Shallow Social Media and Deep Work.

Pop artist John Mayer went through a creative dry spell after releasing the album Continuum in 2006. He wrestled, and finally he closed his Twitter account and confessed on his blog his own creative desert was a result of social media addiction: “The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still four minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still four minutes long… I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore, and I was a tweetaholic. I had four million Twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. ...it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.” 

Social media distraction actually atrophied his creative capacity. “You can’t create lasting art if you are heavily involved in social media. It occurred to me that since the invocation of Twitter, nobody who has participated in it has created any lasting art. And yes! Yours truly is included in that roundup as well. Those who decide to remain offline will make better work than those online. Why? Because great ideas have to gather. They have to pass the test of withstanding thirteen different moods, four different months and sixty different edits. Anything less is day trading. You can either get a bunch of mentions now or change someone’s life next year.”

It's not only Twitter, although it's apparent that limiting discourse to 140 characters obviously limits the scope of thought. Limiting conversation to a photo, ala Instagram, or the power of video to slapstick shorts ala Vine–come-TikTok narrows the mental appetite with sips of dopamine. 

Continually ingesting bits of social media has become a distraction and an inhibitor in the creative development process. Becoming a creative who can generate works with lasting cultural impact requires what Georgetown professor Cal Newport calls “deep work” - which is a combination of working for extended periods of time with full concentration on a single task free from distraction or interruption followed by intermittent rounds of feedback. A process where one wrings every last drop of value out of their current intellectual capacities. Cal Newport maintains that our creative abilities are improved by the mental strain that accompanies deep work.

It's not deep work to swipe or scroll, we all know it's mind numbing. Our cultural addiction to social media is killing songs and artists and dreamers before we ever get to hear their voices, melodies and ideas. I wonder when our grandchildren ask, "What did you do during the 'Shelter-in-Place' of 2020?" most will have to admit that we wasted the days bingeing memes.

Are you a content creator rather than a content consumer? If you've read this far, there's hope for you. Stand up, shut this off, and tune in to the deep work of your own thoughts.