Advanced Essay #3: Art on the Web

Introduction:

My goals for this paper were to make a piece that explores the difficulties of making art in the modern day. I wanted to take a look at how the internet and online trends have combatted with honesty surrounding what people make whether it be music, visual art, or any other creative medium. My process was slow, this was the most difficult advanced essay by far. Reviewing my work was hard and I feel like this is the closest I could have come to a final product I would enjoy.

Essay:

Being both a self titled creative and shy person, I struggled for a long time to gain the confidence to share my work. The raw face to face exchange that takes place when showing someone something you have created is difficult to say the least, there is a reaction that you can gage almost instantaneously from this viewer simply through their overt emotional reaction.

I then became familiar with the internet, this vast expansive web of connection. It had loomed in my periphery, it was this mysterious complicated minefield of social standards and I made a distinct decision to avoid it. Although, for the past two years I have begun making music and I have found the internet to be a place to share it without the awkward societal exchanges that follow. This blanketing effect made it wonderfully simple for me to place my musical pursuits online, leaving my friends and strangers to peruse my work. Whereas I gained the positive side to this, there are also many people who receive hurtful and negative reactions to their work. This facade of the internet also allows people to say whatever they want without the actual threat of physical violence. An online presence involving creative pursuits have both negative and positive effects on the quality of the world.

My experiences have been solely positive on the internet. My music and art have registered fans who tend to be mostly my friends and family. But the growing use of social media in everyday life is both oversaturating these music platforms but also giving these creative people the fame and love they deserve, it divides the good artists from the bad solely based on honesty. This quote an article relating to American’s relationships with the internet from The Atlantic sums up this expansive quality of the internet perfectly: “Americans are followers: Nearly half of all Americans are now members of at least one social network, double the proportion of just two years ago.” This massive shift in human interaction has opened the world to an innumerable amount of creators who just keep coming, making the ability to stand out extremely difficult.

There are definitely negative experiences though, the internet has made this veneer of numbness that is slowly filling major sections of it. Art is extremely personal, and many times placing it on a social media platform feels vulnerable. People take this vulnerability and place nasty comments upon it for personal pleasure, the pursuit of a power complex. I have a personal example of this, a friend of a friend who attends this high school is a poet. They delivered a poem alongside a fellow student crafting a conversation between them and their future white son, going in depth about how this boy will be placed in a position where they are not allowed to feel bad for themselves. This poem was recorded and uploaded to Youtube. This being an uncomfortable subject a few people on the internet bashed it because they disagreed with the poem, then the negativity began to pick up steam and these children were being torn apart based on their physical appearances and the way they held themselves. This of course began to pull away from the few opinionated issues that followed this piece and became a conformist bully party, allowing people to attack these two peers of mine with intense superficial insults that led to these students needing support.

The internet provides the most raw gateway to human interaction, raw but isolated and removed. This honesty brings up questions about how art is dissected and viewed online, people are who they are and they place that for millions to see. Then other people who are also being genuine, will be brutally honest with no regards for feelings. I find this criticism is much worse than it would be in real life, the lack of human connection is robotic and alien. It stimulates this sense of destructive mystery, not knowing tone or context. I am a person terrified by people not liking what I make. I find real life interaction in this regard to be frightening, the idea of the internet seemed like this foreign sanctuary where I could express myself but I found it to be much worse. I need to know how people feel by sharing my music to the people I am closest to, the people I know on a deeper level who will tell me if my art or music is good or not. I find this person to person connection will forever trump the plasticity and falseness that follows the internet.

Source:

Jackson, Nicholas. "Infographic: The American Identity According to Social Media."The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, n.d. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.