Stepping Back From Social Media
There’s no arguing that Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other social media platforms have skyrocketed many an artist’s career to new heights. My own handmade art has gotten remarkable boosts via such channels. However, at some point I think it’s important to put aside the temporary thrill of likes, views, and shares to ask, “Am I using social media, or is it using me?”
Not-So-Fair Trade
Before the rise of the almighty algorithm, I had a symbiotic relationship with social media: I shared intriguing content that compelled people to spend more time on social platforms, while the platforms themselves spread my posts far and wide amongst their userbases, providing exposure to my work. It seemed a fair tradeoff—a few hours of time each week for a few new customers.
Then, after the sudden and seemingly synchronized preference of videos over images across all platforms, this tradeoff began to feel lopsided. Suddenly those few hours a week spent sharing beautifully photographed works of art didn’t result in nearly as much viewership as before. So I turned the weekly effort into a daily one, and the beautiful images into short videos with catchy soundtracks, as per the algorithm’s incessant demands. The frustrating result was that the rewards for my efforts appeared to become completely randomized. Often the videos I spent the most time on, and was most proud of, would be shunned, getting a couple thousand views at best, while the videos I had debated whether to post at all because I felt they were mindless drivel, would skyrocket with viewership into the millions.
It drove me to start thinking about my art in terms of what would make the most shareable content instead of what would be the most fun piece to create, even though that mindset went against my every principle and inclination.
I couldn’t help it—the algorithm had wormed its way into my subconscious.
A Slow Creep
Even worse, I started to feel its tentacles squirming into my everyday life. My favorite activities have always been ones that are difficult, but provide a great sense of accomplishment (hence why I’ve opted to teach myself skills like web design and product photography instead of outsourcing them), and although learning the nuances of marketing my work on social media was initially rewarding, it eventually began to make me feel like I was regressing as a human.
The more time I spent on social media, the more I noticed my attention span decreasing as I struggled to stay focused on books that I used to be able to read for hours on end. I caught myself thinking of potential posts instead of living in the moment. While out enjoying a beautiful beach day with my husband, watching dolphins swim just yards away, the inevitable thought would pop into my head: “Could this be…content?!”
I began to feel like a part of me was slipping away and being replaced with the dumbest and ugliest qualities of society.
I noticed many of my artistic peers were embroiled in a similar mental wrestling match. My feed was full of posts captioned as “snacks for the algorithm,” or “hopping on this trend to make the algorithm like me,” implying that the inauthenticity of regularly-scheduled posts with viral-worthy qualities was now a necessary evil we all had no choice but to partake in.
Coming Full Circle
It all started to feel eerily similar to the corporate environment I’d fled years earlier. Back when I worked as a technology consultant for a large, multi-national firm, there was a universally-held truth amongst all the employees (and probably amongst 99% of all employees everywhere) which was: we didn’t really want to be there. Sure, we tolerated being there. Heck, some of us even didn’t totally mind being there, but we all knew that the second we stopped being paid to be there would be the same second we’d dash out the door.
Social media today feels the exact same way—like a dreaded job all artists have to perform to pay the bills instead of the exciting adventure it started out as.
I always found it incredibly strange, almost to the point of being comical, that nearly all nine-to-fivers have this common, unspoken (or on the rare occasion, loudly proclaimed) agreement that we hate going to work, yet we’ll spend the majority of our waking lives there toiling away because “that’s just the way it is.” That concept was something I could never bring myself to accept, and was ultimately the reason I left my corporate career in favor of becoming a self-employed artist, and I think it’s also the reason I’ve stepped back from social media in recent years. I don’t have to continue to do something that makes me unhappy just because it’s the safest option and everyone else is choosing it. There’s always another way.
Uncharted Waters
The “other way” I’m taking a chance on is sharing long-form, high-quality content on a weekly to monthly basis that I’m creating because I want to, instead of a flood of daily, short-form posts that I’m creating because I feel like I have to just to stay afloat. I’ll be sharing it here, on my own domain, as opposed to on major social media apps because I no longer want to put hours of effort into meaningful content just to have the algorithm instantly bury it or have people spend two seconds observing it before continuing their endless scroll.
I would rather have an audience of a handful of people with genuine interest and investment in my work than thousands who don’t really care to see or understand all the time, technique, and love that goes into each piece.
It would be incredibly naïve to think I’ll be able to convince a large percentage of the followers I’ve accumulated across Instagram, Facebook, and the other social behemoths to leave their familiar spaces and make the arduous digital journey all the way here instead, but I think I can convince a few, and I think it’ll be worth it.
I’m not fully abandoning all social media (after all, it is an effective form of advertising despite all the negatives attached to it), but going forward I plan to post much less frequently in those spaces, sharing just a few peeks into my projects instead of every step of the process. I’ll save all of the gritty, behind-the-scenes creation insights (a.k.a. all the good stuff) for here.
Maybe…
Maybe at the age of 32 I’m already a stubborn old hag that’s refusing to change with the times. Maybe I’ll lose all of my supporters over this transition and never sell another piece of art. Maybe I’ll be too happy to care.
A friendly reminder that I share details of my creation processes with the intent of empowering people with knowledge and techniques that may help them reach their full creative potential, not with the intent of enabling other artists to recreate my pieces. All of my designs are protected by copyright and are illegal to reproduce, reuse, or republish without my permission under any circumstances.
