LOVING ART TO DISTRACTION
On Captivating Your Audience in a Post-Entertainment Culture
In his recent state-of-the-culture address, “The State of the Culture, 2024,” Ted Gioia issued a startling, challenging, dispiriting proclamation:
“We’re witnessing the birth of a post-entertainment culture. And it won’t help the arts. In fact, it won’t help society at all.
“The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.
“The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.
“It’s a huge business, and will soon be larger than arts and entertainment combined. Everything is getting turned into TikTok—an aptly named platform for a business based on stimuli that must be repeated after only a few ticks of the clock.
“TikTok made a fortune with fast-paced scrolling video. And now Facebook—once a place to connect with family and friends—is imitating it. So long, Granny, hello Reels. Twitter has done the same. And, of course, Instagram, YouTube, and everybody else trying to get rich on social media.
“This is more than just the hot trend of 2024. It can last forever—because it’s based on body chemistry, not fashion or aesthetics.
“Our brain rewards these brief bursts of distraction. The neurochemical dopamine is released, and this makes us feel good—so we want to repeat the stimulus.”
So, Gioia contends, our world of arts and entertainment is now in the stranglehold of Big Tech. And that’s a huge problem. Because—
“The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers.
“Addiction is the goal.
“They don’t say it openly, but they don’t need to. Just look at what they do.
“Everything is designed to lock users into an addictive cycle.
· The platforms are all shifting to scrolling and reeling interfaces where stimuli optimize the dopamine doom loop.
· Anything that might persuade you to leave the platform—a news story, or any outside link—is brutally punished by their algorithms. It might liberate you from your dependent junkie status, and that can’t be allowed.
· But wait, there’s more! Apple, Facebook, and others are now telling you to put on their virtual reality headsets—where you are swallowed up by the stimuli, like those tiny fish in my food chain charts. You’re invited to live as a passive recipient of make-believe experiences, like a pod slave in The Matrix.”
If all this is true—and Gioia gives us good reasons to believe that it is—you Starving Artists of the 21st century [HIT LINK BELOW] must face up to this fact:
Your audience is on their phones. Perhaps vaguely interested in [INSERT YOUR EPOCH-DEFINING MASTERPIECE HERE], but too distracted or addicted by [IMAGINE THEIR DOOM SCROLL HERE…AND HERE…AND HERE] to pay attention.
Like those trolleys with an IV attached that patients roll beside them as they walk the corridors of the hospital, so too our cell phones are always with us in a pocket or a purse, so that we can get that shot of dopamine whenever we want it.
This is just where we are these days. There seems to be [CHECK YOUR EMAIL HERE] nothing for it.
Every story is about a protagonist in quest of a goal.
You are the protagonist of your artistic journey.
Your goal—unless you want to travel THE STEPHEN FRY ROUTE[1]—is to [CHECK SCORE OF GAME HERE] captivate an audience.
How are you going to do this? [PAUSE HERE TO WATCH MONTY PYTHON YOUTUBE SHORT]
It appears there are two possible routes to take.
ROUTE #1: LEAN IN TO THE TIMES: GO SMALL OR GO HOME
If you can’t beat ‘em, etc. (I have no time to spell it out for you.) Start creating work in small squirts that mimic the dopamine injections experienced in all that scrolling. Twitter fiction is so 2011, but maybe a TikTok novel/opera/ballet?
If you decide to go this route, here are some pro-tips designed to help you make the most of TikTok’s platform:
The Algorithm Is Your Friend
TikTok’s demographic (16-24-year-olds) skews younger than Instagram (a high percentage of whose users are actually in their 30s), so maybe dance with your painting/drawing/sculpture to a Taylor Swift song.
Grab Them with a “Hook”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” That sounds a little too brainy. Start your novel off with a KA-POW! and then SMASH CUT to the climax.
Add Effects & Filters
Tearing paper, or rain falling, evokes emotions of well-being. (I don’t understand the tearing paper thing either, but that’s what they say. Tearing paper only makes me worry about paper cuts.) Anyway, think about adding these sounds to the background of that snippet of your sonata. And a black-and-white filter might be just the thing to give your jazz riff that Oppenheimer feel.
Take Us Behind the Scenes
Don’t just read your poem. Show your tribe video of yourself writing at your desk, puzzling over your next line, crumpling up the page and throwing it into the waste basket. People want to see how the sausage gets made.
Tag an Influencer
Ask yourself: which Kardashian will respond best to your verse family saga? Which make-up influencer could help get the word out about your abstract expressionist lipstick case installation? Tag them and watch your Follower count explode.
Take Advantage of the Updates
By default, on TikTok you can record up to 15 seconds of video. This might not seem like a lot, but imagine how short Hamlet would be without all those boring soliloquies? Plus, on TikTok you can now stitch together up to four 15-second segments. That’s an entire minute! Your four-act tragedy is basically set up for you.
Make Use of Hashtags
Such as: #newformalismforever #litficforthemasses #litotesnotsobad
Or, if Route #1 does look desirable, there’s always…
ROUTE #2: THE PÈRE SERTILLANGES OPTION
Make art that threads the needle between the highest-level compositional demands of your craft (see: Shakespeare’s grasp of the techniques of classical rhetoric) and the archetypal needs and desires of human beings (see again: Shakespeare’s ability to speak to the universal human desire for love, justice, family, friendship, etc.).
Some of these same human beings might one day comprise your tiny but mighty audience.
Chances are, however, very few will ever notice your efforts. They’ll simply be too distracted.
Nonetheless, do your best to put your work out into the world where it might be seen, and then let the chips fall.
Who was Père Sertillanges? He was the one who wrote this:
“The essential thing is not the reception accorded to our words [or works], but the reception that we ourselves have given to truth, and that we are disposing others to give to it.”[2]
[1] THE STEPHEN FRY ROUTE: Stephen Fry tells us, in his book on writing poetry, The Ode Less Travelled: “I have written this book because over the past thirty-five years I have derived enormous pleasure from writing poetry and like anyone with a passion I am keen to share it…[But] I do not write poetry for publication, I write it for the same reason that, according to Wilde, one should write a diary, to have something sensational to read on the train. And as a way of speaking to myself. But most importantly of all for pleasure” (xix). The way of the pure amateur unconcerned with any public viewing of his work is a noble one. You desire to have an audience, but only an audience of one: yourself. If that’s your calling, then we’ll shake hands and say goodbye here. You have already achieved the goals of your adventure, the internal goals of self-knowledge and pleasure. Congratulations!
[2] A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Press, 1998), 209. See this entire section of the book on “Detachment from Self and the World.”
For novel writing, I wonder if serials with short-ish chapters would be something likely to appeal to shorter attention spans. Fanfic web sites have all manner of readers reading chapter by chapter - many of whom seem to prefer the 1000 to 2000 word length at a time and would not want to sit down and read an entire book, yet follow novel-length stories. I wonder if a broader availability of quality original fiction using such a format to publish online at first, then wrap it up into a single book (ebook, paperback, whatever) at the end - much as Stephen King did with The Green Mile, though his serial was paperback rather than online - might draw more people into longer works a chapter at a time. The thing is, you probably wouldn’t be able to charge a whole lot for the serial versions, if you’re hoping to draw in people who would otherwise be reading fanfic or looking at TikTok.
Serials haven’t - at least, to my knowledge - been terribly mainstream in recent times. Do you know if there are publishers or online magazines or other sites doing such things, or if anyone is thinking about bringing serialized publishing more into the mainstream? (Or if it already is and I just completely missed it? :-D)
Don’t know if this kind of thing is even feasible - just thinking out loud…