“If I’m not sharing it, if people aren’t seeing it, then it feels like there’s no point doing it.”

I said this to my wife recently — and the moment I heard myself, I realised how deeply social media had rewired my motivation to create. I tried to remember a time when this wasn’t the case, and given I built my first website back in 1997, I’ve had to go back a long way.

There’s a scene in Red Dwarf (“Justice”, S04E03) where Rimmer proudly shows Kryten a series of holiday snaps while Kryten struggles to stay awake. In the early ’90s, the idea of boring your friends with your photos was a sitcom punchline. Today, it’s practically a social media business model.

How did we get from that, to today, where the purpose of creating and experiencing is to share?

Modern sharing gives us the dopamine hit of validation from strangers. But what was the pre-social media equivalent — postcards? Home videos? It seems social media doesn’t just satisfy an existing urge; it created a new one.

Creative people feel compelled to make “content” — supplementary media that acts as a signpost towards their authentic work. The problem is that social media leads to a manipulation of the artist’s work to suit an algorithm. This means that much of the work we see online is inauthentic and lacking in diversity. And once creativity is shaped to please algorithms rather than express ideas, it becomes data.

Then we get to the AI issue. Much of this inauthentic work ends up being used to train AI models so it can replicate this work. We’ve seen it already with artwork and images, and now the quite frightening trend of AI cover songs, many of which end up on streaming platforms, earning the prompt creator more money than actual artists.

So sharing online is a multi-faceted issue. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, and it enables a few strangers we’ve never met to access our work. At the same time, our compulsion to share feels like a destruction of meaningful engagement in creative endeavours and hobbies. It’s created a hustle culture where we prioritise sharing and engagement over skill building, methodology and authentic outcomes.

So let’s go back to that quote I found myself saying: “If I’m not sharing it, if people aren’t seeing it, then it feels like there’s no point doing it.”

Despite being a musician, I wasn’t actually talking about music. I was talking about photography. I used to take countless photos. My photos have even been featured by the Metro Newspaper, Panasonic, and Apple. I enjoyed looking at the world around me, thinking of cool things to shoot, and sometimes coming up with photos that I’d be incredibly proud of.

And then… I stopped. I haven’t done much photography for years. I can’t think of a singular reason why, more a combination of things.

• Feeling pressured to focus on fewer things
• A drop in engagement on social media
• The drastic improvement of mobile photography, rendering much of my gear redundant.
• Said mobile photography doing all the hard work in terms of shooting and editing and removing the skill from it — thus everyone’s photos looking the same

Photography was once something I did purely for joy. Somewhere along the line, joy turned into content.

Recently, I needed to find a creative outlet that isn’t music, and isn’t geared towards sharing. Something for me. This is how I ended up here.

If I want to take photos again, how would I take photos if I wasn’t sharing them online? What would be the point of it?

This post isn’t meant to be anti-social media or anti-mobile. Mastodon is my favourite social media site of all time precisely because it’s authentic and doesn’t manipulate its users into producing content to chase an algorithm. But I think there are some valid criticisms to level at it.

It’s a worthwhile thought experiment for any creative person. If I wasn’t sharing online, what would I create, how would I create it, and how would I seek meaning in what I make?

Maybe that’s where real creativity begins again — in the parts no one else ever sees.

Photo Credit: Prateek Katyal