I am staring at a small glass screen, waiting for a red dot to tell me that I exist. It is a strange way to spend a Sunday lunchtime, sat in the kitchen with the smell of stale coffee and the low hum of the fridge for company. I have just shared a photo of a collage that took me four days to finish. In the logic of the machine, that collage is now worth exactly three seconds of someone’s attention before they flick their thumb and move on to a video of a cat or a car crash.
There is a specific kind of quiet that follows hitting the post button. It is not a peaceful quiet. It is the silence of a room where you have just told a joke that no one heard. I am told that I should be making films instead. I should be pointing the camera at my face, explaining my process, dancing perhaps, or at least cutting my film to the beat of a song that everyone else is using. They call it content, a word that feels like sand in the mouth. It suggests that the work itself is just filler for a void that can never be satisfied.
I find I am quite bad at playing the game. I don’t want to be a presenter or an editor or a personality. I just want to show the thing I made. But the algorithm is a jealous god; it demands a constant stream of noise, and I seem to only speak in whispers. Because I refuse to perform the digital liturgy – the tags, the trends, the frantic daily updates – I am effectively invisible. The work sits in a digital drawer, unlooked at, while the world moves on to something louder.
It isn’t about vanity. It isn’t that I need a thousand strangers to tell me I am talented. It is more practical than that, and perhaps more lonely. Making things is an act of communication, a way of saying, I saw this, did you see it too? When you are ignored by the software, that loop never closes. You are just a person alone in a room, talking to a wall that has been programmed to look the other way.
I looked at the drawing on my desk just now. The collage is heavy, slightly yellowed at the edges where I worked it too much. Out here, in the cold light of the window, the lack of a red notification doesn’t change the way the charcoal sits on the grain. The machine doesn’t care about the work, and perhaps the work shouldn’t care about the machine. But it is hard to remember that when the screen remains so stubbornly dark.
I suppose I will go for a walk. The trees don’t require me to document them to stay standing, and the pavement doesn’t ask for a caption. There is a certain dignity in being ignored, even if it feels a lot like failing.
I get you, it’s not about the need for likes, it just acknowledgement that you’ve said something at all!
I’ve noticed that my stuff isn’t even shown to all my friends these days. And then you get a motivational message telling you to post more. Why?! You don’t get to set me homework. I could easily increase my engagement instead by simply standing outside my front door and showing my pictures to passers by. And I don’t live on a busy street.
Anyway, consider this a ‘red dot’ for you.