Changing lanes

New work-in-progress (detail)

     I've been on a social media hiatus for almost three weeks and counting. I'm not even sure if I mentioned it in this blog, but earlier this summer, my main Instagram account was hacked and I had to start over with a new one. I was pretty pissed about losing access to the old account since I'd put a lot of time into building up an audience, plus I there's a ton of specific posts, photos and things in the old story feed  that were specific to that account. Most of the photos I have but all of the archived stories and so forth are still on there. I've been unsuccessful in regaining that account and at this point, I've pushed it back on my priorities list. 

    Honestly, by the time the hack happened, I was already growing tired of how I was feeling about my time on social media and how I engaged with it. The continual manipulation by the platform admins and whomever else is responsible for the algorithms was becoming annoying. The overall strategy of all social media platforms is to maintain your attention on that platform, which means introducing and manipulating features to keep you in the content loop as much as possible, both taking in others' content and making your own. I remember seeing a note from Facebook on my feed saying that (I'm paraphrasing here) "People trust you more when you respond to a direct message within a short time" Maybe that was referring to brands, but still, it manages to feel like you're being mentally pressured to do more and more while receiving less and less value from these sites.

    There's a lot of value to be gained from social media, especially for visual artists and other creatives. I like sharing thoughts and photos online and have done so in a variety of ways on as many platforms. I've made a lot of great contacts and have managed to get a fairly solid following, not counting the bots. However, it's really important to take some time to evaluate how we engage online. Lately, I've had several questions come up for myself that I'm evaluating in an attempt to figure out what role social media plays in my life right now:

- How do I feel about social media now? What do I feel when I'm engaging with various types of content?

- What do I get out of it for the time spent engaging with platforms?

- What are my goals are with it? What can social media help me with in this moment as an artist?

- How much time do I need to put in with commenting, liking  and otherwise engaging with others' posts?

- How is social media affecting my behavior?

    I'm sure there's more, but these are the main things that have come up for me in the past couple of weeks of not being that active on social media. I've been thinking about these things in an effort to reimagine what I do online. Top on my list is reinvigorating this blog and making good use of my studio newsletter. 

    

    With my "summer social break" that I've extended into September, I've reduced my engagement to just checking in on my FB and IG feeds once or twice a day, usually in the morning and evening. I've not posted on my main feeds nor story feeds. I've been tempted to a couple of times, but so far, I've been good about that. I'll make a post about a dear friend who passed away last week, but that's the extent of my posting anything until mid-September, maybe longer. 

    

     I don't really know how this experiment will affect how much other accounts engage with mine. I may lose some followers over this period and may gain others, I don't really know. What I do know is that I have to do something different. My very non-scientific research shows that people don't really engage with older posts much unless they are just discovering your feed and "like" and comment on a bunch of older posts. Other than that, the algorithm only shows the newer things. So, what you thought was a great post never gets much more notice beyond the initial impressions. Just after mentioning that I was taking a break, there were a few new follows over a period of a week later. Since then, as expected, it's been a ghost town and understandably so. Even when I find new-to-me accounts that I like, I mostly look at older posts and leave likes and comments on newer ones. 

    Over the past couple of weeks, I've found that my mental state of mind has improved. I concentrate much better on my work in the studio and I'm not so tired from the eyestrain of looking at my phone screen so much (I still need a couch in the studio for naps, but that's another story). Experiencing the difference in my ability to concentrate has been amazing. I feel like I've been able to return to a state of clarity that I had years ago that slowly eroded a little, I think. 

    Purposefully shifting my social media habits has been really enlightening and I'm sure there's more to gain from this change as time goes on. I'm still planning on being active online, but just in different ways. As I mentioned above, posting more on this blog has already made me feel better. I enjoy writing longer entries without the noise of social media around. It might not be for everyone, but I'm hoping that people start coming here to check out what I've been putting out over the years. 

    I'm also planning on integrating more of my general interests here, as well-it's not always about art or the making of it that matters. Lots of other things figure into what I do in the studio and I mean to include more of that here. I'm kind of tired of compartmentalizing everything at this point. Like I said to someone recently, life is art and art is life. What I mean is that life is created as we move through our experiences and like most of art, there is no playbook. All of this is made up as we live it. With art, we're constantly making new worlds and universes as we create paintings, dances that change how we experience space and movement, stories and books that transform our mental landscape.  In life, a lot of us are constantly creating and remaking ourselves and our environments to accommodate new information that we take in; taking a new walking route, changing a decision and going to another place instead of the original one and so forth. It's all an act of making, of charting new paths whether we recognize it or not. 

    TM