8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: social media

Chapter List

  • Uncritical Content

    At first I was casually avoid it, but lately I’ve been actively blocking and aggressively veering my personal algorithm away from it: complaint baiting. 

    Sloppy critique often starts off as sincere criticism. I imagine so, anyhow. I would like to think that many of the types of armchair film critics and technology buffs and gaming reviewers started off with a genuine interest in doing artistic criticism.

    Rightly defined criticism and critique are invaluable aspects of the feedback loop for artists and creators. One of those difficult but important skills any artist must learn is how to take critique and learn from it without crumbling under the perception of negativity.  Good critique, after all, is not anger or dismissal or ridicule: it is important information to help someone redirect their effort and improve it on the next iteration or attempt. 

    Yet, social media has become rife with what seems to be more of something I would call complaint-driven content. It disguises itself as critique, but rather than offering insight or nudging the artist in a slightly different, presumably better direction creatively… it rails. It gripes. It complains. It mocks. It leeches off the work to make something ugly of its own that was never intended to lift or improve or offer even critical support of the original.

    I have to assume there is an audience for that, and an audience means clicks and revenue.  The capital-driven feedback loop never fails in this regard.

    I also have to assume the only recourse towards weakening its grasp on society is to each do our parts in ignoring it, blocking it, and discouraging it through our lack of attention.

  • Linked Out

    There is a flavour of professional writing which I find myself trying to avoid veering into.

    If you’ve ever been on that professional networking social media platform you know exactly what I’m talking about, those articles that talk about leadership, career growth and always seem to find a new way to write an article called what I learned about insert-business-trope-here from insert-random-life-experience-there.

    On site, those articles get lots of likes and reshares, but off site many assume it is all a lot of performative mugging, a bit vapid, and almost certainly driven by a lot of generative AI.

    So when a guy like me sits down to write a daily article on creative motivation or skill development or artistic niche hunting, it would be real easy to drift into the lane where all those aforementioned articles persist.

    That’s not my goal.  Far from it, in fact. It’s the reason I don’t pepper this site with advertising. I want to be more than that. Better than that. And in fact if I were to suggest that what I’m doing here is writing articles with that similar flavour but also with a lot more homespun sincerity and (what I’m hoping is) experiential insight then you might be closer to understanding where I’m coming from with this writing project.

    Still, the problem remains: writing optimistic micro-essays about creative pursuits is a genuine niche and one that has drawn the ire and ridicule of many who see it, when poorly or hastily done, as an disingenuous to the spirits of voice and purpose and method.

    It becomes just more slop.

    But I think I can avoid that.

    After all, just because fast food commodified and ruined the hamburger, doesn’t mean you won’t find a delicious example of one somewhere else, right?

  • Creative Positive, two

    (Continued from Creative Positive)

    I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

    The darkness is insidious. It is sweet like raw sugar upon the tongue, lighting up our emotions with an ability to draw us in and feast upon our time and energy.

    You may be reading these words—all of them, the blog and every post and every image and all the adjacent works of public performative creativity that goes on around it—and pondering the purpose. 

    I have a hundred reasons to write and create and sketch and make and build and do interesting things. But I have a very short list of reasons to share: it is, yes, about money and brand and fame, of course it is, it always is—but it is also about balance. It’s about holding my little patch of digital ground against the darkness. 

    It is about creating human-made ideas and sharing them into the ocean of slop.

    It is about being a net-positive in an electronic sea of rage.

    It is about finding the good of the world and launching it back into the universe for something bigger than myself.

    So long as I have hope that the world still needs something bigger and brighter than the dim shadows of this societal chasm we seem to be traversing I will get up each morning and try my best to find something positive to make …and share.

  • Never Enough 

    I recently came across a social media thread that got my head churning. 

    A person whom I follow, a prolific nature photographer, had received a comment from another of his followers demanding—demanding!—that he reveal the location of the photograph. He posted screenshots of their conversation and it went pretty much exactly how one might expect a dialog between a proud creator and an entitled audience member might escalate into digital fisticuffs. 

    Such is the nature of making anything for a large audience these days, and the the online market in which we all abide merely seems to amplify it as it sends our work to the furthest reaches of culture and opinion. This, and a long list of similar reactions I’ve had personally with people online lately, illustrates a point that has been gnawing at me: you can never know what your audience expects from your art.

    In this case, the photograph was beautiful and interesting and since it was shared for free with tens of thousands of people one would have thought there should be little to complain about. In fact, one would have thought the creator had been more than generous giving away their work. But the person who complained was aggrieved and argued that the photographer was required to go one step further and provide geographic coordinates for the location of the photo.

    Why?

    Unclear.

    But I’ve seen this effect emerge with increasing frequency.

    What you believe to be generosity and quality, giving one hundred percent for very little in return is viewed as insufficient by an invisible audience.

    And you can choose to agree and shrivel at the criticism, adapt to the feedback—or just keep doing what you are doing.

  • Middle Earth

    I recently started re-reading The Silmarillion[1] by Tolkien and was reminded of how the book opens: it is a collection of stories, after all, and one of the first pieces is a long letter written by Tolkien to one of his colleagues. In it he writes describing in informal detail a great deal of in depth background and lore of the world of novels. 

    Of course, this is interesting just on its own, particularly if you are fan of the fantasy stories set in Middle Earth. 

    But from a creative point of view it is interesting for a whole other reason: the format.

    We all struggle with busy lives. The world doesn’t routinely pause for any of us to sit down and just write. Even if you had weeks of time off from a paid job to explore creatively, fitting in words and creative effort needs to be squeezed in around managing your household or cooking meals or shovelling snow. 

    As someone put it aptly on social media recently, even just sending a text message these days is a whole spell slot. 

    Tolkien may not have had a busy life in the way we think of it, certainly not in the sense of replying to emails and curating a personal brand on social media, but he was a professor and a scholar and pre-digital. 

    And I certainly can’t assume or know if he wrote such a letter that sits in the introduction of one of his lesser-famous books for any other purpose than correspondence. Yet, he certainly found an interesting way to multi-task that we still enjoy the results of decades later.