The Tug Of War Between Creating Content And Creating Art.
Do You Go Wide Or Do You Go Deep?
Since we came out of the Covid lockdowns, I have noticed a shift in the attitude of the content creators.
They are doing one of three things -
posting less content,
have left social media, or
shifted gears and are doing something completely different, online or offline.
Now there might be many reasons for this, some being -
the ever-changing nature of social media.
how we spend so much of our time on what's urgent, with nothing left for what's important to us.
how our time is numbered and doing something that we are not enjoying or don't love is stealing that precious time away from us.
But one reason I noticed indirectly came up was that making internet content wasn't satisfying the creator anymore.
To them, their work felt dull and flat, and the creator felt hollow inside. They tried to escape this feeling by continuing to work and publish their content. Still, after a point, they couldn't deny that this arrangement wasn't working for them and the audience.
So it was time to take a step back, re-evaluate their life and work, and find out what was happening.
What I believe was going on, and this is something that I, too, struggle with as a content creator and an artist, is the tug of war between creating content and creating art.
When social media and content creation came into existence, we were promised that we could create and share our thoughts, ideas, feelings, and art with everyone worldwide. We could create anything we want and potentially build an audience.
We all jumped into this fantastic opportunity without noticing the teeny-tiny asterisk with a footnote saying "Terms and Conditions applied."
Initially, social media was audience-driven. You posted something, and people saw it and interacted with it. Now, social media is investment-driven. Now you post something, people may or may not see it, depending on if it's a post on the topic that, according to the algorithm, is trending enough to be shown to others. And social media only wants trendy content because that's where they make money, at the cost of the content creators.
So if you are a content creator, you have to be trend-focused. And not of the audience but of some software program idling away in some computer whose job is to tell everyone what to watch, read, like, eat, do, etc.
And to please the algorithm, content creators give into tried-and-tested templates that may reach a wider audience with minimum deep impact. You might take hours to create that one reel, only to have it seen for 30 seconds and then get swiped away.
So now, instead of creating anything you want, we create content that the algorithm makes us think we want.
While the end goal of creating content is reaching as many as you want with your work, the goal of creating art is self-expression.
No matter which form or medium you use, when you create art, you are trying to give a physical shape to what you are feeling, thinking, seeing, and want to say. There is no pleasing the audience or the algorithm involved here. You simply want to express yourself.
When you do this, you can't help but go deep. And to do that, you need time and patience to let your art, i.e. whatever you are working on, unfold itself to you. You can't rush it; you can't force it. You definitely can't make it follow a template or a posting schedule.
There's a YouTuber who calls himself a filmmaker, but he's not happy. Because he's so busy creating content to stay on schedule and build an audience that he has no energy left for creating or even thinking about a film.
Most of my time goes into writing these essays, and I only get an hour or so a couple of times per month to work on my novel.
This is what Julia Cameron calls a "Shadow Artist."
A shadow artist is a person who pursues a line close enough to what we actually want to do.
Writers become editors and bloggers. Filmmakers, videographers, and photographers become YouTubers. Dancers become trendy 30-second dancers on TikTok.
You reason with yourself that you're getting the practice or building an audience, but deep down, you know something is missing.
We, creators and artists, are the red cloth tied right at the centre of the rope, which is being pulled by Content on one side and Art on one side. That's a very unnerving place to be in.
We want to create our content to reach a wider audience. But at the same time, we want to make our art that has a deeper impact.
How we go about it is a choice we must make, and everyone's answer will be different.
