Social Media and the Death of Creativity

The capacity to daydream and an urge to seek out the new are at the heart of an artistic life. Social media kills both.

A mind that wanders is a creative mind. A wandering mind activates the part of the brain that solves problems and generates ideas. The idle mode is also crucial in giving us the space to understand and empathise with others. Daydreaming – being disconnected, being bored even, and allowing our minds to drift – is a powerful muse.

A creative mind is a mind on dopamine. There are several evolutionary reasons human beings produce dopamine, but in general we can say it is linked to seeking rewards. Connecting with other human beings gives us a dopamine hit. Human beings are social creatures after all: we evolved needing the tribe to survive. We are a species that hunts for new information, is alert for new information, because having the most up-to-date information is fundamental for survival (are there predators nearby? is another tribe moving in to our territory?). We are rewarded for discovering new information with a hit. We can also get it from drugs, poker (slot) machines, sex, great food, and particularly when we are anticipating rewards. Dopamine also comes from new experiences, from novelty.

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Dopamine levels are high in creative types. Studies have shown that artists are extra-motivated to seek out the new and can then channel that novelty seeking into their work.

These are some of the key arguments made by Manoush Zomorodi in her book Bored and Brilliant (How Spacing Out can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self). She explains: “Research shows that great artists, scientists, and other types of creators have an abundance of dopamine in their system that allows them to deal with novelty.” Dopamine is the “the mother of invention.” The problem is we have a limited supply, and must be judicious about whether we spend it on “increasing our wonder and excitement for creating meaning and new things like art – or on Twitter.”

Which leads us to social media. What is the primary function of social media, from the perspective of the tech giants providing it to us as a service? The answer is simple: to hold our attention for as long as possible. Hold our attention so they may sell advertising to us. Hold our attention so the tech giant can gather more and more data, and create a more and more accurate profile of who we are: our wants, our needs, and our weaknesses. And what are one of the key ways that these giants hold and maintain our attention?

Dopamine hits.

Smartphones have provided us with a virtually unlimited supply of social stimuli, both positive and negative. Every notification, whether it’s a text message, a ‘like’ on Instagram, or a Facebook notification, has the potential to be a provide social stimulus and dopamine influx. Former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, admitted to an audience of Stanford students that: “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” and are leaving us, “vacant and empty”.

It’s not just social media, of course. The internet, in general, provides varied means for us to get our hit. An individual may gamble, shop, and look at pornography all at the same time online. Add Twitter to the mix and you have a heady cocktail of distraction.

All of this can poison the well of a creative inner life. Our smart phones stop us from daydreaming, and use up our reserves of dopamine.

A study cited in Bored and Brilliant found that every time we respond to a social media ping, it takes twenty three minutes, on average, to get back to what we were originally working on (I have this figure written on a card and taped to my computer now: 23 Minutes). I’m not sure if it does take me this long, but I do know that there is nothing worse than being ‘in flow’ while writing a novel or short story, and being interrupted.

Zomorodi uses the term ‘deep work,’ which I think amounts to the same concept of being in flow. Put simply, it is the ability of someone in any profession to think deeply and work constructively on a problem – whether it be a program document, a new advertising campaign, or a research proposal. For the writer, it’s that experience of being immersed in the world of the novel or short story. It is being in the shoes of the character, understanding their wants and needs and how they will react. I find it takes me a long time – sometimes even hours, to get in flow.

When it comes to the question of a creative work like a novel, the author needs to hold a massive amount of information in their heads: all the characters, personalities, plots, sub-plots, arcs and revelations, all at once. To write a novel is to be in deep work all the time.

For millennia, humanity has consumed stories in a linear way. We listened to grand tales, or read novels, or watched TV shows, or went to the movies. Scrolling, hyperlinks, and YouTube rabbit holes give us a very different mode: a revolutionary change. We jump from one random thought to the next, from outrage to meme to puppy picture to outrage. Buzzing buzzing from one to the next, until hours have passed us by and we haven’t a clue how we got there, what we watched, or what made us so angry or so sad.

Our brains have become distracted, and increasingly the simple discipline of focus is harder and harder to maintain. Bored and Brilliant documents both anecdotal cases and scientific studies that show how our minds are losing the ability to focus: journalists who are no longer able to read long articles, the widespread decline in ‘deep reading’ (being absorbed in a novel for hours on end) especially in younger people; CEOs who became so distracted they could no longer run their company.

And above it all, there sits the senior executives of the major tech companies, who adamantly refuse to let their children have access to smart phones at all.

So what is to be done? I haven’t a fucking clue. The online world is still, in many ways, the wild West. Exceptions like China aside – where information is rigorously censored and monitored and firewalled – there is still very little regulation, and little appetite to hold the tech giants to account.

On a personal scale it is a question of self-awareness and restraint. I don’t have a smart phone, I have apps on my laptop that limit the amount of time I can spend on certain news websites and on social media. I only go on Twitter once per week, and don’t even have the password – my asked my wife to change it and only she knows it.

I don’t like the way I feel on social media. I don’t like the anger and the animus it encourages towards my political opponents. I don’t like brooding over current events – difficult for a news junkie, like me, in the midst of a global pandemic and the worldwide fracturing of democracies – and I don’t like my frustrations seeping into my interactions with real people, whether it be friends or family.

I’m not a technophobe – I am a science fiction writer after all. The benefits of tech – in productivity and connectivity, in the potential for telehealth and social services, in terms of building vibrant and inclusive online communities – are all clear and attainable.

But I am a sceptic. Whatever the utopian possibilities offered by advanced communication technology and machine learning, the reality is that these powerful developments are wholly owned by venal tech companies. The reality is that the complex and vital process of creativity is undermined by constant distraction, by the soma we carry everywhere in our pocket or clutched desperately in our hand.