Reclaiming creativity in our digital society

I recently came across a reading assignment that I stuffed in a drawer almost a decade ago. The article was Maya Deren’s “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality”, which explores the distortion of photographs and film in contrast with other art. Deren said, “Only in photography - by the delicate manipulation of which I call controlled accident - can natural phenomena be incorporated into our own creativity.” What she means is: a photographer uses real life to distort the viewer’s perception of reality. She says that other artforms “are not constituted of reality itself; they create metaphors for reality - but photography, being itself the reality or the equivalent thereof, can use its own reality as a metaphor for ideas and abstractions.” 

This had me thinking about the use of social media and how we portray deceptive realities to one another. For the most part, we all know we’re doing it, and yet we do it anyway. Someone’s success is heightened while their inner-most thoughts are muted. It’s a classic conundrum - a cognitive dissonance between IRL and URL, when in reality, they’re very much the same thing. The progression of social media is complicated; from the early days of LiveJournal and Instant Messenger and MySpace to the contemporary use of TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter (X), there has never been one singular experience - and yet, people have found ways to create social hierarchies within the vastness of the Internet. To truly understand some of the ways we used the Internet, let me reflect on my own journey for you all.

I was 10 years old when I started using MySpace. I cusped the line between Gen Z and Millennial, awkwardly trying to find where I belonged on the Internet. I was engaging with the platform at the same time its target users (young adults) were. I grew up coding layouts, organizing my Top 8, and curating songs to truly reflect my persona. I felt mature being there, like I could really make a statement with my profile. It was the first time I expressed myself to a larger audience of peers (other pre-teens on MySpace) and strangers that I accepted friend requests from. To me, MySpace wasn’t about clout or gaining popularity. It was simply about building connections with people online, bulletin boards, and making the coolest minimalist MySpace page anyone had ever seen. I didn’t care how many friends I had, but my heart dropped any time I got a picture comment or a new friend request. There was something exhilarating about the symbiotic connection of it all - the community we were cultivating on this expressive corner of the Internet. 

By 13, I made a FaceBook and things started to shift. There was now a competition of popularity, of trying to show off how many cool photos you took on vacation, how many friends you had in those photos, and how many interesting things you liked. It became about people posting on your wall and you posting on theirs for everyone to see. It became about the social performance of it all, completely stripped of the personalized aesthetics that MySpace provided. FaceBook felt too adult, too clean, too boring. I had a Twitter account, but it shared that less visually pleasing component. It felt like the beginning of hoarding digital cultural capital. 

I remember when I first got an Instagram account. It was 2011 and I was 15. My first post ever was a grainy image of a physical copy of The Sims 3 with no caption. I started posting all the time; selfies, random pictures of things with little to no explanation, funny things I saw. As more people joined the platform, the more I committed to using it as a virtual diary versus a way to show off like we did on Facebook. My posts were silly, weirdly poetic and sometimes nonsensical, keeping people my age confused and intrigued. Sometimes I had classmates ask me about my Instagram in person, joke about how many selfies I took or how unnerving my posts were. I found it to be funny and entertaining, to confuse the status quo of how we were supposed to act online. 

As I got a little older, I would share art, music I was listening to, and shows I’d go to. After all, I was balancing the world of my Tumblr account and my high school classmates. I was part of an alternative music scene in Chicago on the weekends, while trying to fit in with the suburbanites during the week. I used my social platforms to curate a persona for myself - the opinionated feminist punk with a Rob Gordon sensibility. In other words, I leaned into the pretentiousness of it all. Looking back, I find it as a way for teenage me to combat all the normies that I felt alienated by, but the total fuck you to all things mainstream was a fascinating thing to capture in real time. It’s part of why I still keep all of those photos on the Internet. I’m intrigued by the time capsule.

By the time I got to college and I cut my hair, eventually got bangs, and only wore dark red lipstick and black, my Instagram persona changed into goth poet girl. I became empowered, leaned into this newfound self and let my short captions become vignettes, philosophical musings, questions, ideas. I used my platform as a way to project myself to the world, to manage how I was perceived, and in many ways, to document myself as an artform. I found joy in editing photos and making sure my grid looked well put together. There was a sense of pride in presenting my profile to others - look at this art pieces that I’ve curated, all made up of extensions of myself and my life. It’s not how everyone used Instagram, but it was my personal art museum. I felt in control of how others saw me. 

Now, after years of building hyper-individualized platforms to showcase ourselves, our lives, and our opinions, social media has evolved into something… dark. Suddenly, everyone’s opinion on everything started to matter. Comment sections grew into pits of verbal body slams. Discourse was the goal - how we shared art became oversaturated and commodified. It was no longer a place to simply just post songs you were listening to or share an illustration we doodled. It became another market for us to use, some in good ways and some in questionable ways. The competition grew more intense and it started to feel as if posting on the Internet had to mean something more than it was. Are you trying to one-up your frenemy? Are you trying to attract your crush? Are you trying to make your life look perfect? All the psychological warfare of IRL social settings came flooding to our virtual space, which originally once acted as a way to express oneself or to create an online persona. 

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As a writer and someone who ran an art magazine for ten years, I saw how much this environment drained creativity from artists. While being an independent artist was already a difficult way to build a living, social media - though an incredible tool in so many ways - demanded that artists become influencers and creators, that they should always be at the beck and call of the algorithm. If they are not, either someone else who is more savvy with editing software or AI will fill their space. What started out as subconscious competition turned into outright battle royale. This applies to everyone, too, not just artists. But at this moment, I am focused on art-making and its freedom to exist without the confines of constant capitalist demand. Sure, there’s the larger corporate art world that reflects this dog-eat-dog lifestyle, but there are also places like Meow Wolf (maybe I am biased), who challenge the rigidness of the art world and instead welcome people to be fluid, slow, and joyful in their craft. 

I am not here to provide answers. Frankly, there’s nothing more that I miss than MySpace notifications. But, the current way we are engaging with social media as writers and artists is stunting our expansive freedom. How do we reclaim art-making as a form of joy and expression versus as a way to solely make money? Is there space for that? Do we create a space for that? Can there be a place where we encourage each other’s creativity, even collaborate with one another, without the intent to sell or market. Even if it’s just a digital diary of your inner-thoughts, plastered into a painting or written into a poem. I have found some inner peace in places like Substack, which is a literary haven for writers - or silly apps like MusicLeague, where you can compete with others on whose song fits a theme more. Sure, it’s a competition, but at the end of the day, I get to discover new artists and share camaraderie with other genre-nerds.

This is both a rant and a ramble and perhaps a plea that we find a third space to simply be and create and explore our creativity before we combust into brain mash zombies, worse than we currently are.