Let’s all agree that thumbs, for all their fabulous utility, are not the final word on cultural critique.
If you’re a creator, this is the currency of the realm. How you trade in five-star ratings, or what you’ve amassed in your accumulated warehouse of unsolicited comments means everything. Even if you sell real estate, you’re beholden to somebody else giving you a public endorsement one heart, one upward thumb, one public review at a time.
This whole thing has gotten out of hand. I certainly understand the value of a good review. It’s important to say that I understand the value of a bad review, too! I appreciate the value of experienced critics across a range of disciplines offering insights, observations, bloviation, and consideration. But in a world seemingly powered by social media uber alles we seem to regard all qualitative assessments only in relation to the positive metrics defined by the three instructions at the top.
The problem is, some things simply don’t rate very well in the ten minutes after then pop into existence. The legendary movie Blade Runner didn’t please studio executives nor many fans when it originally hit theaters. Reviews were not especially kind; box office receipts suggested a ho-hum response. And then something happened, something that word of mouth in a social media era might have quashed. The movie took on a cultural velocity over the next three decades that continues to resonate today. It not only defined a bold, new aesthetic for movies, but also shaped the way that millions of people considered emerging subjects like artificial intelligence, corporate overreach, medical ethics, climate degradation, marginalized communities, and so much more.
The rate-review-share trap doesn’t usually apply retrospectively. The biggest reason Blade Runner didn’t disappear from the cultural scene is because snap-judgement social media couldn’t give it a lethal stink-eye. Social media didn’t exist when the movie emerged into the world. Its tepid initial release took time to gain traction. People reconsidered. They listened to comments from others who had different opinions. They revisited the work. Once embedded into the cultural loam, its merits—and challenges— became much more available to more thoughtful forms of cultural interaction. After nearly thirty years it’s still fresh, new, and daring.
I’m confident that creative people of all stripes are working on new things today that might move mountains if only they get a chance to live beyond a ten minute time horizon. When surrealists emerged in European salons and studios more than a hundred years ago, nobody understood what was going on in their world of melted clocks and bowler hats. (That is, nobody who didn’t grok the forces that propelled the endless pas de deus of cultural change and artistic response.) A few decades of exposure transformed the conversation. Surrealism not only changed the art world, it changed the way people think about the creative process. The spare, metaphysically challenging spaces depicted by Giorgio de Chirico might never have gained currency if social media travel sites had be able to comment. “That doesn’t look like any Italian piazza I’ve ever visited!”
Naturally, this blog is a self-referential call to action. Of course I’d like it if you follow the mandate described in the title. Hey: there’s a new one every month. Make it a habit!
But when the act of creation becomes an enterprise designed primarily to motivate those three verbs more than any other reason, something in the culture has fallen substantially out of kilter. Of course I care which way your thumbs point. I appreciate when you send these words (and our videos, and our photos and all of the other cool stuff we make) to your friends and networks. But I care more when the the stuff we create provokes a conversation, when it makes an audience think or feel or laugh or cry. When creativity becomes a commodity that’s singularly focused on its own quantitatively assessed value, one has to wonder how long it will be before culture itself looses its ability to discuss challenging yet meaningful things on any subject.