How Amanda Palmer Restored My Faith in Social Media

Image via Wikipedia

So, I’ve been kinda blah blah down about the whole transformative power of social media lately. I’m a contrarian by nature (but not in a Chris Hitchens kinda way) and I vowed that if I read one more tweet, retweet, op-ed piece, blog post,  etc. about the wondrous unicorn nature of social media and how we better get in on the ground floor right now and start harnessing and leveraging our brains out, well,  I was going to give serious thought to moving into an underground bunker in the Dakota  foothills. F’reals.

But then something pretty flippin’ nifty happened last night. I was browsing my Twitter feed and noticed a tweet from the one and only Amanda Palmer saying that she was on UStream and had convinced an up-and-coming Boston musician, Matthew Ebel, to play an encore to his weekly webcast concert. Given that I had designs on interviewing him for my other site after reading about him on WBUR (as linked from the comment section of  this post on AFP’s blog), I clicked over to Ustream to catch the action.  I wasn’t the only one. Ebel and his fans were ecstatic at the traffic Palmer’s tweet generated (a peak of 250 new viewers in addition to those who  had actually watched his regular concert earlier in the evening). Palmer bantered with the regulars in Ebel’s chatroom while he followed along on a laptop propped up on his keyboard, took typed-out requests from the crowd and entertained all of us for more than half an hour on top of the 90 minute + show he wrapped up earlier in the evening.  Dude is talented. Palmer’s Ben Folds comparison? Spot on. And don’t get me started on the smartypants awesomeness of Twitter Me Gently.

As Ebel was winding down his impromptu encore, Palmer decided to get in on the action and return the favor by performing a song of her own. Cue the entire audience stampeding over to her Ustream feed where, after polling Twitter for an appropriate song selection, she banged out a wonderfully gritty version of Ampersand on her out-of-tune piano, dressed in her underwear and kimono and swigging a beer. As she wrapped up the final verse, her cell rang with a friend wanting to know why Palmer was late for their dinner date and then again seconds later with Palmer’s other half, Neil Gaiman, letting her know he’d caught her mini show. Aww…

As I watched both artists’ fans school each other (Ebel’s: Come back next week! Subscribe! Palmer’s: Don’t buy her album from a retailer, get it directly from her website!) and witnessed the whole unstructured middleman-free collaboration unfold,  I had to give credit where it was due (aside from to the artists themselves):  social media, namely Twitter and Ustream. In the words of Amanda Palmer as she ended the evening, “F*ck the system; we have the internet.”

Oh, social media, I still think you might just be the post-millennial answer to betamax (I’ll write about this in greater detail in the future), but you just bought yourself a little goodwill for enabling this delightful jam session and letting a lucky couple hundred of us take advantage of your immediate, personal and scalable nature.

But don’t press your luck.