Social Media: Friends or Enemies of Creativity? My Experience

Social-Media App for Smartphone - Image from WIX-Media

Social media is now a powerful driver of creativity, but it is also a complex terrain: while it offers inspiration, visibility and potentially limitless collaboration, it also risks standardising artistic processes, reducing their originality and transforming creativity into imitation of trends.

In this post, I would like to share with you some thoughts and my experience with social media so far.

Social media and creativity: a double-edged sword

Social media is the main tool for sharing creativity. Through social media, we share ideas and creative projects, seek new inspiration, connect with people from the farthest corners of the planet, and learn almost in real time about new trends or products that could give new creative impetus through their use in new techniques. Seen in this light, it is the ideal world.

On the other hand, all that glitters is not gold, and in my albeit brief experience, I have experienced the negative effects of perhaps excessive use of social media.

Instagram, Facebook & YouTube

At the beginning of my creative journey in 2016, social media was the best tool I could have had: it was thanks to platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram that I found inspiration, created my own personal drawing school and learned so much through tutorials by wonderful artists and enthusiasts who shared their talent.

My very first posts date back to the spring of 2022 and mainly concerned my early acrylic casting work. Only later, thinking I might meet other people who shared my passion for coloured pencils through social media, did I expand into adult colouring in 2023.

At first, I found it fun to create art to post, learn how to use new tools such as cameras and photo editing programmes, improvising as a photographer, and then, once posted, see the number of views, likes, comments and followers grow every day.

However, without realising it, I became “addicted” to the number of views or followers I received after posting, linking the appreciation or quality of what I had created solely to the number of new followers. Things seemed to be going great; for once in my life, I felt like I wasn't alone in having creativity as a passion and hobby.

Then everything changed, and almost overnight I found myself practically invisible on social media: no followers, no likes, no comments. I scrolled through my feed out of boredom and without purpose, and as time passed, days turned into weeks and weeks into months in which my social media and my art were frozen. And that's when my downward spiral began: I started to doubt myself, my abilities, and believe that my creativity was not worthy of consideration, and, mistakenly, I stopped creating.

In other words, social media, with its rules, had transformed from a potential tool for connection into a source of destruction for my creative streak. I no longer felt the same emotional drive that made me spend hours and hours in front of a colouring page or a canvas full of colour, waiting to see the subject come to life through the colours.

That was a tough time, but it did have a silver lining: it gave me a chance to think things through and realise that I was totally wrong to let social media define me. Besides, reading comments and posts from other artists, helped me realise I wasn't alone in this situation and that social media had become more of a source of disconnection and competition. It was no longer a simple desire to share a passion with others and, in the meantime, improve myself by learning new things. It was more of a constant race against time to try to emulate, compete, be better and stand out from the rest of the community through a perfect profile and an impeccable feed. And that was a game I was not and am not willing to play.

TikTok

TikTok is another social media platform that, for many, is the main tool for short videos on creative techniques and hauls for new art supplies. Yet, even what might seem like another inexhaustible source of inspiration and sharing has, according to some artists/YouTubers, turned into a mechanism that slowly ruins creativity, transforming it from a simple relaxing hobby into a race for the most perfect project or an excuse to justify the compulsive consumption of artistic materials, with the belief that without a certain type (or quantity) of markers, pens, pencils or colouring books, it would be impossible to get started.

As far as I'm concerned, TikTok is not a platform I use very much, except to scroll and find inspiration. However, I cannot deny that this effect, this subtle push to buy new material mentioned in the video, has in a sense infected me too, and that I have often found myself spending hours on the internet looking for the material used in that video so I can buy it, even though I had absolutely no need for it. I believe, for a moment, to have been brainwashed.

Final thoughts

Although social media is still a huge showcase for creativity and a powerful ally in this regard, the way it has developed in recent years has led it to become more of a tool that destroys this potential rather than support it.

Social media have become a mere tool to push us into overconsumption of art supplies and into an unhealthy competition, while we attempt to gain more followers and recognition through the most perfect feed, the most perfect colouring pages or the best and newest art supplies collection.

As far as I am concerned, I do not want my creativity to become a slave to an algorithm and, in hte end, let my artistic worth, however small or large, be determined by a cold computer. I would very much like to make a step back and see social media return to being a place where each of us can create just for the sake of creating, sharing the result at our own pace and on our own terms without pressure.

What do you think about social media? How do you experience all this as artists? Do you feel overwhelmed, disappointed by how social media has changed, or are you able to live with it because it has become a necessary tool?

Let me know your experience or how you feel about all this in the comments.

Thank you for reading.

Laura