Why Artists Hate Social Media Marketing
Know everyone to be seeking the same thing, a cure for envy.
There is a tinny sound that dings off the silvery slopes of our missing soul. It's heard clear among the desperate masses seeking their prize of fortune. It's the sound of one heart seeking co-regulation with another, in the echoing caverns of an excavated presence and it is heard most commonly as the din of fervour within Social Media. In the online spheres where the smoke of branding chokes a sense of humility, community is essential to the pursuit.
In Yellowstone, a fictitious telling of the Montanan hang over from the wild west, characters are branded with the "Y" of the Yellowstone ranch if they are of criminal condemnation. The brotherhood this instils in them comes at the cost of pain, sacrifice and an emptying of options. "I'm gunna give you one last chance, you leave now or you never leave." says Rip Walker, the foreman and first lieutenant of the ranch.
In being branded, we are known for all who see the scar to be of utter desperation for a way of being. Do we ask for it or is it demanded of us when we decide to stake it all in the likeness of those before us? Branding, the flesh melting and permanent outward disfiguring of our bodies, is the essential compromise for that community we seek and that meaningful work we are attempting to build.
In the world of the social networks, your desires become my fortune. If I can satisfy them, your attention will be funnelled and upsold and converted. Sounds like a head first maze made of and in the void but with a spotlight shining and a strategically placed mirror, I can convince you I have provided you a nuanced perspective. $200 an hour for this kind of service is reasonable.
I don't want to learn your desires just simply to monetise them, as is the wont of the thousands of people hoping to be saved from looming trouble by becoming a social media authority. I am one of those people seeking such an outcome.
Stephen Jenkinson speaks of a soul shaped hole that exists in the western person, we are devoid of the cultural underpinnings that allow us to be whole and that give us cause for give a shit. Yet still I speak here of things coming from and to an individual.
Community is dependent on shared foundations. A network is strung across the cavern of presence because we don't share the deeply affirmed watery way of a well suited culture. We swim in the same pool but the pool is chlorinated to avoid us sharing those microbial inconsistencies so heavily lamented. When our subtle bodies mix, we shut down. The subtle bodies of virality, if they become too entrenched in the sterilised waters of digital networks - we literally shut down. We shut down our local communities, we shut down our economic communities, we shut down our faith communities, we suspect every other individual of being just as dangerous as the gunmen who plague America - all they need is to show their brand, which is a tiny bird burnt into their flesh.
As it goes, I haven't found the problems across the medium of Twitter needing solvent to be of any real interest. The problems I get up for, at 2:30am on a personally important day when rest is vital, is the problem of who we are. We are the restless souls of inherited malevolence. We are the masses seeing the collapses and knowing damn well that, not at least but at most, I'm probably the only one responsible for my wellbeing. If I have to sell you better practices for growing on Twitter, and force you to take the brand, then so be it. Who am I to condemn the demands of best practice?
I find branding and the over saturation of growth tweets rather repulsive. It simply seems miss placed to me, this desire to be lauded for our copywriting prowess while parroting what was done by those we pay to tell us how to do it. I want an audience to know the deeper pangs that call us out.
As is my focus on the networks, I want to propagate a respect for and openness to the inclusion of Art in our every day, such that the creator is financially capable to live from the worthiness of their work. Not merely as decoration, nor as entertainment but as a respectable cultural trade. Art as a slowing, attention demanding and spirit enriching way of being and seeing, the Artist as worthy of their craft without needing to work several jobs and pry their payment from the landlords of spaces that Art inhabits, is my aim.
- Ryan Dickinson