Tag: social media

new blog post: why i will never be a brand Why I Will Never Be a “Brand”
Writing

Why I Will Never Be a “Brand”

Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I’ve been thinking about brands, online personalities, and sincerity a lot lately. Without harping on past posts, let’s summarize the reason for this rumination as recent-past online trauma (if you know, you know).

Something you hear a lot as a new author is figuring out your “brand.” What’s your author brand? Build your author brand in 5 easy steps! Build your brand!

What building your brand should be is targeting your product to your ideal reader. Note: I said product. Your book is a product; you are not a product. I do have an author brand. I call it being a romantic goremonger. I write books with some gory, highly descriptive gross bits (usually medical in nature or having to do with a cadaver) while balancing that with lots of emotional intimacy between the two main characters. My ideal reader also enjoys historicals and is probably queer (or enjoys queer books) since those are basically all that I write. If you like Anne Rice, KJ Charles, Jordan L. Hawk, Cat Sebastian, Allie Therin, and Arden Powell, you’ll probably like my books.

What I don’t like and have come to actively distrust is creatives who treat their social media as an extension of their brand. There’s a big difference between throwing your audience a bone by posting a smutty snippet or sharing some cool research from your latest project and treating everything you post like it’s a direct reflection on you. When the latter happens, often people start posting less about things they actually care about and more about things that will reflect well on them as a brand. It’s the same reason corporations only post rainbow stuff in June or Black history infographics in February. It’s not that they care about any of these groups or want to foster equity of any sort. It’s that if they don’t, it’ll reflect poorly on their public image.

Years ago, I saw this mostly when authors completely refused to post anything “political” on their pages by abstaining from every mentioning a problem a person of color might face or that LGBT people exist. This was mostly due to the fear that people wouldn’t want to buy from them due to their lack of a stance (or conservative stance) on an issue. Unfortunately, we’re also starting to see it happen in the other direction where people make token posts about Palestine or trans rights because they feel they have to, not because they actually give a shit about either group. The idea is once again a preservation of their audience rather than a sincere post about something they care about. I’m totally fine with someone saying, “Hey, I’m not going to post about X because I don’t know enough about it.” I’d rather someone step back and educate themselves than make a knee-jerk post because they feel they have to. You should be supporting people of color, queer people, disabled people, etc. because you want to, not because you feel social pressure to do so. The social pressure on social media can absolutely drive this sort of insincerity, and I hate it immensely. The worst part is how many people seem very happy to tick off the boxes that make someone acceptable before supporting them when in reality it’s all for show and they don’t actually care.

Kara, how do you tell if someone cares? Well, at a glance, you really can’t.

This is the internet where everything is online for all to see, yet nothing is truly real. I think the only way you can truly judge is by looking at patterns of behavior. Do they continue support after X month is over? Do they seem to genuinely care about this topic/group? Do they retweet people who aren’t themselves posting about X thing? At the same time, some people only use their social media accounts for updates about their own stuff, so you have to take that into consideration. At a time where many people want a black and white litmus test for goodness or good rep, I’m here to remind you that nothing is that straightforward.

Going off of this, I will say the one rule of thumb that hasn’t proven me wrong yet is anyone who gets online and touts themself as an authority on anything is probably full of shit. Anyone who acts like they are the most queer, the most trans, the most Latinx, the most whatever because it makes them an absolute, unquestionable authority is probably pulling a Wizard of Oz act and hoping you can’t look behind the curtain to see who they really are. Authority should always be questioned, no matter if it’s in the community or outside of it. I feel like most people who know anything about something know that there is still a lot left to learn, and they are open to criticism or open to new information or outside perspectives. If someone’s online brand is that they are trying to cultivate a following that looks only to them or sees them as the ultimate authority on a marginalization or topic (like publishing), I would be very cautious as those people are usually grifters.

Has the idea of an author brand gone too far? I do kind of think so. The problem truly begins once a person gets a large enough following online. It seems around 3k-5k followers on most platforms is enough for fans/followers to start treating them less as a person and more of some random avatar that they can say whatever they want to as if they don’t have feelings. It’s weird, but I’ve seen it many times where people will suddenly say things to a person with a larger account that they would never say to someone they’re friends with who has 500 followers. The size of the account means the intimacy disappears and with it the humanity of the person holding the account. When we do that, we reduce a real person to only their posts, which makes it easier for grifters to turn themselves into an authority or “brand” that posts only to appease rather than sharing things they actually care about. Ultimately, it’s a problem that lies with the fans/followers as much as the creators. People don’t magically attain a different status when they reach a certain number of followers, and they are never going to appease everyone. Expecting them to do so will only lead to heartbreak, so keep your expectations in moderation and check yourself for parasocial relationships.

new blog post: social media and the devaluation of the arts part 2 Social Media and the Devaluation of the Arts: Part 2
Writing

Social Media and the Devaluation of the Arts: Part 2

Kara Jorgensen5 Comments

Last week in part 1, I discussed how video-based social media has screwed over artists and the artistic process. While you don’t necessarily have to read part 1 to understand part 2, I will be building upon those arguments today.

Scrolling through Tiktok, a woman making miniatures flashes across my screen. With a pair of long tweezers, she places a dozen tiny books onto a bookcase, one after the other. The cuts are evident, but I know that even someone with a deft hand and lots of practice picking up tiny things would struggle to put these itty bitty books on a shelf and have them look artfully arranged. I wonder how much time has gone into creating this video. Was this a time lapse or a rehearsed arrangement of books? Have the other books been glued down to avoid accidentally dumping or upsetting what’s already been placed down in this diorama of a library? But I’ll never know. The moment the last book hits the shelf, the camera pulls back to reveal a quaint, cozy library done in 1:12 scale. It zooms in on a few details before looping back to the beginning.

There’s something about miniatures that I love, though I don’t make them myself. It’s a replication of real life but on an inhuman scale. It’s a very human thing to build houses for ghosts. To decorate them to honor some unseen presence. We relish the work and time we put in making something the hypothetical inhabitant would like. Dollhouses pick up where our temples or homemade altars left off, and it’s comforting to know humans never truly change.

I follow a bunch of people who make miniatures on Instagram and Youtube. Miniaturists often make their own pieces for their dioramas or buy them from independent creators who specialize in a very specific niche like making tiny, lifelike vegetables or weaving itty bitty carpets on a bracelet loom. Under a video of someone rolling out and painting a clay cabbage, a commenter asks how much they cost. I wince at the responses to the creator’s honest answer. “FOR A CLAY CABBAGE?? I COULD MAKE THAT FOR $3!” says the questioner, and others quickly chime in to tell the craftsperson what a rip-off their price is.

The Price of the Aesthetic

If you’re an artist of any type, I’m sure you’ve heard someone complaining about the price of your work, whether it’s a $5 ebook or a $300 full color art commission. People don’t understand the amount of work that goes into making something. It isn’t just the cost of the materials or even the time it takes to make it. You’re paying for skill. It’s the same reason you can make yourself a cheeseburger and fries at home, but you pay $15 for the same thing at a restaurant. The chef knows what they’re doing, and you’re paying for their expertise. Yes, you could make that clay cabbage at home for $3, but do you have the experience to know what clay works best or how thin to roll it without tearing it or how to paint things in a way that makes them seem lifelike? In the amount of time, effort, and material you used to figure it out, you’ve probably spent more than you would have if you bought it from a professional.

When I commission artwork of my characters from my favorite artists, I do so because I know they can do a better job than I ever could. I’m paying for their skill, and usually, I’m underpaying for that skill. Most artists I know do not charge what their work is worth, and even then, they still get told they’re overcharging or trying to rip people off. No matter how little a creative charges, it will always be too much for someone. With the way social media algorithms demand artists to perform in videos, I wonder how much worse this will get.

As someone who crafts and writes, I know the time a project takes, the toll repeated motions can have on the body, the costs of materials, and the amount of energy it takes to learn a skill and hone it over years, but what about those who don’t? I think back to that Tiktok video of the woman placing tiny books on a shelf. I wonder how many people watching the video understand how much work goes into making each of those miniature books. Yes, they look uniform and nearly perfect, despite there being several dozen of them, but that is due to hours of labor and years of skill. They don’t look perfect because it’s easy. They look perfect because the artist knows what they’re doing. And now that work is been distilled into thirty seconds of “content” on Tiktok, being watched by people who may have no interest in miniatures or how they’re made or anything this artist is doing beyond consuming shifting pixels on a screen. The ratio of people who know what they’re looking at to the people who don’t is getting worse the further the video goes outside its target audience, and the more that happens, the more the demeaning comments flow in.

The shift to splashy thirty seconds or less videos is doing a disservice to the arts. A very common format on Tiktok is someone making something with half second sharp cuts between steps in the process. Thread the needle, needle into fabric, row, row, row, row, progress shot, tada. It forces the artist to condense their work and process into what I like to call the aesthetic of productivity. It flattens the creative process to the bare bones of each step, making it almost prescriptive when the art of creating the piece is not meant to be a tutorial. This format doesn’t leave room for contemplation or mistakes or reevaluation, just forward progress, a march to the finish before it’s onto the next Instagram worthy piece. It’s slight of hand that hides the work in favor of the sparkly product, but when we hide the work, we hide the skill, the meaning, the way we’re truly supposed to experience art.

Bob Ross wasn’t a cool artist because he made a shit ton of paintings; it was because he made the act of painting accessible and enjoyable. He took his skill and time and taught others how to make art and be fulfilled by the process of adding happy trees and embracing mistakes. What we’re seeing now is antithesis to this. It’s all product and capitalist consumption, no process or joy or fulfillment. When we take out the most fulfilling parts of creating and what allows us to express ourselves, we not only devalue what makes us human but the skill that artists have cultivated through years of practice and work.

Who Let the Tech Bros in?

I won’t get into my long winded rant about how the devaluation of the humanities lies squarely with white supremacy and its besties, capitalism and fascism, but for now, trust me when I say that the greater accessibility of higher education, online tutorials for nearly anything, and the ease of sharing marginalized voices via social media coinciding with a massive devaluation of the arts and humanities isn’t a coincidence. And as if smelling the blood in the water, tech bros have caught wind of the devaluation of the artistic process and sought to capitalize on it.

First, it was NFTs plaguing the art community, and now, it’s AI generated “art.” “Art” because art requires a certain level of humanity that a computer can never emulate. “Art” because it’s a plagiarist, and plagiarists don’t deserve credit for their work. And most importantly, “art” because it isn’t art; it’s an approximation of what the unskilled, uncaring, and uninterested think art should be. The worst part is, we’ve helped them get there with each high production value, no substance video.

For years, we have been devaluing the humanities. It started again in earnest more recently with the championing of STEM fields above all else and was compounded by the mass denigration of people who majored in the humanities (despite the fact that their skills make them more employable, even outside their respective fields). This has all been further heightened by the well-established misogynistic feelings in regards to needle crafts, clothing design, and artisanal products. Many of the crafts or types of art we see on Tiktok or Instagram were considered “women’s work” and were taken for granted or not seen as serious art for centuries, and now, that the queerness of many masc traditional artists is more obvious, there wasn’t enough “traditional masculinity” left to uphold the arts against the patriarchy. Techno grifters quickly realized they could cash in on those who wouldn’t dare debase themselves by dabbling in the arts and being vulnerable enough to be bad at something.

AI tech bros, whether they know it or not, are selling hyper-capitalist, patriarchal art. It requires no skill, no talent no practice, just stealing the hard work of legions of unseen (and probably marginalized) people. You can’t get more capitalist than that. At the core of it is instant gratification and accolades with none of the process or emotion that goes into actual art. And where do they show off these new masterpieces? Social media. Because as long as we’re quickly scrolling and haphazardly liking, we won’t notice the woman in the painting has seven fingers or that the pattern on her dress makes zero sense or that the piece has no emotional impact or intention. All that truly matters is that the tech bros have colonized a space that was inhabited largely by marginalized groups and filled it with easily consumable trash.

If the process no longer matters and the product barely matters beyond how many follows, likes, and retweets we garner, it’s no wonder that AI “art” has proliferated like a fungus. AI “art” is the culmination of the devaluation of art on social media because all that matters is pulling as much “content” and money from a piece as possible. Unfortunately, I don’t know what the solution is besides legislation cracking down on AI due to copyright issues, but there needs to be major push back from artists and art appreciators alike against the shiny-fication of the arts and the way it flattens the process and the meaning of the pieces themselves. Only by pushing back against the hyper-capitalist algorithms and trends can we truly move toward something more equitable and sustainable for artists.

If you want to help your artist friends, show off their art, like their quieter posts, and support things like UBI and other social safety nets that allow artists to more comfortably flourish. It isn’t too late to turn the tide.

new blog post: social media and the devaluation of the arts part 1 Social Media and the Devaluation of the Arts: Part 1
Writing

Social Media and the Devaluation of the Arts: Part 1

Kara Jorgensen6 Comments

I have a love-hate relationship with those “romanticize your life” videos you often see on Youtube or Instagram, especially when they’re paired with the arts.

On one hand, who doesn’t love seeing video clips of beautiful leather notebooks perched on an iron cafe table in some picturesquely autumnal town? On the other hand, 99.9% of the process does not look like that, and it makes me fear that social media is giving people very unrealistic expectations of what “the process” looks like in regards to art.

Eating with your Eyes

There have been plenty of articles recently that have discussed the burden social media marketing has put onto artists, writers, and craftspeople (I’m going to refer to everyone as artists from here on out because that’s what we all are, whether we want to admit it or not, and this may be part of the problem). Social media marketing for artists sucks. The main problem stems from the commodification of every single thing an artist creates. A fickle algorithm decides whether or not your video or photo is worthy of attention based on your keywords (or lack of) and whatever trend du jour is on order. This means art is being created with algorithms in mind instead of being created for art’s sake or for the artist or even for the artist’s intended audience. This is especially true on sites like Instagram and Tiktok where the idea is to get a post widely disseminated rather than it reaching the artist’s intended audience as one would encounter on Twitter, Bluesky, or author/genre specific forums. Tiktok especially expects the artist to find the audience rather than the audience go looking for things they actually care about. In order to get their work in front of more eyes, artists have to become actors and performers, and as the algorithm shifts further and further in favor of those who are better at this, then the rest of us are forced to become trained seals in their wake.

If you’re thinking, “Oh, well, you just have to get better at talking in front of a camera and selling your product,” you’re wrong. If it was that simple, my teaching skills would come in handy for once outside the classroom. The problem with these hyper visual platforms is that the artist becomes irrelevant except as a vehicle to take B roll or set up an aesthetic time lapse. Half the time, the product barely batters. What truly matters are the aesthetics. Does the artwork look good on camera? Can I put it somewhere aesthetic and film outdoors? Can I show the process at a cafe or in a dark academia-esque study lit with candles while I type nonsense on my very clean Mac Book in my Sunday best? It’s all smoke and mirrors to catch the algorithm’s attention and to get others to buy into that aesthetic delusion as well.

Viewers/followers are eating with their eyes. They are consuming a brand rather than a piece of art. They spend however long the video is taking it in before scrolling onto the next video and the next and the next with no end in sight. Artists are creating visual input that leaves little room for discussion, exploration, or even just the lingering one might do at a museum. You have to be changing camera angles and creating ambience; there is no time for contemplation. That isn’t the viewer or platform’s aim. But if no one is truly seeing a piece, what’s the point? Once the product is barely relevant, a blip on a phone screen, what does that mean for the process?

All Polish, No Process

Back when I was growing up, before Tiktok or IG or even Youtube, there was DeviantArt. It still exists as a place for artists to post their work, but it was a far different space than it is now. One of the things I appreciated about it was how there was a section specifically for artists to post their sketches or scraps. The main part of the site was all the polished works, but artists let you peek behind the curtain at their pages of rough sketches. There would be chunks crossed off, random scribbles, repeated anatomy practice (cough mistakes cough). Artists would post the vulnerable parts of art: the mess. Even then, it was often a curated mess, but it still looked like my best friend’s sketchbook pages. When I would grab his sketchbook and flip through it, it would be pages upon pages of sketchy mess. Places where he worked on anatomy, half-finished pieces that were abandoned, pieces that looked perfectly fine to me but were scribbled out in bright blue marker. But now, when I see a sketchbook tour on Instagram or Tiktok, it’s a notebook filled with picture perfect drawings that might be simplistic but blemish free. The emphasis is on the filling of space aesthetically rather than learning.

On one hand, I don’t think outsiders need to be privy to the process of creating. The creative process leaves us vulnerable. When people see the process, the underpainting, the handwritten outlines, they often don’t understand what they’re looking at. There’s no way to do it wrong, yet so many of us are hesitant to show the unfinished, unpolished product for fear of judgment. What if they think it’s the finished piece and think I suck as an artist? It’s a reasonable fear. At the same time, it isn’t a good idea to curate the artistic process so heavily that all people see is the shiny, Instagram-worthy final product because people will assume if it looks easy, it is easy.

The more concerning question is, what are young artists seeing when they look at the Instagram or Tiktok feeds of the people they look up to? If all they see is the final product or those highly edited four-weeks-of-work-in-thirty-seconds videos, they might assume that that is what the artistic process is actually like. It may sound silly, but how are they supposed to know about all the false starts, practice, and frustration that can go into a piece of art if they never see it? Young artists who don’t have other artists in their lives will get a false perception of how the process is supposed to look. If they assume there are no false starts or messiness, will they assume that, because their early work is messy, they’re a talentless hack and give up on art before they can get to the point of even having a true process? Artists are already lacking in community. This sort of alienation from the process will only make that worse.

But it isn’t just new artists who are being affected by the Tiktok-ification of the artistic process. Because artists can’t just toss their work up on social media in text or pictures, they need to document the process in video if they have any hope of gaining traction on Instagram or Tiktok. Instead of settling into the flow of a piece, artists need to think about whipping out their phones at every step, setting up the perfect lighting, making sure the process looks aesthetic enough to catch the attention of those who don’t already follow them. And what happens if they miss a step in the process because they get engrossed? What if the memory card runs out of story or the app crashes? Was the entire piece a waste of time if it didn’t yield the max amount of social media fodder?

The way social media has forced artists to turn the creative process into a made for TV process should be alarming to all creatives. While filming his show, Bob Ross produced three copies of each painting: one that was sort of a rough draft, one he made on TV to show the process, and a more perfect final version that was used for display. Will that become the expectation for creatives online? That we’ll have to hide the mess in favor of production value and work three times as hard for nearly no tangible reward. Julia Child, one of the most famous TV chefs, often dropped things or burned food on air, yet I can’t tell you the last time I saw that in a cooking Tiktok. We are no longer allowed to roll with the punches and recover when performing before an algorithm.

Social media promotes capitalistic exponential growth, and to achieve that, the algorithm requires flashy, picture perfect productions made digestible for the masses. But if we reduce hours of work to trending music and an aesthetic montage of productivity, what are we saying about the value of our labor?

Tune in next week for part two where I talk about the devaluation of the arts, the branding of artists, and how all of this has led to the rise of AI in the arts.

Personal Life

Mindless Book Consumption

Kara Jorgensen4 Comments

There is a trend on Goodreads and other sites for book lovers that I’ve noticed lately and bothers me as a reader, an author, and an English professor: mindless book consumption.

What the hell are you talking about? you might ask. To me, mindless book consumption is reading hundreds of books a year (or a month– yeah, I saw someone supposedly read 120 books in February), but the books you’re reading a) aren’t given time to be digested or be enjoyed b) chosen for the most part just because they’re easily accessible c) many of those books are not actually finished but are considered “read” and rated on sites like Goodreads.

I have LOTS of problems with this gluttonous treatment of reading material. First off, let me say that I am all for reading tons of books. Last year, I read 120 books, and I totally get how people can read 300 books in year. I wish I could read that fast, but I know, I’m a comparatively slow reader. If you’re a voracious reader who likes romances, I can understand how someone could consume that many books in a year. Many romances are short and fairly straightforward, so if you enjoy them, it’s easy to burn through book after book in a genre you like.

On the other hand, what I’ve witnessed on Goodreads is very different. Goodreads attracts a lot of reviewers or those who are famous on Booktube or Bookstagram, and often that fame is tied to how many books they read in a year. If you’re a reviewer, the more books you read, the more posts you have, the more people read your posts, and the more followers you have. It makes sense from a marketing standpoint, but what has happened on this site is the idolization of gluttonous readers, especially those who pan books. I would like to challenge this ideal because what I’ve seen has been nothing more than binging books with little regard for enjoyment or synthesis of the products consumed.

My concern is the mentality of quantity over quality in the book community. What is the point of reading 300 books if you can’t discern one book from another or you DNF (did not finish) more books than you finished? DNF-ing in and of itself is problematic in the context of the mindless consumption mentality because many readers count them as “read” on Goodreads and rate them despite not reading the entirety of the work. From an author’s standpoint, I wouldn’t want someone to read half of my book and pass judgment without receiving the complete picture, especially if a perceived flaw in the narrative turns out to later play a part in the plot. As a reader, there are plenty of books I didn’t love at page thirty that I adored by the end. Perhaps my stick-to-it-ness comes from being an English major and being forced early on to read outside my comfort zone. By being made to read books I didn’t think I’d like, I ended up branching out to new genres, and I know that if I had given up on Jane Eyre or The Canterbury Tales early on, I would have missed out on stories I now love.

Besides missing out on some great books by DNF-ing, there is the matter of ethics. Is it ethical to mark a book you didn’t read in its entirety as “read”? Even worse in my mind, is it ethical to rate a book you didn’t finish?

The former issue is at the heart of the problem. It’s very easy to inflate the amount of books you’ve read if you didn’t actually read the entirety of the book. Of course, people stopping by your profile on Goodreads wouldn’t know that unless they looked more closely at your reviews and reading history. Others see the inflated number, they feel the need to compete with it, and they might attempt to fudge their numbers and perpetuate the cycle.

The greater problem is how society seems to adore cynical, jaded reviewers. This is a centuries old issue that spans every artistic medium imaginable, but with the internet and social media, you no longer have to be a reviewer for the New York Times to disseminate your views to a large audience. Unfortunately, good reviews garner little attention. Bad reviews, especially those of popular media, stick out. It’s one thing to genuinely not enjoy a work, but in a time where social media users regularly try to gain likes and followers, I have to wonder if some people are more likely to read in order to find fault with a book rather than read to enjoy it. If you combine the fact that people feel special when they go against the grain with the need to meet a very high reading quota, you end up with reviewers on Goodreads and Amazon who specialize in panning and DNF-ing books, which of course they stopped reading because they didn’t enjoy them and then rate them poorly.

The question is, how do we combat this and should we combat it? Of course it is within your right to not finish any book you start and then rate them, but you don’t have to read those reviews or follow accounts that exhibit suspect behavior. Much like avoiding brands that have questionable policies or practices, we can abstain from giving those bloggers attention whether it’s liking their posts, following their accounts, or leaving disparaging comments.

Conversely, if you’re a reader, perhaps seeing this behavior will make you more mindful of how you consume books. Being mindful has become a buzzword lately, but when it comes to consumption, I think it’s necessary to reflect on why you do what you do. If you’re reading to fill a vacuum or to meet a numerical goal, it may be worth wondering why you feel the need to do so. Are you reading because you want to be entertained or learn something or is it because you are in competition with someone or to live up to a perceived standard?

Stay tuned for another post about mindfulness and reading soon.

Writing

Finishing Book Two and What I Learned Along the Way

Kara Jorgensen4 Comments

wg manuscriptIt’s done.  The Winter Garden is done.

Well, the story is finished.  While I was stuck on the third to last chapter (yes, I had finished the epilogue and part of the pen-ultimate chapter before I started that one), I decided to edit the first twenty-seven chapters.  Now, the editing is done as well and The Winter Garden (Ingenious Mechanical Devices #2) is off to my beta readers! Until they get back to me with their feedback, I will be taking a little hiatus from Emmeline, Immanuel, and Adam.  Every time I finish a novel, it’s a bit depressing.  I’m done with the characters (for now), the plot is finished, the bad guys have been dealt with, and now, I need to step back.  In my next post, I will discuss editing in more detail, but for now, I would like to impart what I have learned after publishing my first book and finishing my second. Continue reading “Finishing Book Two and What I Learned Along the Way” →