Because the Internet/do you 'like' me/is sharing caring? Reflections on Social Media

(pictured - 'Really Good' Fourth Plinth - David Shrigley)

A friend of mine started blogging recently and I was advising her slightly on how to reach a larger audience, suggesting she used appropriate hashtags.  While I use hashtags to try and perhaps reach someone who might want to read my writing, I don’t put a lot of thought into digital self marketing or whatever you’d call it, but it’s in your mind when you follow someone on instagram or twitter that they might follow you back.  What is it that we’re working towards with our online output?  She wanted some feedback for her words, which is a reasonable aim, but facebook wasn’t the format for it.  Somehow we can share things with strangers that we perhaps wouldn’t say to our acquaintances.  There is a degree of anonymity and a project of developing an online persona within the framework of whatever field you’re operating in. 

            I still try and write and draw and play music and take photographs for their own sake, but increasingly it has become bait for coaxing likes and followers.  It reminds me of a character in Childish Gambino’s extraordinary screenplay companion to the album of the same name – Because the Internet.  He says his job is twitter and all that sort of thing.  It’s what he puts all his time into.  His friend says he hasn’t got a job, because he doesn’t need one, and this is just what he does with his time.  There is in the proliferation of internet social media output an assumption that this type of output is meaningful, and the feedback and likes we get a valuable and genuine currency rather than a whimsical gesture or cynical attempt to curry favour to reciprocate.

            The internet is an amazing platform for communication.  It connects most of the world.  But it is also as we know a superlative procrastination device.  I wonder how many people are distracted from their life’s work by making work that can be understood in the few seconds that people take to look at an image on their phone.  I wonder what could have been accomplished if the thought put into every facebook status was put into a novel.  What is the best outcome of blogging, or posting songs on soundcloud?  Some sort of internet fame?  Is that even desirable?  Maybe it draws attention to more serious work we produce and helps us reach a wider audience.  I don’t know if these thoughts resolve.  I think I will continue posting stuff online.  When I hear about friends who’ve left facebook I look at them with the same baffled admiration of someone who has quit smoking.  This is the world we live in, posting just about every facet of our lives for encouragement and admiration.  It feels like there’s no escape.  It feels to some extent that real expression is being strangled by an urge towards caricatured versions of ourselves that are more palatable as a product.  Whatever, this is how it is.  Like it or leave.  If this read like a moan, it’s not quite meant to be one.  I’m really asking questions of myself, why I blog, post drawings, poems, songs.  Is anyone really listening?  Does it mean anything?  Who knows.