What Are Friends For?

Well, no wonder I'm not getting much done. Being technologically challenged is hard enough. But in a world where all of my favorite artists have these MySpace .... thingies....well, it just adds to the pressure. The pressure to produce new articles, the pressure to make friends, the pressure to embrace a new technology and use it to further my cause, the pressure to keep up with a world of technology and social networking that I'm just not ready to handle!


I remember when MySpace first kind of took off. Now, it's like a madness. Even my nieces have MySpace pages. Ok, even I have one now, not because I love to indulge in social networking on the Web, but because every single one of my favorite artists has a MySpace page. Most of them are in my extended network of 3,246,921,805,02 MySpace users. At some point, it became clear that if I didn't get on this bandwagon before it passed me by, I'd have a pretty big gap in my bluegrass friend file.


Personally, I wish I understood how life got to this point. I feel like as a society we've largely reconfigured the human connection to something remote, electronic, finite, distant -- and to some degree, safe. At the same time, we've made it a smaller world. Heck, even Jamie Dailey is in my extended network! The chance to directly promote specific artists or developments is neat, so I'm not giving up. Still experimenting. But it is still a huge learning curve -- especially since I'm not sure I'm ready to quit all my jobs in order to manage my various Bluegrass Pimping Web Sites. I'd much rather be visiting each of these bands in person or hearing their shows, but since I can't be in two places at once, MySpace does kind of bridge that gap.


Progress, or something like it, moves toward us at a pace virtually unimagined by our forebears. As I struggled to reply to a text message sent by my 12 year old son from camp nearly four hours from home, I realized it's time to get over the whole tech thing. No way to beat 'em, so I gotta join 'em. And I suppose it's kind of cool that people who visit my page get smacked with a taste of some of my favorite artists, including some local folk.


If you stop by my own space, you can enjoy a spectacular rendition of one of my favorite all-time tunes, an old Bill Monroe piece called Jerusalem Ridge. I love this song, because it's like in four pieces. I've been trying to learn it for a couple months now. So I was really tickled by Casey Driessen's version. Of course, you can visit his Space, hear more tunes, and find out whether you're in his extended network!