Love this take from [[McMullin, Tara - Beyond Creating Versus Consuming - 2023-07-17]]. Tara talks about the need to *consume* art to *make better* art. This is advice in essentially every creative practice or medium — except social media. And, as Tara points out, social media is a creative medium. We see consumption of social media content as being… like, “lower-brow” than consuming other types of content. We see most of what’s online as brainrot. I tend to agree with this, especially since [[{6.1} artificial intelligence will increase the power of the stream]], flooding our feeds with generally meaningless slop. But Tara points out: >Look, people make **bad art** in every medium. And, yeah, actually. This is a much more level-headed way to look at this. Looking for something to watch, how many low-effort b-movies do we scroll past? How many recycled shows and ideas and IP? When I read, how many times have I put a book down because it didn’t live up to my expectations? That doesn’t make me see filmmaking or writing as inherently *bad* mediums. I don’t write off cinema because of Sharknado (and why would I!). So why do we write off social media as a legitimate medium just because other people use it to publish shitty content? That’s a *user* issue and a *platform* issue, not an issue with the medium itself. Maybe we should be more concerned with how platforms *reward* low-effort content than with how much low-effort content there is… This ties in with another idea from Tara’s article: performance of gender on social media. ![[McMullin, Tara - Beyond Creating Versus Consuming - 2023-07-17#^151576|clean]] I wonder if this is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or, like, what the cycle is here. A man creates a platform that we all join > Men try to replicate the creator > Women are tasked with engagement… I dunno, lots to explore here.