Social Media and You
TLDR: Social media is about making money for the platform holders by scraping, using, and selling your data. Social Media is a crappy free self-promotion tool, not a singular path to or marker of success, or measure of your worth as an artist.
Uncontroversial opinion - Social media platforms… (sigh), they really don’t work for artists, they “work“ for the platform owners and you also work for the platform holder by promoting their platform. Social media “doesn’t work” when the artist expects to somehow go viral or become a celebrity and then profit by simply posting amazing artwork every week or every day. No one would say this is their expectation but that is how a lot of the social media rants come across to me.
I just want a space to dispel the harmful myth that “exposure” in the form of likes should lead to an comfortable income- its an early 2000s - 2010s, Web 2.0 sort of idea of how the web works because the platforms worked that way for a few people. This is back when companies were just starting to understand how to make money from user generated content and web traffic…ads and selling user data.
The funny part is, I wouldn’t even call the expectation unreasonable it’s just outdated but that was the picture of success that was sold to everyone by said platforms back then. The reality is that this lie is promoted as the best possible path to success because it makes these platforms richer. These platforms which had nothing to sell and no use aside from an additional avenue for social interaction were always about selling your data while giving you a warm fuzzy feeling of connection. The speculative markets all collectively held their breath as these platforms hemorrhaged cash every year until they figured it out.
Platform holders profit off of your hope of potential success. Artists are not paid enough to make a living through art alone in most career paths. There really aren’t as many full time salaried employment opportunities for artists and that has been the case for quite some time. There are only so many spots and there are millions if not billions of people who want to make a living making art, its why your parents or teacher or some random on the street will dissuade from it. You have to chase it it doesn’t just show up for you. Platform holders and capitalism prey upon artist’s lack of fair compensation to get user generated content and profit upon the data it generates.
In the 2020s, the platforms don’t work the same way, they have leveraged big data using predictive analytics to see where trends were going to then using prescriptive analytics to serve you the content you didn’t know you wanted. So its harder to become noticed in the deluge of “content“ and that content is curated algorithmically and served to the users based upon the user’s preferences, past likes, data and the popularity of certain content. The platforms have all the levers and they can decide what to push and what to suppress based upon what makes the most money and that control and predictability killed the previous organic system we want to believe still exists online.
The social media influencer/artist space is such a tiny slice of the industry but the idea is so intoxicating that lots of people try for this (and if you really want that, go for it) but we shouldn’t think its only way to make art a viable career or live life as an artist. The irony being, that some of the most influential artists in our era do not have that level of success, fame or virality, and most people wouldn’t even recognize their names but they might recognize their work. There are also still millions of artists from all over the world and from all walks of life whose work can be found/seen online that would never have seen the light of day in the past and yet there are still artists whose work is only discovered posthumously. Art is by and for everyone, we are not special beings with magical powers only bestowed to us; we are skilled, curious, passionate humans that like creating things and use the visual arts as the medium to express ourselves.
Deep down, we hoped that social media platforms would disrupt the barriers in place that prevented lesser known artists from breaking into the industry by essentially replacing/ bypassing having an art agent/dealer, a publisher deal, a marketing team, and a public relations expert. We wanted to bypass the bias of the human gatekeepers and cut out the middleman to success and be discovered by people who want to give you money for your art just like a Hollywood hopeful would be discovered by a producer or director etc. without having to find an agent to represent them. All of that was and is still a rags to riches, capitalist, underdog lone hero fantasy and by the way a super American-tinged way of thinking about success.
In reality, having an online presence is easy and a bare minimum as there are no barriers to making your profile and yet, the rest is still hard to do and luck still plays a factor. So social media disrupted the hard to understand and obfuscated barriers of the commercial art industry only to replace it with their own hard to understand algorithmic barriers that are doing much the same thing, the curation of content. People with certain advantages can still leverage social media and their real world contacts, capital, and connections to be seen more than the average person so many of the old barriers still exist today.
So social media is just a tool for marketing, promotions, and connections that scrapes all of your data that is all. In the early days of web 2.0, it was more organic but still wildly different from the industry and that was what made it disruptive then. The fantasy is that it can be so much more; its a star-maker. Social media chooses who will be successful, it chooses whose art is worth seeing and if you don’t get the likes your art should not be seen and that’s a huge lie that stifles creativity and promotes toxic behavior. We give it too much power because we want promoting our art and getting it in front of important eyes to be convenient and easy. The thing is, we watched a scant few people go viral and become Internet celebrities and we said “its possible“ and banked on that.
As artists, we use social media to collaborate and make things together and connect with others with similar interests and I think that’s the value. To me the other “stuff” around social media making you money is just figuring out how to become a huge corporate shill, a marketable commodity, and how be a good capitalist artist.
