How is Social Media affecting your Creative Mojo?

Question for you: 

 Does your creative mojo outpace the fierce fandom and regular (and loyal) usage of social media?

[Social media being: blogging, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Deviant Art, etc.]

My creative mojo used to be much like this plain black canvas largely because of the influence and impact of social media.

I believe I have breached this topic before but I thought I would talk a little more in depth as I have recently stumbled upon some situations that have really made me think more critically about it. 

I don't remember exactly when it happened but in the last few months I started noticing some things both about social media that I really didn't like because of how it was affecting my life. General things I noticed about it were this:

• It made me lazy in my relationships. This includes both people and "things" (like creative endeavors).
• It made me jaded and easily unimpressed which, in turn, made me passive-aggressive and "judgey" in the way I was thinking or reacting to what I was taking in. 
• It made me feel both inspired and inadequate at the same time, which, in turn, made me unnecessarily envious and frustrated with the fact that I couldn't achieve/do/create/design in the same way as someone else.
• It actively contributed to me being inactive - with my body, my mind, and (most importantly) my heart & soul.

Because of all of these things, I made what some folks have called drastic an unnecessary, the decision to cutback on how and what social media I use. The biggest thing of it was I removed myself from Facebook. I took a ton of flack for this and I even still get it from people on a regular basis. I also stopped bothering with Twitter - not that big of a deal because I already wasn't using it a ton. And, I seriously examined my blogging activity - though it might not seem like it because I have managed to keep a pretty regular schedule of Monday-Friday posting since the school year started with some recent exceptions.

Now, I don't bring all of this up to say that social media is bad or that anyone who uses it is bad either. I mean, you are reading the blog that I keep right now and that definitely is something of social media, right? (And I'd like to think that this blog isn't bad otherwise it would have gone the way of Facebook months ago which it didn't do.) My point in bringing this up is to perhaps inspire some internal conversation (in myself as much as for you) about the call we all feel to be creative and create but how it ends up existing dormant inside of us because of the noise and activity of so many other things these days and ultimately? It ends up slowly and painfully shriveling up inside until that feeling starts to suck up the rest of us as well. (So, I am talking about this as it relates to creation and creativity.)

I cannot tell you how many folks I come across on a regular basis - my student artists, my colleagues who are incredible artists outside of the non-art/creative content areas they teach, and fellow artists I meet by way of this blog and just general adventures of real-life - who have been impacted in seriously negative ways much like the ways I shared with you above about how it has impacted me.

Just the other day I had a conversation with an incredibly talented student artist who is just a freshman and has had very little formal training in the way of drawing. It has taken her months to finally bring in her personal portfolio for me to just look at (much less critique) and when she finally did it, I literally had to tell her in a very blatant way, "Do not talk while I am looking at it." Why? Because all of the narration and explanation she was giving me was negative and seriously untrue. This is because (I found out) she spends a ton of time trying to be a part of an online community of artists by the name of Deviant Art and rather than it inspiring her to create, it has only made her feel inadequate, unfairly critical, and incapable of designing or creating anything worthy of anything more than hiding away or discarding.

Now, like I said before, I don't begrudge the many conduits of social media or its vast communities of users. That's not my point in saying all of this. I am only trying to offer a perspective based upon my own personal experience and observations about how it is perhaps doing something to our innate capacities and yearnings to be creative and be creators. As a believer in the gospel, I believe it exists because the Lord (the most supreme creator and intelligent designer in all of existence) created man in His image therefore giving each of us seeds of being visionary like Him and the power to create like Him and this goes for people who are believers and not yet believers of the gospel!

I believe every single one us was created to create! This is why people who will openly profess to not be artists doodle in their folio pads during conferences/class instructional time or play with office supplies at their desks when they should otherwise be doing work. Creativity and creation is inside of us and it simply needs to be roused awake and then fed and cared for so it can thrive. But when you introduce social media into the equation? Well, that kind of media ends up pushing out and ultimately eliminating other kinds of media from our otherwise creative and creating selves.  The unfortunate thing is that it happens in such a way that we are far from being keenly aware of it because it convinces us that it's not so bad and then it starts seeping into and all over parts of our life without us until it's everywhere and everything. I mean... I make this sound kind of extreme but it sort of us like that. Harmless at first but can eventually be smothering the way it exists.

Anyway, if you are feeling stifled (or smothered, or wilting, or disintegrating) with your own creative inspirations, efforts, and overall investments, perhaps you are dealing with a similar situation as I was. And if you are? Well... it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't have to be that way at all.

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ADDENDUM, 12/4/12 => Found THIS via Hongkiat.com during my morning blogrolling. It is so relevant to this topic! It speaks specifically about how to establish and maintain balance between your Online and Offline social lives rather than letting one dominate and replace the other.

Lesson idea: Name Tangles in Scratchart

This lesson is not my original idea and I found it HERE. The difference in the original lesson plans and what I did is the medium. The original idea utilized pen/marker and ink and I reinterpreted the idea in scratch art. It teaches a number of different elements and principles of art and design (contrast, space, emphasis, variety, balance) and it also introduces the students to a medium that might have always seemed novel and/or fun in the past but a medium that can be used to make a more serious piece of artwork.

I must admit that as the first project for the semester, this was very ambitious for them. It required the understanding and utilization of negative space on top of requiring them to think in reverse - since scratch art essentially reverses whatever design/image you are creating. (So in hindsight, I could almost call this the "Double-negative Name Tangle project"). Additionally, the end result of the work is non-objective in subject matter making it even more challenging for the students since the metric for whether they've done something well enough or not is definitely not concrete or clearly defined. Still, I feel like forcing them to focus on their lines and the way they come together to make patterns and shapes offers them a different perspective as well as a new respective for the creative process of design and the fabrication of a well-thought out piece of work.

Ultimately, the students did very well AND created pieces that are impressive with regard to their reasonably limited experience in art (this is a foundational course).

In the future, I am considering having a stock of matte black ink markers for corrections - I used Sharpie with wedge tips and it worked well but resulted in a glossy finish against the matte look of the scratch art paper we were using.