I guess to the people of the time period itself, it must not have been that strange, because they had no idea that, 10 years later, in 2007, there would be something called Facebook and Instagram et cetera but, still, something tells me that it must have really been quite different, and certainly rather lonely. I mean, you really have to think about it: Prior to social media, how would just a basic fan even really know where a band was heading to next, on their tour, in the first place? Sure, I suppose you might have had the option to buy one of those famous tee shirts where all the tour locations were listed, or maybe there was something you could buy at the show itself that displayed the tour dates , but beyond that, assuming you had neither of those things, what exactly was there? What resource did one even have to follow a band in depth prior to the Internet? It's honestly unfathomable to me.Like if you were just living in Kansas somewhere and you were aware that a band, especially a smaller band like Sonic Youth was on tour, how the hell did you know where, exactly? How could you actually go about locating them?
Looking backwards, I just do not understand where on Earth this information would have been being passed around, and this is exactly why I say that even just being the band itself on tour must have felt, in some sense, pretty damn lonely, because you really had no one to share any of the individual tour spots with , besides of course whoever was waiting for you there. These days when a band is on tour, especially a minor band whose just leaving on their first, one imagines that they probably take a hundred and one exciting photographs of each new city or town they peel into. The photographs they then of course probably post instantly to social media. Hell, most of them are probably even shooting videos as they hit each spot. But a 90s band? An 80s one? 70s? What the hell reason did these pre-social media people really have to photograph anything when , beyond a magazine , who probably wouldn't use the pics anyways, they had no hope of sharing it anywhere? To tell you the truth, actually, I sometimes look at the many photographs that the pre-social media celebrities took in eras like the 90s and beforehand, and I just can't help but wonder: Who exactly were they taking all these photos for? Where exactly were these photos being distributed, aside from a magazine -- of which there couldn't have possibly been all that many?
Like, there is no way they were being taken solely for fun or for his own personal use, because you can see hes trying to put on an image with them, and then too you also know he wasn't taking them for social media, because it did not exist, so what the hell were they for, exactly? For the future Internet? Did they somehow know even then what it was eventually going to be all about? I doubt it. And then too there's also the fact that he could not have possibly known, at that point in the middle 90's, just what a titanic star he was going to wind up being in the post 2001 period, anyways .
For all he knew, he'd be washing up on the shore an absolute nobody....and yet there he is, over and over again, in these incredibly interesting and good looking photographs that could perhaps even be said to be sort of responsible for his career. Many of these photographs of a young JD are now shared obsessively thousands upon thousands, if not millions of times, on engines like Tumblr, by young people who have no idea just how strange it once was to take photographs, of every little thing. Young people who don't understand that, prior to social media, the only thing that happened to a photograph you took (even a photo of a celebrity that a magazine would not print, as Im saying) was that it often got stuffed into a drawer somewhere, to never see the light of day save for maybe 3 times a year. Now of course you can take a photo of your dog lying around somewhere, upload it to Tumblr, and it might get reblogged...who knows... 12,000 times in 2 weeks. It's crazy.....
Myself, for example, I came of age as a teenager in the middle 2000's, and from that period, since Smartphones with digital cameras did not yet exist, I basically have zero photographs of myself. Literally. Zero. They were almost all lost, and one part of the reason basically all of them managed to get lost (which sounds, I know, insane to a teenager of now) is because so few of them were taken in the first place. It was a pretty rare thing to get your picture taken even in the mid 2000s, at least if you were a lower class person. I have no idea what was going on with the middle class or the upper class...but down in the trenches, nobody was taking photos all that often. Nobody had a fucking camera! The second you saw someone with a digital camera, you used to think "they got money to blow on stupid shit .... "
In fact, I remember vividly that, during my teenage years and even the first, say, two years of my 20's, there would occasionally be someone who came around with an actual digital camera in order to take pictures of us, usually of course on some somewhat special occasion, and we used to always think it was strange as hell whenever anyone would do that. We would have some fun with it, I remember, and the next day we would often get some laughs looking at the pictures that were taken, and it would actually be a sort of event with everyone crowded around the PC looking, but for the most part it actually only happened rarely. I also vividly remember buddies of mine who would have to sometimes go out of their way to get their photo taken for Facebook or MySpace, et cetera, asking to borrow someones camera and get the photo emailed to them. Or of course you would have some poor sap who had some awful grainy phone and you could hardly make him out in any of the photos he had uploaded. Indeed, you used to be able to discern someones social class with photos......
These days with the smartphones of course this all sounds ridiculous. High quality ictures are now essentially being taken around the clock throughout each social class, and not only that, but they also have somewhere to actually be uploaded and seen, so there is a good reason to take them if you want to take them.
For instance, it might sound odd, but I have been talking about crossdressing and cosmetics a bit on this blog lately, and the truth is that, without the smartphone, I never would have realized just how fun it is to do either of those things, because without the phone and the ability to take very quick selfies and then alter them, I would have probably never been able to properly see myself, the way I do with the smartphone. You can really plot a picture and the way you'll look in it rather easily with a smartphone, first because it allows you to see yourself as you shoot the photo and secondly because the timer is easy to work.
At any rate, I of course would have been able to take a selfie in the year 2006 with a digital camera if I wanted I suppose, but for some reason it seems I never did it. I also, as I am saying, never edited a single photo of myself until I had my first smartphone which I think I got around the year 2013 or so. And it was probably, say, one or two years after getting my first smartphone that I discovered the joys of cosmetics and then, shortly thereafter, cross dressing, after accidentally stumbling across a cosmetics app called Perfect365 on the iPhone. I am honestly not sure if I perhaps searched the app out or not, assuming that something like it might exist, but all I know is that the second I found it I became enamored, fascinated, and absolutely amazed with the results it gave me. Yes, I know it isn't how the makeup would really look... but its still pretty close, I think, and holy hell is it fun. It makes me sad of course, sometimes, because I wish something like it had been around when I was younger, like 17 or 19 or so, but sady there was nothing...nothing at all. The only way back in those days that I would have been able to see my own face with makeup on it is if I asked a girl or maybe I did it myself somehow, and obviously i was never going to bother doing that. So basically I was stuck with nothing until Perfect365 came out ..
Wow, I really am a bad writer...
I got vey off topic here. Please forgive me. Im wroking with a TERRIBLE keyb0ard----
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