Jay Slayton-Joslin: You recently published an article on Buzzfeed about the anxiety of social media. Do you feel that this is a necessary evil in the modern day age of self-promoting and publishing?

Michael Seidlinger: Oh yeah, you better believe that social media is rewiring how we think, communicate, and function as individuals in modern society. I mean, the 24-hr news cycle alone is a testament to how information technology has restructured the cultural conscience. With artists—be it an author or not—there’s this gravitational pull to the social media platform as a means of both promotion and fascination. In the Buzzfeed article, I wrote about relevancy and the need for validation. It’s very real and almost always, if even not the main reason someone uses social media, one of the things that keeps a person coming back. How often do you find yourself checking your phone for notifications?

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