Social Networking

My normal Sunday morning routine is to get up early with the dog, fix coffee and breakfast, read the newspaper, and watch the morning news shows. I particularly like to watch ABC’s Good Morning America first, since it is on around the time I usually get up. Then I switch to CBS’s Sunday Morning when it starts, later in the morning. Well, today was no different, except that they both featured stories that by themselves are not that memorable, but when featured one after the other within an hour on two different networks covering different aspects of almost the same thing, it caught my attention.

If you didn’t happen to catch either of these programs this morning, I am sure you are confused by now. Let me explain. Good Morning America had a feature about the social networking site MySpace. But it wasn’t really about MySpace as much as it was about this ordinary middle-aged guy who worked at his local Home Depot as a credit manager. Outside of his regular job, however, he loved singing Boston songs. In fact, his daughter helped him create a MySpace page where she posted a lot of his remakes of Boston classics. The crazy thing was this guy is really good. I mean, when I wasn’t looking right at the television, I would have sworn the old Boston was back. Of course, it wasn’t the original singer, Brad Delp. In fact, Brad committed suicide in 2007 while on a tour break. But somehow, the remaining members of Boston found Tommy DiCarlo on the Internet through his MySpace page. After inviting him out for an audition, the band welcomed him as their newest member. Recently, Boston did a live show, Tommy’s debut, and it went very well. Who’s to say if this arrangement will last, but it definitely makes one think about the power of social networking.

As I said earlier though, this one story, as fascinating as is was by itself, was made much more powerful when about an hour later Sunday Morning featured a story about a Filipino man who was discovered much the same way. I’m sure most of you remember the band Journey from the 70’s and 80’s. What you may not remember is why the original lead singer, Steve Perry, was replaced. He suffered a hip injury while hiking and needed surgery to be able to continue touring. When he refused the surgery and stopped communicating with the rest of the band, they let him go. After several failed replacements, Journey recently stumbled upon Arnel Pineda from the Philippines. They found him through YouTube after watching several posts of him singing covers of Journey classics. Once again, the vocal resemblance to the original singer was uncanny. As with the previous instance, I don’t know if this new lead singer will be a long term solution, but he definitely honors the unique sound of the original band and that means he has a lot going for him.

The point of my rambling in this blog is the power of the Internet, the importance of social networking, and the total randomness of the world. I mean, here’s a great example of two guys who never could have dreamed that they would be the lead singers for two of the world’s greatest rock bands of all time, yet here they are. So the next time you post something on your MySpace page or upload something to YouTube, think about who might see, hear, or read it. Think about what you are saying about yourself and your friends. It could be your one shot at fame and fortune. If you don’t care enough to do it right, I am sure someone else in this world will.