“Manage the temptation to publish yourself”

Musician John Mayer did a clinic at Berklee music school recently, and essentially his take on the internet and social media was that it made him stupid, which is why he quit Twitter and blogging.

After hearing Amanda Palmer at Webstock earlier this year, it strikes me that Mayer's statements in this story are the complete opposite of everything Palmer says and does, the way she engages with her fans via Twitter etc. Mayer still seems stuck in a star system from 20 years ago. He wants to be the mysterious artist.

“The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”

But John Mayer’s main reason for discouraging promotion came from his own struggle to curb using social media, which should have been an outlet for promotion but eventually became an outlet for artistic expression. Mayer shared that he found himself asking himself questions like “Is this a good blog? Is this a good tweet? Which used to be is this a good song title? Is this a good bridge?”
Read: John Mayer at Berklee.