The Groove Issue 80 - How Social Media Impacts Your Creativity
HOW SOCIAL MEDIA IMPACTS YOUR CREATIVITY
Thank you again for all the enormous support on my book launch! It’s been out in the world for two weeks and excellent reviews are pouring in!
If you haven’t bought a copy yet, consider benefitting the independent bookstores through Bookshop.
Last Friday I was on the Today Show on NBC talking about my trajectory, why I believe that creativity is the most important skill anyone can possess and how my book helps develop your ideas and turn them into gold.
You can watch the entire segment here, and if you are outside the US and can’t access that link, I posted it here too.
I’ve always wondered about the effects of social media on creativity and now there are studies that tell us what happens to our ideas when we participate (or don’t) on the networks.
We are always processing and recombining our thoughts with those that others have generated. In fact, nothing that is creative and innovative is 100% new. It’s all about the improvements and new spins you give to old concepts that bring novelty and excitement to your contributions in this world.
I love social media as a community-building space, as a place to gather inspiration, as an outlet to get my message amplified and of course as a marketing tool. But what about the role of social media in creativity? Does it help or hinder it?
Beware of Echo Chambers
The very many social media platforms of 2022 are both overwhelming and a necessary part of our contemporary culture.
In social media platforms, the algorithms are programmed so that you are shown accounts to follow or recommended posts that are similar to the people and accounts you already interact with. Assuming that your interests are varied enough, you will have greater exposure to a variety of thoughts and thus a higher chance to make a creative move inspired by those.
The issue is that most people follow others who are as similar in thoughts and tastes as they are. And this hinders creativity.
In a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the researchers first asked participants to think of unusual uses for everyday objects. Then they were asked to evaluate those ideas and choose who to follow for creative inspiration.
The participants unequivocally chose to follow those who had the most creative ideas regarding unusual uses for everyday objects, but who were also different from their own.
In other words, according to this study, if you follow people with unique points of view on social media, this may prompt you to start seeing things differently or recombine those ideas in a style that is novel in your area of expertise.
Food for thought: look at the accounts you follow and see if you’ll pass the test - is it generously spread out and heterogeneous enough to prompt your creative thinking to see things from different angles?
Creativity Starts With Action
Something that I have always advocated for, not only in my book but throughout many of the past issues of The Groove, is that passively watching things happening around you will never bring anything creative or innovative.
Action - little daily steps, whether that is writing a page of an upcoming book, editing a video, or sketching a new design-is where creativity flourishes. Social media is no different.
In a more recent study conducted by psychologists from the University of Arkansas, they take their investigations a notch further. These researchers actually wanted to measure the correlations between creativity, use of social media and real-life achievements coming from ideas in ten areas: visual art, music, dance, architectural design, creative writing, humor, inventions, scientific discovery, theater and film, and culinary arts.
Here’s what they found after analyzing the data coming from a rigorous study of 379 undergraduate students: people who think in more creative ways tend to not actively engage on social media and are generally less addicted to their smartphones.
BUT! People with real-life creative accomplishments, on the other hand, spend more time and tend to be more active on social media platforms.
In other words, people who just passively browsed through social media had good ideas, but they didn’t really have many creative accomplishments to account for.
On the other hand, those who actively created content, asked questions, commented on others’ posts, wrote tweets, etc., had much more creative tangible accomplishments because they had built communities, increased access to resources, received continued motivation to produce creative work from praise, or received immediate feedback when something wasn’t so great.
And with this information, wouldn’t you like to create more than you consume on social media?
What if you posted a short video every other day about your process or a behind-the-scenes look into your business? Maybe you could enter a challenge or create your own? Start a valuable thread on Twitter and kept adding interesting thoughts? Or simply contribute a positive comment for someone you follow?
UPCOMING EVENTS
TOMORROW IN-PERSON: Wednesday, March 30th at 11:00 am I will be in Charlotte, North Carolina signing books and hanging out with the Southern folks at SoCo Gallery. Make sure to get your book here.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
There are no affiliate links in this email. Everything that I recommend is done freely.