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Social networking: the death of creativity

  • Apr. 20th, 2012 at 11:56 AM
computer monkey
The modern dilemma of creatives: staying in touch with your audience - increasingly expected these days - versus actually, y'know creating stuff. As always, xkcd speaks most clearly in its minimalist way:

Constraints
Click the image to see the xkcd website.

LJ and other blogs often require a lot more thought and attention per entry to update and read than the other social-networking sites, but Twitter requires constant attention to make any sense of at all.

The most productive I ever am is when I'm offline.

How about you?

If so, why are you reading this? ;-)

Chris

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mckitterick
Apr. 20th, 2012 05:29 pm (UTC)
I guess I sort of do a similar thing in that I do my social-networking stuff before I really dig into grading/etc. However, I leave my email on all day (except when I'm writing), and that pulls one in a million directions per hour.

I need a cabin in the frakkin' woods to write! Or to just turn off the interwebs... but there's so many quick answers to things out there....

I couldn't possibly work with a Skype window open - wow! Do you two talk the entire time you're writing? You must have the opposite of ADD.
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etcet
Apr. 20th, 2012 07:17 pm (UTC)
Well, skype, for me, is basically the same as having someone else sitting in an armchair across the room - it's how I've conducted the majority of my current romantic-relationship-at-a-distance (the term of art we've coined is "digital (or virtual) roommates"), so it's less a constant conversation than a less invasive form of IM - essentially turning the computer into a speaker-phone.

(In case that's confusing, my collaborator is a different person than my girlfriend.)

My email stream in the evenings is fairly light; the main inbox is either social stuff i'm interested in, or second-job stuff that's easy to ignore for a couple of hours; second mailbox is almost exclusively spam and facebook alerts.

Fundamentally, though, once I get myself settled into the writing/creative zone (check out John Cleese's excellent discussion of this on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg ) I'm good to drill through almost uninterrupted for the best part of an hour (if i get really into the zone, it can go longer than that)
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