Reluctance to Social Media
This blog posting is going to be a little different since it was late. This past weekend I had a grueling family event that required all of my focus, and I apologize for the inconvenience but I think I still have a lot to share on the this week's topic, the community of practice model. It's interesting to think about how the community of practice model has evolved over time, and how I hope it will continue to evolve in the future.
My profession has always been in audio since I was a pre-teen and so I try to access that community in many different ways, and it usually never requires me to be communicating with professionals in person - like ever. I will touch more on this later, but the point is that I always try to exercise this model without having to interact with platforms like Twitter or Instagram, just because I always thought they were never really effective in sharing how complex audio can be, and being limited to what I can provide to around 200 characters.
Conversely I almost never interact with sound designers, engineers or audio professionals in person, or in a shared space. The way I commonly access these professionals are through discord channels, where I can directly message them or share video chats, or see their content on platforms like YouTube, where they control the flow of what they want to share, and what challenges they face in the audio world personal to them, which I love.
So in this medium that I became accustomed to, I never really saw myself as a YouTube creator, and I never imagined finding community in places like Twitter amongst audio professionals, or audio hobbyists.
My Profession
Yes, sometimes I consider myself an audio professional, but I also consider myself still a student, and I think I always will, the way I have been attached to audio since I started, made me crave the learning process, the sharing of wealth of knowledge in audio, the experimental creativity even if it sounded awful - just for fun and satisfaction of trying something new - to learn.
What I attribute to calling myself a professional is also how much time I have dedicated to this profession/ hobby. I can confidently say I have put in anywhere between 5000-10000 hours a year on creating and manipulating audio alone for the past 8 years. This doesn't account for the learning I do outside of my DAW or how many videos I watch, and how much music I listen to on a daily basis, it consumes my whole life, and I've learned how to manage that time with it wisely.
So, how can I advance myself in platforms in a way that I normally don't use, or considered to find the community of audio engineers, sound designers, producers, recording artists? It will definitely take a lot of self discovery and solid research to immerse myself in a world of audio people that I would typically never encounter.
What is my platform?
The platforms I have chosen for this week are Twitter (X), and YouTube but as a creator, and seeing if people will have feedback for my public work that can lead me to new communities, much like the videos I watched. In my brief period of already utilizing these platforms, I found a community called the Audio Engineering Society and it was already an amazing discovery to find a concrete example of community beyond my chosen mediums to reach.
Some of my preconceived notions about Twitter was that it was a sort of an unpredictable platform, that it was free to post virtually anything you wanted, hard to find the content you actually enjoy or want to engage with, and you're often seeing content that you didn't ask for all the while having a lack of censorship or content regulation.
Even so, it shouldn't deter me from trying to interact or search harder for the community of people that share similar interests with me in the audio world - maybe I just don't know where to look.
As for YouTube, I've always loved the platform. Of course over the years I have some disagreements with policy changes, but I am more grateful that a platform like YouTube exists than if the platform didn't exist at all. The mission of YouTube is for people to share their profession in the mediums of video, and people can share their opinions about the content - and I am all for it.
I think I am going to try sharing my profession in audio in very small instances first, maybe small sound designs I have made, somethings I do in my daily audio life, my habits and routines, and be sure to welcome folks from every walk of life.
If you'd love to support me and other artists from the Bay Area; Listen to music produced and engineered by Aux on Spotify here:
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