.: Thoughts On Social Networking & Friends

Monday, April 25, 2011

Thoughts On Social Networking & Friends

Used to be back in the day you would go to a club or other social gathering to meet your friends and they would introduce you to new friends or you would just happen to meet a new friend by saying hello! Being in the life we would sometimes walk down the street and if you saw someone you liked you would turn back to see if they were looking back at you... sometimes called cruising. In any event you met someone by actually getting the nerve to walk up and talk to them in person. If you had something in common you might have met a new friend. If there was an attraction you might have found yourself in a relationship.

To day it is all different… I still meet new friends through my friends and sometimes I meet people who look back as I look back.. But that is rare.

Now I meet new friends on Facebook and other social mechanisms including online personal sites. I am represented by a avatar of myself, a photo or little drawing… or perhaps just a silly photo of a puppy or flower in the case of MSN. Personal sites ask you to put in stats such as height, weight and what ever else. They might ask you to share you birthday/age, horoscope sign etc. All of these stats allows the potential new friend to sort you based on things that wouldn’t or shouldn’t have any real input as to weather you were worthy to be a friend.

Yes I can understand that these might influence who you wanted to be in a relationship with, people like what they like! But filtering people who maybe a potential friend using stats just means you maybe be missing out on the best friend you have ever had in your life, the type of friend you used to meet when you met someone in person. I miss those days.

Sites like Facebook are changing the dynamic of the one thing most important to us… Human connection.

I noticed tonight that 3 people had de-friended me in the past day… one of which was someone very important to me. It stung. I’m not going to even lie it hurt. They left me with out having to explain why… they took an easy exit. Were they my friend in the first place?

Doesn’t seem so. Perhaps it should be called Acquaintancebook because many people on your facebook are not your friends.

This past weekend I had a potential new friend bail on a visit to Toronto. A visit I had invested in financially. They bailed via Facebook using a plethora of reasons all within their control, had they called me it would have made the difference on how it made me feel.

Again it is easier to type then connect. Social networking has allowed a greater impersonal- ness to creep into our relationships. Famous people are always sited for breaking up via a txt message or email. What the hell is that? Social networking allows people to avoid the fear of connecting when the news is not positive. In my opinion if I have been dating you for the last year I need to have the balls to break up in person... otherwise I am simply communicating to you that you were never important to me in the first place.

I cant say I haven’t connected with new people on Facebook, I cant say I haven’t met people I now call friends as I have met many of them in person and they have been delightful individuals. But then I cant say they all love ME warts and all and I can say that about my real friends.

Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

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The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

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Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com