"Our creativity is becoming more and more of a means to an end -- and that end is to get attention." - Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Recently, I stumbled across a very thought-provoking podcast titled "Creative Processing with Joseph Gordon-Levitt." After listening to one episode in particular, I was pleasantly surprised by Joseph Gordon-Levitt's thoughts about the creative process and how it relates to the attention-driven media culture we are all a part of.
The second I played this episode, it sparked an undying thought in my mind about how our culture values social media that is largely based on getting attention, whether it is good or bad. This trend grew when social media platforms unveiled users’ number of likes and followers, thus, causing other users to experience a feeling of inadequacy when comparing themselves to others. Think back to the time before Instagram when Facebook was the groove, and nobody really gave a damn about how many likes you got on your last post. Then in high school, friends would text me asking me to like their last post on Instagram, and shortly after, people started paying for likes and followers on social media platforms either to appear more liked or acquire some sort of superiority above users who naturally had fewer.
You can partially thank the attention-driven business model of today’s big social media companies for this disaster. In the TED Talk that is part of this podcast episode, Gordon-Levitt reveals how companies like Instagram and Twitter make money by selling the attention of users to advertisers. These platforms then strategically train you to crave this attention, so you continue to post material as means of getting attention. As a result, users get stressed out when they don’t get enough, and the cycle proceeds.
Because of these seemingly significant numbers, people started to lose sight of the true purposes of social media: to share, to collaborate, and most importantly, to connect with one another. As Gordon-Levitt said, the channels of media distribution have been democratized. Anybody can share whatever they want, whenever they want. But the sharing in and of itself is not harmful. It’s the content being shared that’s causing an issue.
The continuous competition for attention on social media has resulted in the subconscious sharing of empty, meaningless content as means of getting attention. Instead of focusing on posting what means something to us as individuals (or paying attention), we’ve encapsulated ourselves into a cycle that relies on modulating our content based on how we think others will respond (getting attention). In other words, we decide what to post based on how much attention it might receive from other users.
What does this mean for our creativity?
Well, it means we’re no longer making our creativity a priority when it comes to sharing, and that’s counterproductive. Within the heart of social media sharing lies creativity itself. Yet (with the help of social media companies’ attention-driven business model), we’ve managed to transform social media into an online space that overflows with misperceptions that generously gift users with comparison hangovers, ultimately undermining our most genuine thoughts and ideas (our creativity). To be frank, the number of followers and likes on Instagram should not come at the expense of your truest forms of creativity.
This is where Gordon-Levitt’s insights become inherently useful. Instead of seeing other creative people as competitors, he sees them as collaborators. While he’s on set with another actor filming a scene, he teaches himself to realize he and the other actor are both there for the same reason, collaborating on the same film. He admits that paying attention to his work and paying attention to their work enables him to perform better, because if he’s paying attention, he’s not competing for it. The second you compare yourself to another creator, you lose your creative focus and perform poorly.
“If we could stop competing for attention, the internet becomes a great place to find collaborators.”
I think we should take this example and apply it to how we use social media. Before we post something, we need to ask ourselves if it means something to us and ask why we’re sharing it. Instead of posting meaningless content purely to get attention, we should pay attention to what we’re making by electrifying the creativity we have been suppressing and reopening the boxes in which we’ve stored our most personal, eclectic thoughts. If we just take a step back and look at the purpose of social media, just as this TED Talk suggests, we’ll see that we’re all ultimately using social media for the same reason: to share and connect. If we did this, I think we might find ourselves surprised at how pleasant it can be to collaborate, rather than compare and compete.
With love,
Gill
Podcast Episode: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/cadence13/creative-processing-with-joseph-gordonlevitt/e/63865086
TED Talk (and cover image source): https://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_gordon_levitt_how_craving_attention_makes_you_less_creative