauralyn’s latest blog post, where she basically declares that she is quitting the usual channels artists use to interact with their fans on the Internet — Twitter, Facebook, Flickr.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we don’t care much. The blog (which we read) will go on, so we will presumably see her photos in our RSS feed. Social media is best used for fostering a virtual sense of community amongst widespread people that you might not otherwise interact with. It gets too much credit (for instance, for revolution in the Middle East) and too much blame (for instance, for the decline of our youth). I follow some artists on Twitter, despite not liking their art, and avoid following others whose art I quite enjoy. Twitter is a strange place.

What does get our metaphorical panties in a bunch, however, is the things that get Ms. Wilkins in a huff as she disappears from these places. Some samples:

I couldn’t really see where I was reaping great returns from perpetually plastering my pics. all over the internet

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we wonder — what kind of a “return” did Ms. Wilkins expect to receive? The general tone of the post is that Ms. Wilkins expected some combination of Twitter, Flickr and Facebook to give her fame and fortune.

This seems to be a blatant misunderstanding of how these platforms — and perhaps, the world — works. It is not enough to be both involved and good; the social media route to fame depends almost entirely on luck.

Not that it does not happen. For instance, Rosie Hardy was randomly contacted by Maroon 5 to do the cover art for their most recent album. The important thing to remember is that being randomly discovered is just that. Getting large exposure via Flickr is about as likely as getting on the cover of Playboy magazine by going to a football game.

It may happen, but you will probably have more luck buying a lottery ticket.

I still don’t know for sure if the limited response to most of my contributions to FB and Twitter – was because my stuff isn’t worthy of being acknowledged, or if people in general, aren’t inclined to help or even encourage each other. Could it be, they don’t wanna see anyone else get more than they have?

A suggestion of conspiracy? People are not promoting Ms. Wilkins’ self portraits (for free), because … why?

There are a lot of “social media gurus” out there, and here at the Big Bad Blog, we are not going to pretend to know (or care) what they say. But the key word in “social media” is “social”. Brand-management via Twitter can be used to engage your fans — but this does not create fans.

If somebody views your artwork on Flickr, it is because they want to view your artwork. If somebody follows you on Twitter, it is because they want to read your tweets. The mediums both allow interaction — allowing the artist to further engage with their audience.

Expecting that audience to then do you favours seems a little bit lot ridiculous. Not that it’s impossible, but — like all relationships — it needs to be built.

The wonderful Pixiq article that benevolent stranger – Haje Jan Kamps – wrote about me and my self-portraits, is an example of how social networking can be a positive thing. As soon as it went live, I waited anxiously, wondering if the article would trigger my big “break”. But after a flurry of interest and only about a week’s worth of time, the article seemed to have all but vanished from the site. Good god…was that my fifteen minutes of fame?!

And here we reach the point where we decided to post to the Big Bad Blog.

Pixiq is a lot more popular than we are here — according to Buzz My Stat (which may be completely unreliable), they appear to get about twenty times our traffic. We get so little traffic here, however, that twenty times more is not that much.

Assuming twenty times an average day at the Big Bad Blog (in late December) makes for 6-8,000 viewers via Pixiq. Not bad. And what does Ms. Wilkins’ do with the exposure? Leverage it? Share Pixiq with her fans? Try to provoke commentary on the piece? Republish some of her favourite work to show it off to her new viewership?

No. She waits anxiously and hopes for the best.

Ms. Hardy writes about exposure here, and while she (unfortunately) does not provide a nice short blurb for us to quote anywhere, the message is clear: gaining exposure is hard. It is incremental. And you need to put effort into it.

These are three things that Ms. Wilkins seems to have issue with. She is leaving social media because it is hard — people do not simply give you fame and fortune because you write a tweet and post a photo. She is leaving it because it is incremental — when somebody did decide to hand her some exposure on a platter, despite the improbability of it all, she had trouble dealing with the fact that it did not catapult her to fame. She is leaving because it takes effort. Luckily for those of us who like her work, it sounds like she is putting that effort elsewhere.

Twitter is overrated, after all. We may simply find Ms. Wilkins’ photos coming to us through a different channel. That channel, however, is likely to be filled with people who do not wish to promote her for free, exposure is likely to come a little at a time, and only after much effort.

Here’s hoping that Ms. Wilkins is OK with that.

Photos by Lauralyn Wilkins

Remember the movie Memento? Where the protagonist wakes up each morning with his memory wiped clean? Apparently such things can actually happen — a woman has not formed a new long-term memory since 1994.

The article itself is a bit … poor in quality. It claims the woman has no functioning short term memory, when her problem is clearly adding things to her long term memory. And it compares her condition to the movie Groundhog Day, which has nothing to do with memory loss at all.

But, hey. Neat story.

(Paper Art by Elod Beregszaszi.)

Stanford Magazine offers up an interesting look at the study of how language can influence the way we think.

CSI: Nintendo.

Good morning, internet. Here is your top headline of the week: Designer nano luggage to carry drugs to diseased cells.

And now, your infographic of the week:

(by Chon Hon Lam)