Dancing with social media

I took a 3-month Facebook break starting about Halloween. I kept getting messages that someone was trying to hack my account and it was always a chore to get the channel to come up on my phone. The break was a gift that kept on giving.
But I realized over the holidays that many official news sources are now putting their press releases on social media and I had missed a couple things because those same “press” releases weren’t being released to the “press”, but were just getting posted on social media.
It’s kind of like “press” boxes that are no longer really allocated to the press, but to school officials. That’s okay, though. I prefer to be close to the field when covering sports. Other reporters can fight over those metal chairs and lofty spots where decent photography is hard to come by.
When I acquiesced and put the damned thing back on the new phone I had to get because my charger port went kaput, it took me all of about 15 seconds to find myself watching one of those damned reels.
You know what I’m talking about. I don’t even need to put the IYKYK shorthand in here – but I just did.
I hate those things. How many of you have started watching one and then, 40 minutes later, realized you’ve basically watched half a movie and you don’t even know if what you were watching is real?
I stayed away from social media. I don’t peruse X or Instagram even though my wife and daughter regularly send Instagram links for me to watch. They have yet to figure out that I haven’t watched any of them.
Facebook was a great mechanism for staying in touch with friends, but I swear, I just don’t believe anything that’s on there anymore. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a lot of the creativity that goes on there.
One of the first reels I saw when I re-installed the app was this dance group that goes into Wal-Marts and Sam’s Clubs and Wawa’s and dances around the customers to see who they can engage. I think that’s cool. What’s neat is watching the reactions. I’ve always been kind of a body language geek.
These two guys and now a girl, go in to MC Hammer’s ‘Can’t Touch This’ or some other pop hit and cut loose down the aisles. If you watch security around them, they’re never smiling. It’s like, ‘Oh…here come these idiots’ but the troupe just dances right in. Some people engage with them and when customers start dancing, the real dancers just slide in next to them and adapt.
They try to dance with children, which is just awesome. Some kids jump around and love the flash mentality of it all. One toddler in a cart seat started crying when the dude danced up on her, but they adapted to that, as well, and quickly moved aside.
Some of those customers can really go. I don’t dance and I don’t sing, but I love a great musical and the people that can dance and can sing. I think it’s extremely courageous even if it doesn’t sound the greatest, it’s brave and heart-warming.
The bigger takeaway for me, aside from cracking up at the senior citizen who has to be tempting an MRI for getting jiggy with it, is how much we need things like this.
What’s more fun than three dancers making some money by becoming influencers simply going into a store and dancing with people. It’s a simple thing that they came up with to get views and get paid. But watch them. These people are genuinely having fun and celebrating life with complete strangers.
As the world fights over oil, and student loan debt, and narco terrorism and health care subsidies, and whether or not the U.S. should ‘acquire’ Greenland (Denmark colonized Greenland more than three centuries ago, but an obscure Cold War pact gives the U.S. military access to the island) we need more dancers.
As emotions run high over a woman getting killed by an ICE officer in Minnesota, just what the doctor ordered in the Viking state, a random stranger trying to get me to dance with him while I pick up brussels sprouts, milk, and Doritos wouldn’t ruin my day.
I might join in for a few bars. Imagine the regret when you’re heading back into the parking lot NOT having participated. At a Wawa, (you can tell I stop and watch these things) a dancer sashays over to a bigger guy pumping gas. The guy just stares at him with a stay-in-your-lane look and then puts his stuff up on the top of the car. He takes one step toward the intruding dancer who immediately chooses flight over fight, and then gives a couple seconds of some kind of a pop-n-lock, bringing smiles all around.
It’s restorative to me. People aren’t born to be grumpy. We’re born to be happy. We get crap thrown at us all the time and the catch-22 of it all is the more social media we watch and get stuck on, the more we see so much of the bad.
I don’t know. I could create a new element before I could figure out how to make my body do what my mind's eye sees, but someone coming up to me with music playing and a camera rolling, and trying to get me to dance randomly in a grocery store might extract a horrific moment of bad rhythm from an otherwise nice guy – But that’s Beside the Point.
Chuck Vandenberg is editor and co-owner of Pen City Current and can be reached at Charles.V@PenCityCurrent.com.