Is Instagram Killing Creativity?
With the platform’s increasing monopoly over our collective focus, sense of aesthetic and indeed personal time, Chantal Brocca, cultural writer and artist, explores how the advertising business model of the app could have destructive consequences for the arts…
There’s no doubt that visual social media and the creative process have become increasingly intertwined over the years, and with half the global population having Instagram at their fingertips, the platform has successfully positioned itself as a creative marketplace. It’s become a space where personal profiles act as permanent online CVs, and feeds are littered with curated moodboards that attract thousands of followers looking for inspiration.
On the surface, it seems that artists have hit the jackpot: free and able to identify, connect, learn from and sell to a global audience, able to self-promote and find self-sufficiency as self-employed creative entrepreneurs; but it’s not all that it seems. Choosing to base your entire artistic universe within the confines of an intensely curated reality that is built on advertising algorithms – that decide what you see, and in turn what you’re allowed to ‘like’ – comes with stiff hidden costs.
Tristan Harris, founder of the Centre for Humane Technology, ex-Google employee, and one of the key figures on the hit Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, has been outing social media’s social-engineering practices for almost a decade. For him, it’s the social-approval indicators such as ‘likes’, pioneered by sister company Facebook, that are the biggest threat to our independence – subconsciously undermining our individuality by re-routing our collective attention away from our personal interests and towards mainstream, macro-categories of aesthetics that are easier to target efficiently.
It’s what Pierre Bourdieu, renowned French philosopher and sociologist alludes to in his concept of habitus, that our social milieu is social media, and our tastes are entirely defined – and stunted – by the limited spectrum of images we see. In short, what we feed our minds with is eventually what spills out. Consistent exposure determines taste, like listening to the same music or eating the same foods, and with more and more creatives, or rather, reported monthly users of 1 billion, feeding from the same stagnant well, there’s bound to be repercussions.
“You’re being creative, but only in the exact way in which others on the platform are being creative – it’s a fully constrained expression,” says Elisa Arienti, artist and co-founder of Dubai-based fashion brand, La Come Di. “We’re so intertwined with it that we feel we have to align ourselves with its overall aesthetic culture – we know it’s bad for us, but we just have to be on it.” Reema Al Banna of eclectic UAE boutique label Reemami agrees: “I see with a lot of designers today that there’s a lot of monotoning, less breaking the rules, and less creating new stuff.”
Their views are confirmed after just a few minutes of conscious scrolling through Instagram; overarching umbrella aesthetics, mass reproduced images both among brands and individuals, and most unsettling of all, full-blown identity replicas herded by transient, seasonal trends – posts featuring the same style, creative concepts and, sometimes, even captions.
There are whole Instagram profiles dedicated to showing us that we are running in circles: @insta_repeat for travel photography and @diet_prada, famed for outing imitations among designers who mistake inspiration with borderline copyright infringements.
Still considered a relatively new technology, we are yet to fully assess the cognitive and social impact of social media’s heavy intrusion into our daily lives. But surely, dabbling within safe, commercially viable and conventionally popular spaces is the antithesis of innovation and creativity?
Artist and psychoanalyst Otto Rank called it almost 90 years ago in his book Art and Artist when he alluded that the true artist innately runs counter to the mainstream, delving into unique, new dimensions that add to our perception and understanding of reality. If Duchamp, Van Gogh, Kandinsky and other pioneers of art movements hadn’t challenged aesthetic norms of the time, none of the artistic diversity that erupted from the 20th century would have ever occurred.
This is where Instagram’s immense disservice to the entire endeavour of creativity is most clear – by limiting and homogenising what constitutes desirable content through the superficial metrics of the attention economy. Instagram reveals itself not as an egalitarian platform that creates a space for all individual forms of art to exist and be seen, but as a slow and subtle indoctrination machine that suffocates that innate spark of originality, spontaneity and authentic being crucial to art, inadvertently reframing the world’s ideological perceptions of ‘creativity’ to mean content marketing, and ‘good art,’ that which garners the most likes, views, reposts, and followers.
“Social media really takes away your independence because you’re constantly thinking about the public,” says Stavros Antypas, creative activist and founder of Tawahadna (@projecttawahadna), a local production house dedicated to supporting Middle Eastern female artists. “The content you choose to showcase is entirely manipulated based on what you think people should and shouldn’t see about you. Likes and views are what dictate direction – is this really authenticity?”
In a society that equates success with notoriety, creativity has become a simple means to an end: fame. Curation has come to supersede creation, with users dedicating enormous amounts of time to creating a steady stream of Insta-favourable content that can be tracked with readily accessible KPIs – and the sad truth is that ‘artist’ and ‘influencer’ are on their way to becoming practically interchangeable terms.
It seems the creative industries have fundamentally restructured to align their business models with the soul-crushing parameters of fame and celebrity culture. The result? PR companies, talent agencies and art galleries seeking out ‘artistic’ talent based on follower count and not on the independent merits of their work. Thought-provoking concepts, creativity and innovation give way to ‘reach’ and trend guidelines that maximise return on advertising spend – which does nothing but exacerbate the damage done to our collective sense of creativity by mass- endorsing a space permeated by lazy, uninspired commercial work and quasi-identical content, and to the exasperation of the local creative community, client briefs requesting the exact reproduction of images found on Instagram have sadly become a common occurrence.
And then there’s the hours of mindlessly scrolling. The Statista and Data Portal has daily time spent on social media at a global average of 2.24 hours per day, innately undermining the fundamental constituents of the creative process, namely, uninterrupted periods of intense focus, isolation and immersion in one’s craft, which is leading to more big-ticket artists such as Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lily Allen to include cyclical periods of extended hiatuses from social media in order to reconnect with the self, the present, and immediate surrounding environments; all critical factors in exploring our creative potential.
To cultivate a path back to originality, the creative eye needs to regain its independence, to rediscover personal and offline spaces, to seek inspiration irrespective of its like-potential, and the form this takes is an innately personal one.
As Steven Johnson, media theorist and renowned popular science author, suggests, “Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.” That tangled bank is our inner universe, the source of our identity and unique, inimitable voice and perception. Everything we need is right there, but the choice is ours.
Images courtesy of local creatives, Elisa Arienti, Reema Al Banna and Stavros Antypas
