Now more than ever, we have the opportunity to share about what’s going on in our local community to the rest of the world. The video-making tools, the blogging, the twittering, and picture-sharing via online networks is growing exponentially. It just needs to be organized. As we wrap up this week, we want to ponder how our community could be affected if we took bigger steps in revealing our culture to non-dancers outside of our world.
We’ll always have an underground community. No matter how exposed street dance gets pushed into the public spotlight, there will be folks who want to keep it underground. It’s a natural process that has gone in cycles for the past thirty years. What’s different today is that we individually can take steps to start conversations with people and tell them about what we do, what our lives are like, and what we love about our dance. Maybe there will never be one source for all this information - not one online forum, blog, twitter site, or Youtube channel. But every contribution that a dancer makes to the global online conversation about dance is shaping perceptions and people’s understanding of our history.
This is a theme that we’ve visited before, but it’s worth reconsidering because the expansion of our scene could depend on it. Youtube opened up the street dance world to a new generation in 2005. Now, there’s a glut of material online - dance videos, postings, articles, blog posts. People are going to get confused. We can help them. We as street dancers can become spokesmen and women for our stories and personally converse with an audience.
Make a personal Twitter site. Create your own Youtube channel. Become a regular contributor to online forums and share your thoughts. Post it on facebook. Make that personal connection. We have to look at the outside world as a potential audience of future street dancers who are at this time, uninformed. They just need a little direction and we can provide that together.
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