Social Media No Longer Serves Me
© Benyamin Bohlouli via Unsplash
Some 10 days ago and after some deliberation I decided to temporarily deactivate my Instagram account while trying to figure some things out.
I discovered that Instagram’s first motto was “Capture and share the world's moments” and that Facebook’s mission currently is “give people the power to buid community and bring the world closer together”.
For most creatives be them designers, illustrators, fine artists or photographers, whose personal lives are intermingled with their careers, this often means sharing creations, work in process, workspace and inspirations - to inspire and connect with others. In fact there has never been a lack of audience for original creative content way beyond one’s closest circle, including people living on the opposite side of the globe, for the simple reason that humans like to stop and admire art and creativity.
Despite this I always assumed that at some point Instagram would suffer the same fate of the social media that preceeded it. I’ve seen it happen before: stop being the cool platform and be flooded by a wider demographic, from our parents generation to businesses that sell frozen peas and everything inbetween - entities and people that don’t care about creative content or feeling inspired but about using the platform as a vehicle for corporate, political and religious content, fingerpointing, fundraisings, cute cat videos and publicity.
Yet I also expected that by the time this would happen we creatives would already had already taken our content elsewhere, like we’ve always done before. However since Facebook Inc. - now Meta - acquired Instagram, things came crumbling down a little too fast for everyone.
It all started innocently enough with an algorythm that messed with the chronological order of posts and had people complaining about missing their friends’ posts - but that was far from being the worst yet to happen. Since then the bulk of creatives on Instagram have seen their content reach drop to less than one tenth of their follower count - and stop being shown to anyone outside of that count - unless they pay for publicity that is.
Those who are still successful abide by the algorythm which in 2021 means something like posting at least 3 times per week and curating hashtags to the latest requirements. They also need to make reels and post stories - and of course mind the trending narrative.
THERE ARE NO FREE MEALS
I guess anyone understands that a social media platform needs some sort of algorythm to better monetise itself - as if selling our personal data weren’t profitable enough.
However any algorythm that uses post frequency and consistency in order to reward creators with visibility is bound to hurt all professionals whose artworks take multiple days to create as well as those who can’t afford to work on their trade full time - and neither of this things correlate to a creative’s talent, technical ability, creativity, appeal or relatability. Adding insult to injury the algorythm requires people to make reels to engage users - when some work is simply incompatible with this format.
Is it fair to favour a photographer, cartoonist or iPad illustrator over a fine artist, designer or motiongrapher whose projects take multiple days, weeks or even months to conclude?
Is it fair to favour someone who can work full-time to create content over someone who doesn’t?
Is it fair to hide some creators’ content just because it isn’t compatible with video format, when this was a still-image platform to start with?
I don’t think so. One could argue that I am being deluded and that social media never cared about creatives - other than using them to attract users onboard the platform in the first place. Such argument frames creatives as useful idiots however I wonder how long Instagram will remain relevant for the the average user after the bulk of content creators is gone. Facebook made this mistake years ago and turned into an echo chamber of crap content and a haven for fake news. Millenials and Gen Z hate it and now Instagram is heading the same way.
INSTAGRAM WORKS FOR A SINGLE TYPE OF BUSINESS
… and not even paying for publicity can help it.
About a year ago I decided to test paying for advertising one of my lines of work that is targeted to private clients. I configured all the parameters: age group, gender, interests, etcetera and went through with the add. Then it hit me:
“Wait, I wasn't offered the option to target business or creator accounts - what if I have wanted to reach creative directors, agents or companies instead?"
I did some online research and wasn’t able find any satisfactory answers to my question, only some vague claims on Instagram being great for B2B (but with zero data to back this) and as a platform for creatives to be found by art directors, through the use of specific hashtags. Yet both of these claims rely solely on the assumption that employed professionals spend a good portion of their paid time on social media.
However when we look at discoverability and more importantly, attention retention, having a website is still the best option. Nowadays Instagram is flooded with irrelevant amateurial content, but even back in its gold days it already shared from the core downside of portfolio websites and professional directories: a single click is all it takes to move on to the next profile.
To be fair some art directors report having discovered talent on the platform but I haven’t read any recent reports on that - which brings us to another drawback of being discovered there - each of us is judged against other accounts who have more followers and likes - and since both these things can be bought… we either surrend to the same fake paid popularity or simply pray to the other end being able to see through the smoke curtain.
ECHO THE TRENDING NARRATIVE
If you leave in any Western country you certainly aren’t oblivious to all the sociopolitical stir that has been going on for the last couple of years - nevermind the pandemic. Universalism, liberalism, freedom of speech and other principles that the West have held dear to its heart over the last century started giving place to tribalism, quotas, finger pointing, censorship and plenty of public mea culpas.
Do you think big brands and public entities would have risked making bold social and political statements had cancel culture at large not forced them to?
I don’t think so. Part of society - not most of it but rather the noisiest part of it - started pressuring companies to ‘speak up’ about where they stood on a number of social issues, and even brands that weren’t actually under scruttiny saw an opportunity to come forward and fall into public favour by issuing voluntary statements and saying the right thing.
Were these acts sincere? Only if you believe in fairytales. When economist Milton Friedman advanced his shareholder theory back in the 1970’s, which holds that a firm's sole responsibility is to its shareholders, the corporate landcape changed - for shareholders it did for the best but for society at large it had the opposite effect. I could go on an on about how workers pensions were impacted, how Westerners lost their jobs and industries, how developing countries’ citizens were taken advantage of in a different number of ways and how the environment was impacted.
These are just some examples of the brutal consequences of an economic doctrine that encourages corporations to do everything in their power to maximise profits including lying, hiding and diverting attentions at all costs. One specific case comes to my mind, that of well-known Western sportswear brand which has been recurrently plaged by accusations of resorting to child labour in Southeast Asia for many years now, but which has always dodged being cancelled by issuing vague statements on the lines of “we’re revolted by these claims and will investigate our supply chain” and through spending a relatively small amount of money in the practice of virtue signaling in the West - which often consists of donating, sponsoring or pledging alliance to minority groups - sometimes the same ethnicities they exploit elsewhere.
We have grown used to these statement issuances and virtue signaling all over social media for the last 2 years, to the point of them being the norm and us being desensitised. Even small companies and independent professionals who would typically stay out of this, not because of not caring about the real issues but because of realising these practices are nothing but PR manouvres, have succumbed to these practice, as not doing so made them stick out like sore fingers.
During this same period I’ve seen a number of small brands on Instagram - businesses that manufacture locally and have a fairly transparent supply chain - being harassed by personal accounts. Harassed to change the names of their products (who were named after foreign cities and thus deemed an appropriation); coerced into “offering” their social media outlets to promote books and projects (either through victimisation and/or blackmailing) and pressured to disclose how much they gave away voluntarily as donations to charities (and to prove it with bank statements!). All this discounting miscellaneous unsolicited suggestions to spend money on assorted issues and measures who wouldn’t reward businesses in any way.
However harassment isn’t just reserved to companies big and small - I have seen illustrators, comic artists and animators being accused of seing the world through binary lens and not being “allies” (comment on a story about two cats, the plot was decisively feline); of not promoting racial and body diversity (the evil illustrator in question painted all humanoid caracters in the same colour) and even of using social movements as an excuse to create art and grow their portfolios (in Portugal we say "arrested for having a dog and arrested for having none").
Yet despite all this pettiness, social media activism isn’t inherently a bad thing.
It could be a driving force for positive change in the world; assuming those who demand change were right and reasonable in their demands, open to dialogue and did their share as consumers instead of assigning blame to companies while keeping buying from them.
Unfortunately divide and strong emotions sell or, in Instagram’s case, drive engagement up. The fresher an issue is and the more voices echo it, the higher engagent rises keeping people on the platform - and the longer they stay there the more adds they see. Keeping users in an information bubble tailored to their own interests, prejudices and spiced up with the latest inflamatory content is something in Social Media’s best interests, regardless of how detrimental it is to ours. Nowadays in order to thrive on Instagram you must feed the algorythm this type of cocktail - either that or accept being hidden.
I was never an Instagram sensation but like many creatives I relied on my presence there to be found by clients I didn’t know existed and therefore would never reach. This is now gone. There is no shortage of social media managers out there saying that situations like mine can still be salvaged, that all I would need to do would be posting consistently and creating reels and stories.
Yet like many other professionals, I know my target and I know for sure that it is not glued to the phone wasting hours watching reels in the hopes of finding a designer. I also know that I like (and it makes sense in my case) to post curated content and that if I am to create 3 pieces of this type of content every week I will not have time for the work that truly matters.
The truth now is simply that social media no longer serves me. So I must ask: Does it still serve you?