8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: social media

Chapter List

  • 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.

  • Costume Party

    Does everyone need to brand themselves? 

    A personal brand goes well beyond a clever URL and a logo made up of your initials. 

    In an online world we are presented with this ideas of an avatar, a kind of costume that we don when we share our work, our thoughts, or our best selves in digital spaces.

    Since we are (obviously) unable to be online in the physical, tangible way that is the organic stuff of reality and a million years of social evolution, what we then present online is necessarily a construct. After all, we cannot know the subtleties of our own personalities like the ticks and quirks we give off when sitting across from a real person, so all of it is fabricated as some kind of manicured self image if we like that idea or not.

    Embracing this idea, leaning into it, is the notion of personal brand: shaping that avatar to fulfill a purpose, and perhaps to be more than—or at least a more refined and controlled version of—our real world selves.

    The notion this implies is that we are all somehow emotionally mature enough to construct these online characters in a way that presents us in a positive and beneficial way. 

    What this implies is skill and nuance. 

    What this notion misses is that not all masks well made.

    To brand oneself, one puts on a mask and becomes someone or something else, which can be useful and necessary, but can be a difficult illusion to maintain. 

    This doesn’t make it impossible or ill-advised, but rather perhaps something that is done with care and purpose and not just because it seems to be a fad.

  • Critical Commodity

    Minding the gate are too many unworthy of the task.

    If you are a creative, and anything like me, you too often go online to see the unfiltered criticism of so many gatekeeping Shadowtrolls. Performative dismissal of the work of others has become something of a cottage industry online, an entire genre unto itself filled with dark aspirational influencers whose sole contribution is unfiltered judgement.

    Criticism is essential to any art form, but open critique meant to foster the talents of a creator who has hung their work out for public adjudication is vastly different than tearing those same offerings to shreds while glorifying the corpse of someone else’s creative efforts. Shadowtrolls feast on the pain of the latter, giving no value to the community they critique and farming adulation from those who giggle at the imperfection of others.

    Art is always imperfect. Even the rare examples that we hold up as so are also the source of flaws and must be subject to evaluation to particular tastes. 

    Criticism is inescapable, and I am not here to simply say it shouldn’t exist.

    Rather, as a creative who is among those offering our own imperfect samples to the world, that when met with the ravings of a Shadowtroll seeking to bar the path and slam the gate closed, we should do something besides hear and recoil at the critical rage. We should make our own evaluations of the source of those barriers and judgement, and discard such opinion with a ferocity met equal to the unworthy.

  • 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.

    Our feeds, all of them, are filled to the brim with algorithmically pushed trash.

    Some of it is important. Some of if drives awareness of injustice and tragedy. Some of it sparks action and reaction. Some of it is vital to understanding the world, society and the universe.

    But creatives have an important role to play too: positive balance. 

    It is not our jobs to join the rage.

    It is our job to balance it all out, to remind people that there is beauty in the world worth fighting for, and it is our job to maintain the flame of art and story and music and hope in a wasteland of anger and AI slop.

    It is so easy as an artist to reject the darkness of these platforms and avoid them, and I have struggled myself, even recently, trying to understand my role there.

    The way I see it? Our role is not to repost angry memes, or rant about authoritarian politics, or even rage against the machine. 

    Rather, our role, the creative’s role, is to keep playing the music of humanity in all its forms and make sure when the dawn returns there is still a bit of our humanity left to remind us why we were fighting the darkness at all.