Social Media and Creativity (in a time of Covid-19)
What a moment we are living in. I have taken to drinking tea out of the enamel Puffing Billy souvenir mug I usually take camping, and taking my laptop into the backyard to work, because it makes me feel as though I’m on holidays. But I can’t fool myself for very long, and this is not a holiday.
I have been tinkering at some writing about social media for about the last few months, supplemented by lots of reading and research, but I was never able to shape my ideas into something complete. Possibly because my main conclusion was that I’m infinitely happier without social media in my life, and the simple solution to the problem would be to remove myself completely from it. That conclusion has become somewhat redundant in the face of this crisis, with my livelihood now dependent on the internet.
Like many people I have found myself suddenly without a significant portion of my projected income, probably for the next six months at least, and any income I do make going forward will have to come from activities like online teaching. Most of my students here in Melbourne have been wonderful and made the transition to online lessons, but the hole left in my income from the performance work I have lost is significant.
In the early stages of Covid-19 the entertainment industry was hit first by social distancing measures, with no signs of aid from the government, particularly for self employed contractors and sole traders who make up a large part of the industry. Sitting back and hoping for new business didn’t seem an option, and social media (and leveraging my “personal brand”) suddenly seemed crucial to my livelihood. As the economic crisis has spread to many industries the collective voice has become louder than just arts workers, and measures have since been announced to support sole traders financially. This has personally come as a huge relief, and I’m no longer driven by the fear of destitution to irrational decisions, and I can once again assess my relationship to social media with a little bit of calm detachment.
Until the Covid-19 crisis really took hold I had been taking an extended break from online life. I’d come to the conclusion that my relationship with social media was almost identical to my relationship with alcohol, and like alcohol I found moderation almost impossible. It was far simpler to abstain completely. I have tried setting many different rules around my use of social media, but like trying to drink only three days a week, or stopping after one glass of wine, the willpower involved in enforcing these rules is exhausting, and the times when the object of your addiction gets the better of you become a source of shame and anxiety. I still want to make and share my art, and engage with the art my colleagues are making and sharing, but in the last few years the baggage that comes with social media has become too heavy to carry. I am nostalgic for the era of “Instagram before influencers”, and for a time when social media was the sketchbook, and not the finalised product, which, as artist Alexandra Marzella puts it, "requires a whole new set of skills and energy”.
It is this energy required to maintain a social media presence that I find so exhausting. In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport makes an extremely strong case for removing the distraction of technology to help you access states of flow, and I can confirm that my attention becomes far deeper when I take a long abstinence from digital connection. The more time I spend on social media the more time I spend thinking about social media, and soon there is no space in my mind for anything other than anxiety.
The problem I have with Deep Work is that Newport is a tenured academic, and can afford to be a bit of an eccentric social media abstainer. What do those of us who work as self-employed creatives do? Social media is sold to us as an essential platform for sharing our work, building an audience, connecting with new clients, finding collaborators, publicising our events, and even just making us appear relevant in a crowded marketplace. We have been encouraged to build our personal brands publicly through our social media profiles, and the more followers we have the more likely we are to get hired for prestigious jobs or be offered high profile gigs, publishing contracts or recording deals. Record labels or publishers used to take chances on unknown artists on the strength of their work, but now they prefer the less risky option of backing those who already have an audience ready and waiting to spend.
To build this audience we are told to share our work, and our creative process, post regular content of exceptional quality, and interact with our audiences and colleagues by commenting, sharing content and participating in industry based Facebook groups and other online forums. This takes an incredible amount of work, time which most of us would prefer to spend on our own creative practice. Much of this work is aimed at manipulating the algorithms behind the social network feeds, which are constantly changing, leaving us at the mercy of the companies who own the applications with no real control over whether our audiences are actually seeing the work we put so much time and effort into.
This raises the question is all this hard work worth it? When people ask me about The Song-Chain Project and whether it was difficult to write something new every day, I tell them that sharing each day’s work was the most difficult part of the project. Writing the music was easy in comparison to the work of filming, editing and uploading videos, and the anxiety induced by sharing my music in a very raw form. The sharing was not pointless. It gave me public accountability, and I made many new friends and had wonderful conversations about the creative process, but was the accountability, connection and conversation worth more than the art itself? Would time and space to enter a deep state of flow have produced better art? Possibly, but I can’t deny social media its place in the project, as my experience with it shaped the music I wrote as much as it hindered my creativity at times.
I bowed out of The Song-Chain Project earlier than I had planned, and didn’t log onto any social media for about six months after I posted the last song I wrote. Since then it has been a cycle of burnout and abstinence, as I fail to find an achievable balance between connection and solitude.
Cal Newport’s follow-up book to Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, provides a more realistic framework than Deep Work for minimising but not abstaining from social media completely, but I personally haven’t found the right balance. Just as I feel after several years of sobriety that one drink would be one drink too many for me, just a few minutes spent on social media can derail my entire day and send me down a rabbit hole of unhelpful behaviours and thought patterns. My experience is eloquently described by Tavi Gevinson in this excellent essay:
"For all my years growing up online, I am still unable to both rapidly and accurately manage so many realities at once: to account for hundreds of people’s feedback in a matter of minutes; to know what to give weight to and what to let go of, what to take at face value and what to read into, what strikes a chord because of a real insecurity I have and what strikes a chord because of a silly insecurity I’ve learned to have, what of other people is authentic or performance or both or neither, and how to catch my brain when it goes to this place. This cycle of judging and being judged is a black hole in which time disappears, in which I and the people I encounter are all frozen in our profiles. It is where I nourish my insecurities over the millions of past versions of me that float around like old yearbook photos and where I still judge people I don’t know for reasons I can’t even remember."
Yet now in the reality of Covid-19, our world shifted entirely online, disconnecting from it doesn’t seem like an option. I could possibly be happy making art just for myself, but the truth is I want to share it. In performance the audience is as much a part of the show as the artist, and playing for myself in my own home is an entirely different experience to feeding off warm and receptive bodies in live performance. Both are valid forms of artistic expression, but I don’t feel my practice would be complete without the latter.
For now, strategies like signing out of my accounts once I’ve posted something, not keeping social media apps on my phone, using the Facebook News Feed Eradicator plugin and embracing slower forms of communication like this blog and my email newsletter help keep a lid on the distraction and anxiety, but I know I’m up against the deliberately addictive design of these platforms, and I can’t shake the little feeling that what I really want is abstinence. I’ve just started reading How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odel, and I hope that it will provide some new insights into making art in a digital world.
Related reading:
Who Would I Be Without Instagram? An investigation. - The Cut
Me, Inc. The paradoxical, pressure-filled quest to build a “personal brand.” - New Republic
The Rise of the “Getting Real” Post on Instagram - The New Yorker
Unconventional Life Hack: Think of Your Attention Span Like a Bank Account - Manrepeller
Books on social media and attention:
8 things I learned after selling 90% of my possessions (plus a couple of regrets)
“I had stored these dreams of the future me in labelled plastic tubs: wools, silks, cottons, linens, rayons, shirting, crepes, velvets, voiles. They contained the lives I would have lived, places I would have visited, friends I would have made.”