We’re in a culture that has conditioned us to steal attention. One of our fundamental responsibilities as artists is to avoid the bear trap.
Easier said than done.
Last weekend I shared my blog on my Instagram and Facebook accounts for the very first time since I started it a year and half ago.
Of course, it didn’t translate into a single new subscriber.
In a similar vein, I heard a story the other day – and it’s not an anomaly – of a person whose reel went viral, amassing 8 million views. How many followers did it translate to?
Two thousand.
How many of those followers can they expect to engage with their best work going forward? Almost certainly far less than two thousand.
As artists we find ourselves in a Kafkaesque situation (give me an excuse to use that word and I’ll jump at it). A society that has been conditioned to steal attention is also a society that has been conditioned to guard its attention.
This is a serious problem for artists. Beyond the work of creating, we spend most of our days brushing up against apathy – and nowhere as dramatically as online.
I’m not going to pretend that this is wholly unique to our current times. Artists have always grappled for finite attention, but the dynamic has undoubtedly been dosed with steroids. People know that the artists want their attention, but the reality is, they don’t need more songs or more stories or more films – they already have too many to wade through as it is. Anyone who has an ever-expanding ‘to watch’ or ‘to read’ list will be well acquainted with this feeling.
So the default position gravitates towards ‘ignore’. Swipe past. Maybe do a polite digital clap or hat tip (in the form of a like), but they, like me, are desperately guarding their time and attention.
It makes sense. Time is our most finite resource and we’re in a world that bombards us with content.
And yet, we need people to leap – to interact with new works of art in good faith and do so with a degree of purposefulness and patience. We need more people to take the risk of having had their time wasted by a passionate artist. And as artists, we also need to get better at doing that ourselves. It’s in our interests too, because when we adopt this posture, the discoveries are all the more rewarding.
The flip side is a spiralling of the dire situation we currently face – a culture that fosters a compounding distrust of artists. A feedback loop that damages culture by auto-piloting away from deep immersion, and pushes the artists who aren’t willing to succumb to the demands of their popularity-seeking conditioning to tap out too soon.
Indeed, it’s a rabbit hole – or should I say Kafkaesque nightmare? – that risks depriving our culture of an aesthetic and emotional richness.
The burden on artists: keep honing one’s craft and resist the industrial trappings of the popularity seeking complex. No noise for the sake of it, which is what constitutes most of the content on social media, and ironically is rarely how serious trust is earned.
As Peter Drucker said: “What gets measured gets managed.”
When I’m on my death bed, there are a few things I’ll hopefully be glad to have measured:
- Deep relationships
- Songs written
- Immersion in challenging experiences
- Generous acts
- Creative projects tackled and shared
Something I’ll be less glad to have tracked: Instagram likes and followers.
And yet, I will likely share this post on my Instagram because I think it’s important that people read it. Now, what could be more Kafkaesque than that?
The Thoughts of Others
“A cynic is a passionate person who does not want to be disappointed again. The secret is not to speak to a person’s cynicism, but to speak to her passion.” – Benjamin Zander
