Blog One - Week 3: Social Media and your Career

So for my Creative Industries unit at university, we have been learning all about the portrayal of ourselves online. As part of that we have been learning all about the importance of Blogging, so what better way to get stuck into it then 3 blogs about the topics we have covered in class!

To kick it off, this blog is going to be about our week 3 topic, something i have always had a bit of a stand off with, the important role of Social Media.

Firstly, i'd like to state that i don't really use many forms of social media in my personal life. It's just something i've never been all that interested in, sure i have a Facebook account, which i use to keep in touch with friends and up to date on gigs and such. Which is all i need it for, i've never made many posts or put myself out into the world wide web, so even just blogging my thoughts is quite foreign to me.

However, unfortunately for me and my old fashioned sensibilities, i've learnt that in the current climate of the creative industry , to be successful, Social Media is a must. Even when i was a teenager and Myspace just came out, i made a concerted effort to stay away from it, because i could see it, for lack of a better word, corrupting my friends. People getting into fights about who was whose "top friend", and now with Facebook and Instagram it's the same thing just with "likes". People seem to get addicted to getting likes on their photos and pictures it almost becomes a hobby. For some it becomes a career.

One major gripe i have with how important it has become in the creative Industry is the pretty obvious one, which is that it's all just a big popularity contest and the music ends up being a side note. Granted, most of the time you would still have to be a fabulous artist to get all those likes, but i just wonder how many artists give up what they really want to be painting, or the music they really what to be writing, all based on it's perceived popularity.

I think that Social Media is a great tool for making the world seem much smaller, and for people to get their work in the public eye. But i hope we start to pay more attention to the actual work then how many likes the artists profile picture has.

References -

https://medium.com/self-directed-practitioners/week-6-social-media-and-your-career-21ec52b2b003