Antisocial Media
The creative instinct is a gift. It's been hijacked.
Art is an instinct. Music, painting, drawing, sculpture—these are primal compulsions humans have as children. All parents have recognized in their children that human impulse to leave marks on walls and tables and everything. And the impulse to drum and hit and sing and tap on things. Although the earliest forms of human expression such as cave paintings and drumming are now considered Art with a capital A, those Homo Sapien progenitors did not consider their works art in the way that we conceive of art today. Nor did they consider those works media. Expression and communication was just a part of life: an instinct.
The forms that creative expression take are reflections of the technological conditions of culture, and reflections too of the biases and desires of the societies that create and enable them. Today, we have a digital ecosystem where the most contrarian, sensational and disturbing content is algorithmically pushed to the top, and while the prevalence of more measured dialogue and quotidian images are diminished. This is reflected not only in our media and our art but in our speech, our political leaders and our documented increasing inability to relate to each other compassionately1.
In my own work as a professor of painting/intermedia I think a lot about how painting functions and how it relates to other forms of media. It is a weird comparison for sure, painting and digital media. But it’s useful for a few reasons. One reason is that it can foster a more equitable and objective view of art history. Another reason is that comparative media is a check against our tendency to take our media environment for granted, particularly the digital and the algorithmic elements of our environment that are designed to be invisible. Today, terms like “information literacy” and “digital citizenship” get at the challenges of creation and consumption online. But the thing thing missing from a lot of these conversations is the idea of agency.
As consumers and participants, we have very little agency. Our choices about how we express ourselves creatively feel like our choices but are in fact heavily mediated by machines. We are largely unaware of the extent that contemporary media “work us over” (to use Marshall McLuhen’s term), as social media platforms “roll-out” new features and subtly nudge us toward particular formats and ideas. While our natural creative instinct is designed to foster predicable and reliable outcomes — we share what we make and do for a small audience and the audience provides feedback — in cyberspace our position is stretched and warped while our audience is selected not by us but by opaque algorithms. As most everyone knows by now, these algorithms privilege engagement rather than satisfaction.
Artists are especially sensitive to the joy that comes with completing a work and presenting it to even a small but appreciative public audience. For artists, the feelings associated with completing and sharing a painting or song or play can promote a deep and lasting satisfaction, pride and joy. But like slot machines, our devices give us just enough satisfaction to sustain engagement but not enough to truly satiate. The endless scroll is designed to thwart any feelings of resolution of the sort that normal human creative exchange fosters. True resolution or catharsis of human creativity is postponed indefinitely. What’s worse is that this feeling of dissatisfaction, let’s call it, is bought and sold behind our backs.
Shoshana Zuboff’s tome of insight The Age of Surveillance Capitalism makes the point that it’s not merely the time we spend, but that the time is essentially our human ingenuity and creativity. Human nature itself is the commodity that gets exploited:
Now it is human nature that is scraped, torn, and taken for another century’s market project. It is obscene to suppose that this harm can be reduced to the obvious fact that users receive no fee for the raw material they supply. That critique is a feat of misdirection that would use a pricing mechanism to institutionalize and therefore legitimate the extraction of human behavior for manufacturing and sale. It ignores the key point that the essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us.
― Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
This instinct of art and communication exists in children for a reason: story-telling and sharing of ideas makes us healthier and stronger and promotes cooperation among our species. Without a diversity of skills and opinions we would not have made it out of the mouth of the cave. Finding food, navigating dangers, finding love. Our brains and instincts have been designed for communication. Communication makes us compassionate, and compassion is survival. Regretfully, today, our innate desire to share stories and share our ideas has been hijacked, commodified and exploited to disastrous consequences.
Humans evolved to live in small groups or clans, relying on close-knit communities for survival and social interaction. Art and creativity has always been about community, about sharing with others and real connection. Ironically, in the past ten years, as more and more creative energy has been expended and shared on social media, more and more people feel isolated. This isolation is such a problem that the surgeon general felt compelled to call it a loneliness epidemic.
Our desire for creativity and sharing our creativity is ancient. The total exploitation of that desire is new and so far not going particularly well. For technologies that are purportedly social, their impact on society is not positive. Social media are antisocial in that their actual goals of manipulating and commodifying our creative behavior are antagonistic to our human social instincts. The word media denotes something that is communicated or expressed, from the Latin media meaning middle. True social media are forms of art or artistic dissemination that allow artists and creators to directly connect with an audience. The irony is that media has always been social. Until now.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-us-has-an-empathy-deficit/
"The endless scroll is designed to thwart any feelings of resolution of the sort that normal human creative exchange fosters."
This is a great way to explain the "empty calories" conceptualization of the majority of social media content.