The Great Social Media Swindle
Updated: Sep 6
"Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?" - John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten.
In 1977, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, the Sex Pistols played their final show. If you have seen video footage from the event, you will appreciate that it is like watching the last breaths of a dying animal. Punk had blown up and now, within three years and one groundbreaking album, the Pistols were done. Despondent and broken, John Lydon, as his alter ego Johnny Rotten, uttered those final words to a baying crowd of hippy types: "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"
There is something rather perfect about that final sentence. It was aimed at the audience, but could just as easily have been aimed at the record industry, the music business, the band itself, or perhaps even at Lydon. Punk had started as something that was never really supposed to fit comfortably within the mainstream, yet within a remarkably short period of time it had been packaged, commodified and sold back to the very people it had set out to annoy. The Sex Pistols were never going to last, but perhaps that was partly the point. They had arrived, caused an almighty disturbance and then, spectacularly, imploded.
The figureheads for punk culture may have died at the Winterland Ballroom, but what it spawned certainly didn't. Punk has continued to reverberate through music and film, fashion and art, and its influence is now so deeply embedded in popular culture that we probably don't even recognise it as punk anymore. Yet punk in its purest form was always about much more than a visual identity. The clothes, music and attitude were simply the most obvious manifestations of something far more interesting. It was about looking at alternative solutions to what was considered mainstream or acceptable. If one didn't have enough money to create that 'thing', then finding a way of doing it on a budget and owning it was the goal. If the establishment says you can't, then perhaps the obvious response is to ask why? It was DIY in its most basic and appealing form, and it is a mindset that artists have used for centuries. Punk merely wrapped it up in tartan trousers, a ripped T-shirt and some rather impressive hair and owned it for themselves.
Nearly fifty years later, we find ourselves in the aftermath of another kind of revolution, although one which began with a similarly seductive promise. The rise of social media, from its infancy in the early noughties with Friendster and MySpace to the behemoths that followed, such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (I refuse to call it X, on principle), appeared to offer something that could have been genuinely revolutionary. Suddenly anyone could publish their thoughts, show their work, find an audience and communicate with people anywhere in the world. The traditional gatekeepers could be bypassed and the barriers to entry were, at least superficially, removed. You didn't need a gallery to show your photographs, a publisher to write something or a record company to make music. You could simply put it out there.
It was an incredibly attractive and liberating proposition, particularly for artists. Social engagement and bringing people together was supposedly the point, and for a while it probably did feel like that. Yet somewhere along the way, the emphasis shifted. Social media became less about being social and more about engineering our behaviour. The platforms learnt what made us look, what made us click and, increasingly, what kept us there. Social engagement was replaced by social engineering and this is ever more apparent in the visual arts.
For many years I avoided many of the social media platforms, partly because I felt I had nothing particularly interesting to share and partly because I had a genuine fear that I might write or post something that I would later regret. In retrospect, I can't help feeling that this should probably be a prerequisite for anyone embarking on a journey down the social media rabbit hole. Eventually, however, I relented and started posting my photography, initially in the rather vain attempt to be seen. Both Instagram and Facebook proved a marvel. I received a lot of interest and, with a new feeling of purpose, I found myself shooting and posting most days. At first it was exciting. People were seeing the work and responding to it and, as any artist will understand, there is something incredibly encouraging about putting something you have made into the world and receiving some form of acknowledgement in return. The problem is that it is very easy for encouragement to become validation, and validation can very quickly become something you start actively seeking.
That little endorphin hit is remarkably effective. Someone likes an image, someone comments, somebody follows you and suddenly you want another hit. So you post again. You start looking at what worked previously and trying to understand why it worked. You look at other photographers and notice what seems to be attracting attention. Eventually, almost without noticing, the work begins to change as well. I started trying to figure out how to break the code. The closer I got, however, the more the code seemed to move. The algorithm changed, the audience changed and so did the things that appeared to work. In trying to understand the mechanism, I was inadvertently allowing the mechanism to influence what I made. I wasn't consciously deciding to make work that looked like other people's work, but I was being influenced by what I was seeing and by what appeared to receive attention. My photography was beginning to move towards a look that was recognisable, understandable and, importantly, likeable. I was moulding myself and my photography to fit a system that was never designed to encourage individuality, despite constantly telling us that individuality was precisely what it celebrated.
The irony isn't lost on me. A platform that encourages everyone to express themselves has somehow managed to create an environment where an awful lot of people express themselves in remarkably similar ways. A visual idea can appear on Instagram in the morning and be replicated thousands of times by the evening. A particular colour palette, compositional style or method of processing becomes popular and suddenly it is everywhere. We are told that this is individual expression, yet increasingly it feels like a collective aesthetic being generated in real time, and this is where I think social media becomes particularly problematic for artists. It doesn't necessarily tell us what to make. It doesn't need to. It simply rewards certain things and leaves us to work out the rest. If an image receives attention, we make another. If something doesn't, we perhaps make fewer of those. Over time the process becomes self-regulating. The artist begins to anticipate what the audience, or more accurately the algorithm, will respond to. The danger is that the work can become less about discovery and more about confirmation.
Stepping away from the constant pull of social media has made me realise quite how strong that pull actually is. It isn't simply the amount of time it consumes, although that is considerable. It is the mental space it occupies. The constant awareness that there might be something to check, someone to respond to, another image to post or another opportunity to be seen. It is remarkably difficult to make quiet work when your mind is constantly being encouraged to seek noise.
Instagram in particular has changed enormously from the platform I first encountered. It was once, at least in my experience, a place where photographers could show photographs. Now it increasingly feels like a place to waste hours watching banality unfold, interspersed with the occasional photograph that reminds you why you were there in the first place. There are still wonderful photographers using it and genuine communities to be found, but they exist within a machine whose primary interest is not photography, art or community. Its primary interest is attention, and attention, as it turns out, is worth an enormous amount of money. Meta makes a fortune from the attention of its users and from the information that attention generates. We are not really the customers, despite the fact that we spend our time there. The photographs, conversations, relationships, preferences and interests that we willingly put into these platforms all contribute to a system that has become remarkably good at predicting what will keep us looking. The antithesis of punk, one would say.
The original promise was that social media would allow us to bypass the establishment. Yet we have simply created another establishment, one that is considerably less visible and arguably much harder to challenge. Instead of a gallery owner deciding what gets seen, we have an algorithm. Instead of a critic telling us what is fashionable, we have engagement figures. Instead of an audience standing in front of the work, we have a number beneath it telling us how many people apparently liked it.
For me, that realisation has meant making a transition. I am slowly moving my online life towards my own website: a place that showcases my work, a future sales page where I can hopefully make some money from my efforts, and a blog where I can share ideas and thoughts with anyone who is interested enough to read them. It isn't particularly revolutionary and I am certainly not suggesting that I have discovered some great alternative to the internet, but there is something satisfying about having a small corner of it that I control. I can decide what appears there and, perhaps most importantly, I don't have to make any of it conform to an algorithm.
Perhaps that is the point I am slowly coming back to with my photography. I don't want to make work because I think it will perform well. I want to make work because I am interested in where it might take me. That may sound like an obvious distinction, but it is surprisingly easy to lose sight of it when the numbers are sitting there in front of you.
Johnny Rotten's final words at the Winterland Ballroom were uttered in disgust at what punk had become. Yet Lydon didn't remain trapped there. He moved on to a very different life, continued to make music and developed as an artist. This is an inevitability of being an artist; we move on and develop. We don't necessarily abandon everything that came before, but recognise when something has stopped being useful. Sometimes the thing that once gave you an audience can become the thing that prevents you from developing. Sometimes you have to step away from the noise to hear what you were trying to say in the first place.
"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? If you have, it's down to you to find your own path to salvation.
I would like to add that I am immeasurably grateful to all my friends, family and followers over the years who have offered kind words and support. My issue with social media is so much deeper than regular engagement. Words are so much more important than likes, yet likes also have value, and therein lies the problem. This is precisely why social media is such a confusing mess.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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