Critical Creating

There has been a little bit of divided uproar in Finland this week, because of poetry, or lack there of, depending on which side of the fence you sit. A well-known ex-figure skater wrote and published a book of poetry and a critic tore it apart, saying it was a miserable piece of work and wasted all the linguistic possibilities of poetry.

No doubt it will now sell better than expected.

However, I have never been a fan of critics, even though each of us makes judgements on everything we come across, one way or another. But, making a career out of picking to pieces the work of others, but almost never being the one to produce anything themselves, is underhanded. And often, the critics themselves are largely clueless, using the learnings of others to form their "opinion".

There is nothing wrong with having an opinion, but we live in a world that has platforms for every opinion to be hear d and then the media pick up some random story, and amplify it for the drama it gets. This isn't a new technique, it is the way of the mainstream media, where they tend to find the most polarized and ignorant voice from the crowd and then, position them as representative of the group.

Now, they don't even have to report from on location, they can just trawl the social feeds for stupid and amplify the message as if it is relevant, and the voice they have chosen is an authority.

Don't fall for that shit.

We are being manipulated. And as a result, we have become less creative ourselves, less willing to put our own content into the world and more voyeuristic. The centralized social media platforms are filled with more content than they have ever had, but it is coming from an increasingly narrow source of users, concentrating audience attention and driving social segregation through topic and argument, where instead of actually discussing problems in search of a solution, it is about shouting down others and scoring points.

We aren't even using our own content anymore, where we are instead justifying the usage of other people's content as our own, because we are the ones who asked a machine to collect, collate and summarize it for us. The videos created don't show our faces and, they use text to speech to become our voice. Yes, this makes it more convenient, but the underlying truth is, people want to hide.

And they want to hide because they don't want to be judge and criticized, and they don't want to be cancelled for their opinion, by a small group of people who have opposing opinions, even if they only oppose to get attention to make themselves feel relevant, because they have nothing of themselves of value to trade otherwise. They piggyback their relevancy on the work of others - they are attention rent seekers.

In the near future, I believe content creation is going to go through a human revolution, where the mass produced content, AI, ubiquitous and clickbait content will start to be filtered out by user preference. On top of this, we will more heavily move toward supplementary income growth through Web3 interfaces and people will start to demand more human, more personality, more value, more emotion.

But, one of the hurdles to this is that the pool of creators that are both capable and willing to put themselves out there is shrinking, because currently, no matter what the topic or what is said, there will people who disagree strongly and then make it their mission to "destroy" their agitators. We see it on Hive often, don't we? This is not a Hive-specific trait, it is a symptom of the greater world, with Hive being a Petrie dish science experiment, dragging users in from all kinds of backgrounds - often from a position where they are struggling financially, emotionally or socially.

But, because there are incentives on the platform to do so, it is also a place where a lot of different people post in an attempt to gather some attention and capture some value in the form of HIVE. Web3 makes this more commonplace in society and once there is the incentive to make creation great again, it will start to shift.

And perhaps, once more people are creating and consuming from real creators, this rent seeker critics will become less valuable in the marketplace, as people want real, even if it isn't polished or perfect. That means there will be less incentive to be a critic too and through the laws of supply and demand, they too will diminish and perhaps find themselves, having to trade their skills, instead of their vitriol for attention.

I don't feel sorry for the published poet and haven't ready any of the book, but I do think that most people should put a lot more effort into exploring their creative side and if putting it out into the world helps, do it.

Don't give a fuck what anyone says.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]