AFTER SOCIAL MEDIA

On the new possibilities awaiting the artist

• Why are artists leaving social media?

• Why didn’t Homer adopt the subscription model to increase his followers?

• Why do I experience faint nausea every time I enter a Barnes & Noble?

The answers to these questions follow just below.

But first, allow me to share this week’s edition of…

McINERNY’S MUSINGS

• Cal Newport’s podcast Deep Questions is a staple of my weekly listening. On this week’s episode, Newport explores why certain artists have revolted against social media and the possibilities this opens up for different kinds of distribution. My post below attempts to pick up where Newport’s analysis leaves off.

• Although Newport does not mention Louise Stigell on his podcast, Stigell is another artist who has left social media for greener distribution pastures. Her Substack, The Calm Creative, which now includes a podcast, is well worth a look for artists and creatives seeking to navigate the addictive waters of today’s digital technopoly. As for her reasons for quitting social media, find out here.

• By the way, I finished Cal Newport’s latest book, Slow Productivity, and I recommend it highly if you’d like to contemplate ways to work with greater focus and excellence. Newport’s threefold approach to slow productivity is easy to summarize: (1) Do fewer things; (2) Work at a natural pace; and (3) Obsess over quality. His discussion of these principles is illuminating and very useful.

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AFTER SOCIAL MEDIA

Why are artists leaving social media? After studying the explanations given by several (apparently all visual) artists, Newport culls three main reasons why artists are abandoning Instagram, TikTok, and the like:

1. Social media platforms constrict artists by (a) forcing them to post according to the requirements of the platform; and (b) by using an algorithm to control the presentation of the artist’s work (an algorithm, by the way, which favors sameness, what’s worked before, and only pretends to offer the artist’s posts to the artist’s full list of “followers.”)

2. The addictive nature of social media platforms are making artists unhappy and exhausted. And the fact that they are helping serve the addictions of their “followers” only compounds the unhappiness.

3. The artistic pursuit of beauty is meant to be for its own sake. But social media platforms are all about social validation, trying to get as many people as possible to see, approve, and hopefully purchase or in some way support the artist’s work.

So, what are these artists doing instead of using social media to, as it were, take their pigs to market?

Not giving up on the internet, apparently, but returning to something like the days of the mid-2000s, before social media took off, when artists used websites or web-based blogging platforms to showcase their work. But now, in 2024, added to the artist’s digital arsenal are subscription-based platforms like Substack and the efficiency and ubiquity of podcasting.

The new opportunity is what Newport calls the “distributed trust” model. An artist shows his work on an old-time website, or builds an email list on Substack, and then depends on what Newport calls “serendipitous discovery” (not a algorithm) for folks to find him. Once they do, he looks to build trust with his emerging audience. It’s a slow burn, but the hope is that, over time, a tribe of devotees, as opposed to a loose collection of largely anonymous doomscrolling “followers,” will gather around and be enriched by the artist’s work.

No Silicon Valley behemoth manages the process. Everything is based on self-selection, connection, and trust.

It’s like the difference between an artist trying to drum up interest in his work by going around the parking lot before the Super Bowl wearing a sandwich board, as opposed to opening up a boutique gallery on a charming corner of the artsy part of town.

All well and good. And if I didn’t see the distributed trust model as superior to the algorithmic model, I wouldn’t be on Substack.

But here’s a Thought Experiment.

Why didn’t the poet Homer adopt a subscription model to showcase and distribute the Iliad and the Odyssey?

A ridiculous question, to be sure. But maybe it can serve to throw a certain truth into relief.

Homer didn’t need to build a tribe for his poetry because his tribe pre-existed the poetry. His poetry was the tale of his tribe. No doubt his poetry helped his community to achieve and to celebrate its identity. But Homer’s stories were the natural expression of his community’s already assured self-understanding.

In light of this ancient situation, an algorithmic distribution model seems grotesque. For it assumes that the artist is exiled from his tribe, and needs to blast his message to the four winds in the hope that someone, anyone, will respond.

But even the distributed trust model seems anemic in comparison to Homer’s situation. For on the distributed trust model, the artist still needs to put his work forward, if not necessarily as a commodity, as something to be shopped for, at least as something aimed at gathering a tribe where none has existed hitherto.

Surely there are artists who, perhaps through a religious or political faith, or some built-in common interest, enter the digital arena with an incipient following, or with the capability of quickly assembling one.

Such an audience would have certain features of a tribe. But it wouldn’t be a community actually sharing its life, except in some attenuated sense. It would be a tribe in diaspora. Living like astronauts stranded on Mars who occasionally get audio transmissions from Houston.

I’m sincerely glad you’re all here. I’m very grateful for your taking the time to read my writing.

But, truth be told, most of you have subscribed to The Comic Muse more or less anonymously. Many of you come without an identifiable name in your email address. Are you part of my tribe, even remotely? Do you understand and sympathize with what I’m trying to say?

In too many cases, I haven’t the foggiest idea.

Are you out there? Hello? Hello?

But why is an in-real-life community so important for art?

Because the good life is, by nature, a team sport. And a team realizes itself as a team in lived community “on the field,” by struggling and suffering and hopefully achieving victory together. Art is the tale of this team, or tribe. It is the spontaneous psalm of praise of the goodness of the team’s story.

Which helps explain why I tend to feel a faint nausea whenever I visit a Barnes & Noble bookstore. The shelves and shelves packed with books by authors wholly unknown to me make my eyes swim. It’s so difficult to place them. And even when I do, I too often find the books are on topics and themes antithetical to my own tribal allegiances. I can’t accommodate all these random solicitations to sit by someone else’s campfire and listen to their songs when I don’t even know who they are, or when their songs are loathsome to me.

So, what’s a poor artist to do?

By all means, adopt the distributed trust model. Take advantage of whatever remedial opportunities exist outside the social media circus to build an honest tribe of trusted fellow wayfarers. And for making such an endeavor possible, thank you, Substack!

Beyond that, the artist might imagine what it would mean to participate in a community capable of inspiring poetry like the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Imagine a campfire that’s real, not virtual.

But is this anymore than daydream?How could such a thing exist in our day and age?

David Jones, in the preface to his long poem, The Anathemata, truly observes that “We are, in our society of today, very far removed from those culture-phases where the poet was explicitly and by profession the custodian, rememberer, embodier and voice of the mythus, etc., of some contained group of families, or of a tribe, nation, people, cult.” ¹ Indeed, he says that “It would be an affectation to pretend that such was our situation today” (14). And yet…

Jones also suggests that the very stuff of poetry, language, cannot be disengaged from the myths, whether real or imaginary, that once were told around the campfires of living communities (20). Like broken pottery shards from an ancient civilization discovered in a burial mound, so too do clues to an older way of embodying the arts in community lie waiting to be discovered in the very words we use, as well as in the “languages” of the other mimetic arts.

“If the poet writes ‘wood’ what are the chances that the Wood of the Cross will be evoked? Should the answer be ‘None,’ then it would seem that an impoverishment of some sort would have to be admitted. It would mean that that particular word could no longer be used with confidence to implement, to call up or to set in motion a whole world of content belonging in a special sense to the mythus of a particular culture and of concepts and realities belonging to mankind as such” (23-24).

This is all very rough and speculative, I know. But I leave you, whoever you are, with this thought:

Once upon a time, the tribe pre-existed the poetry. But now poetry—art in general—might best be seen as a way of excavation: leading us back to the tribe.

1. David Jones, The Anathemata (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 21. All other references to this text will be by page numbers in parenthesis.