Social Media Rant

When I was growing up, social media was two tin cans with a piece of knotted twine stretched between them. I had my first flip phone in high school and my generation mastered the now useless skill of T9 texting. I remember marveling at photos of Blackberry PDAs in print magazine advertisements. They were, of course, prohibitively expensive. No one in my working class community had one, even the businessmen in church who muted their beepers before service. It was amazing to think that a pocket sized computer could have a real keyboard built in.

PBS Kids television used to preview their website during TV ad breaks, and I memorized the sequence of letters h t t p colon slash w w w dot PBSkids dot org. My family didn’t have the internet until our rural telephone co-op allowed for dial up connections around 1997. The digitized screech was a siren song to my naive imagination. For years before I’d been spellbound by Maxis’ Sim City, Sierra’s The Incredible Machine, and Broderbund’s Print Shop. I chomped at the bit to explore the vast reaches of cyberspace for new clip art, new “web-pages”, and...new games!

When the modem first crackled to life and I logged on, it was underwhelming. Not a complete let down, but nothing could have fulfilled the grandiose imaginings of youthful anticipation. It was as if Santa Claus came down the chimney and turned out to be a middle aged conservative southerner with an office job and a modest budget. For one thing, the pages were interminably slow to load. The games on the PBS and Nickelodeon website were a far cry from the CD Rom software I was accustomed to. It was still fun to explore websites, download sound files, and browse videogame forums, but it wasn’t such a big deal.

Likewise, when I was a teenager there was a new trend called Myspace. Before that I had used AOL Instant messenger and anonymous chat rooms; essentially like having an electronic penpal, and I lost interest quickly. Myspace was different. Most people used their real names and advertised their interests...along with lots of other advertisements. I never really got into it, so when people started talking about a new web-page called Face Book, I didn’t even bother making an account.

Around 2014 I finally got an “iphone”. I still remember being confused by how to use a phone with no buttons. I had a second-hand laptop that I used in the small antique/thrift shop I inherited from grandfather. For me there was still a stark division between phone and internet. I used the iphone to call or text only. No one I knew had WiFi anyway, and the 3G LTE service was slower than dial up. I made a Facebook page to advertise my antique shop and all of my old friends added me as friends on the internet.

I met and broke up with my first girlfriend on Facebook, and my second, and third. I never used dating apps, because at the time that’s what everyone used Facebook for. When I was dating I usually left my phone off and in my car. I never checked my phone, and never wanted to. My friends didn’t either. Sometimes we would take photos with the phones or look up directions, but if we used social media it was when we were alone at at home.

Like many people, in my early 30s I found myself alone and miserable with only my phone, alcohol, and my Facebook friends. So, I vented to my electronic friends, then I blamed them for being absent. I wrote to these electronic friends I was angry with, these friends who knew my heart and could see through my anger. But those friends were never anything more than my psychological projections incarnated in cyberspace. Instead, my words were shorn of their emotion and lain on a sterile algorithmic chopping block for strangers to autopsy.

Quiet electronic conversation went on and I, a digital Icarus, gathered my broken wings and walked back to the Metaverse. A few years later around the time of the 2020 pandemic, I took a break from Facebook for a couple of years. When I returned I found that it had changed so much as to be unrecognizable. Small changes to the interface, rounded profile pictures, slight adjustments to the color palette, these innovations roll out with each ios update; because Facebook is no longer a website it’s an app.

I miss the old days of banner ads and pop-ups. They were annoying, but it was clear what was advertising and what was “content”. When I made my first social media accounts for my business, I prepared the sort of advertisements that have been used for centuries in newspapers. Around 2015 I began to see a trend among other antique shops posting more casually, sharing inspirational quotes, engaging with small talk in the comment sections. Over the next ten years that trend continued.

Now, there are no demarcations between individuals and businesses. We’ve replaced Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald with Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. The only difference between a personal and a business account to Meta Corporation is clicking a slider to select your preference; and spending money, of course. When I have paid for social media ads, I’m prompted that similar businesses in my category spend hundreds of dollars weekly on ads.

The folks who never contributed to social media beyond an occasional selfie and sharing posts from others are now making the transition to “creator accounts”. Lifestyle influencers spend money to advertise themselves spending money, in order to entice others to spend money with them in exchange for advice on how to spend money.

So, where does art fit into any of this? I’m not sure it does. The best artists I’ve seen on social media, mostly folks in their 50s and 60s have fewer than 1,000 followers. They post thoughtful imagery, or academic artwork that isn’t “shareable” or sensational. The social media commercial ecosystem is founded on limbic stimulation; on fear and reward, pleasure and anger. There’s no room for contemplation in that. There’s no room for traditional art gallery pacing, slowly analyzing what you see. Because if we analyze advertising, it fails. This is why billboards on the highway are effective, they register in the limbic system and before we can analyze the message, we’ve driven past it.

Art isn’t that way. It’s not meant to shout at the viewer, but rather to whisper. Like the still small voice in the Bible story of Elijah. Art is meant to invite the viewer to examine it, like a peacock feather on the sidewalk. It’s not something cheap to be peddled by digital carnival barkers. I see artists using the term “branding” now. I see ads shouting “ARE YOU AN ARTIST LOOKING TO GROW YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE?!” We’re commanded to grow our following and promote our brand. But, at what cost?

I see artists paying to promote photos of their families: their 2.5 blond haired children, their golden retrievers in their beachfront homes, their optimistic aphorisms, their Bible verses, their histrionic emotions, conspicuous acts of ostensible charity. Maybe I’m old and jaded, maybe I’m being negative, but I think infusing anything with capital this way is like watering a flower with gasoline.

But, this is the world we live in, and money is the social currency. Bribery has always been the language of diplomacy and extravagance the language of romantic love. I’m not sure this is anything new, but social media seems to make it more visible and more stark. It seems to divide us more sharply into castes and demographics. Art has historically been used to bridge those gaps.

Art on social media is being processed (to borrow a term from the abattoir) by social media much like the written word. Literacy rates are declining in the US and I suspect that’s driven in part by our productivity driven culture. I enjoyed reading for the first two decades of my life, but since becoming a full time artist I don’t permit myself the time. Instead I listen to audiobooks and podcasts. The difference being that there’s no opportunity to pause and think. It’s like the autoscrolling levels in Super Mario World, the pacing forces us to react accordingly. The same is true of viewing art on a social media feed.

The algorithm’s reliance on visceral reaction means that art is required to “pop”. That word gets a lot of mileage in galleries these days, and I stopped using GPT to appraise my work when I realized it was focusing on contrasts too much. That was inevitably the suggestion, “consider strengthening the contrasts to make the colors pop”. When prompted to generate images in response, AI will create gaudy hypersaturated cartoonish variations of my paintings. That’s what is being sold in galleries and taught in art schools. Because it arrests the attention, and I suppose it sells paintings. But, it’s not artistic refinement, it’s brain candy.

I chose to boost my best performing post on Facebook. It was an image of my easel and a plein air painting of a logging site. It’s novel and quaint, not particularly my best work, but the image is arresting. Maybe the shape of the logs is sexually evocative. For whatever reason it garnered attention and received five “likes” organically. The rest of my posts average between zero to two. I paid to advertise it and it’s reached over two hundred and fifty “likes”. I will continue to promote it instead of other, better, paintings, because Facebook users respond better when given social proof, like large numbers or verified checkmarks. It’s the same reason we elect celebrities as President and professional wrestling executives to educational leadership.

This changing art market is affecting me keenly, because I’m trapped in the eddies of the changing current. If I continue to produce traditional work, the market is aging and it’s becoming more difficult to be accepted. If I choose to pursue social media art, I’d have to completely reorient my process. I would focus on digital painting only and sell low priced prints and T-shirt designs, then try to market tutorial videos and beg for Patreon donations. Neither is a stable situation. But if I’d wanted a stable situation, I’d never have started this career. Art isn’t about business or marketing, it’s about challenging ourselves and society. I never really wanted to be an artist, but life has led me in this direction.

I continue to produce social media content. I’m working on new videos for Youtube, I’m posting to Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook. My budget doesn’t allow me to compete with major artists and art platforms, but I see very successful artists and galleries who are choosing not to engage with this system at all. Conversely I see absurdly bad artists and musicians paying to promote their work and I can only imagine it will be a flash in the pan after their ads stop running. That’s my concern with the direction I’ve taken on Instagram. If I produce silly Tik-Tok style videos to garner followers, they’ll be following me for the wrong reasons.

As someone who struggled socially from a very young age, this is especially relevant to me. I can remember as a small child learning how to act in order to fit in. Learning to pitch my voice a certain way, affect a drawl according to circumstances, learning to sit and walk according to convention. I developed neurotic fixations around analyzing my conduct. As a teenager it became efforts to seem cool, while self aware that effort itself is the antithesis of suave.

Just as in life, where acting disingenuously will ultimately fail, performing a role on social media isn’t sustainable. The best comedians, like Jim Varney, Sacha Cohen, Dave Chapelle, and Robin Williams succeeded because they brought so much of their true personality into their work. It was exaggerated, but not completely contrived. For me, I’m not interested in “southern culture” or affluent lifestyles. I paint what I’m able to sell thematically, but I’m not going to “brand” myself accordingly. I am not livestock to be branded, I’m a person.

My real life following is slowly increasing with each sale, and that’s much more meaningful to me as a painter than social media. I produce oil paintings that I build frames for, and that’s as much a trade as an artform. As long as that business continues, it will remain my priority. Social media is waning in popularity, especially among my generation, but it seems unlikely to become irrelevant in the near future. For now, I’ll continue as I have, and focus on the work itself more than its digital analogue.