My senior year of college, I wrote a thesis about how social media was morphing our constructions of personal narrative. The concluding section discussed the importance of creating your own unique framework for understanding your life, as opposed to filling in the blanks of a social media profile. In the year or so since publishing that work, I’ve had some new thoughts to contribute to the subject, and I will be sharing those here now.
I’m very struck by how the social media feed is called a feed. 1 It’s slop in a trough. I think it’s very important to commit to a diet and not just ingest the feed. I’ve noticed that though the feed panders to your interests, its top priority is sustaining itself. So while I don’t care about niche perfumes or the sweat tour or mui mui or whatever is trending, I am force fed this content. And you are what you eat! So slowly but surely my brain is loosing its unique dimensionality. My understanding of the world is orienting around the garage I’m being fed each day. My thoughts are being repackaged to fit the form of a tweet.
This is fine if you’re not someone who strives for unique creative expression. But I think the creators of the world really need to consider how “discourse” and instant feedback loops are destroying art. Or maybe, to take a less pessimistic tone, reinventing it.
No matter how strong your sense of perspective is, receiving instant feedback on your creative work, in the form of likes and engagement metrics, will corrupt your brain. You will, almost inevitably, start molding your creations towards what people like. And mind you, these metrics aren’t coming from surveys, they don’t relate to deep engagement, they’re coming from split second impressions. It’s never about the words, it’s all about the image. Beauty is the most valued trait. And so it all gets flatter and flatter.
It feels as though the creative impulse is being replaced by competition and envy. Or maybe I’m just projecting, because I feel so much worse about myself and my art after spending any amount of time online. But I am trying to remember to have fun. Where has all the fun gone! Why is it all so serious? Why is it all so boring?