Love this take from McMullin, Tara - Beyond Creating Versus Consuming - 2023-07-17. Tara talks about the need to consume art to make better art. This is advice in essentially every creative practice or medium — except social media. And, as Tara points out, social media is a creative medium.

We see consumption of social media content as being… like, “lower-brow” than consuming other types of content. We see most of what’s online as brainrot.

I tend to agree with this, especially since {6.1} artificial intelligence will increase the power of the stream, flooding our feeds with generally meaningless slop.

But Tara points out:

Look, people make bad art in every medium.

And, yeah, actually. This is a much more level-headed way to look at this. Looking for something to watch, how many low-effort b-movies do we scroll past? How many recycled shows and ideas and IP? When I read, how many times have I put a book down because it didn’t live up to my expectations?

That doesn’t make me see filmmaking or writing as inherently bad mediums. I don’t write off cinema because of Sharknado (and why would I!).

So why do we write off social media as a legitimate medium just because other people use it to publish shitty content? That’s a user issue and a platform issue, not an issue with the medium itself.

Maybe we should be more concerned with how platforms reward low-effort content than with how much low-effort content there is… This ties in with another idea from Tara’s article: performance of gender on social media.

[UNABLE TO LOCATE EMBED]

I wonder if this is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or, like, what the cycle is here. A man creates a platform that we all join > Men try to replicate the creator > Women are tasked with engagement… I dunno, lots to explore here.