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Why The Metrics on Social Media Platforms are Destroying Our Creativity
The metrics on social media platforms are gradually destroying our creativity. Aspiring creators are prioritizing clicks over craft and metrics over meaning. Some startup founders get caught up in press instead of profit. As I said in An Audience of One, “The very tools that have made unparalleled amounts of creativity possible are paradoxically inhibiting it.”
While Facebook says its mission is to make the world more open and connected, its business model is to sell your attention to advertisers, and the more that it becomes your window to the rest of the internet, the more you’re paradoxically inside a walled garden of a social media behemoth.
Sadly, some of the biggest media outlets play a role in perpetuating this. They reward their writers and content creators based on clicks and eyeballs. As a result, that takes precedence over writing something of depth and significance. The long form content on sites like The New Yorker is losing people to the short attention span required for consuming content on sites like Buzzfeed.
A few years ago I submitted a post to a large web site. The editor said my post was too long and in-depth for their audience. The next day, they published a post by someone who wrote something similar to my 39 Observations of a Life that Hasn’t Gone…
