DialogVisual Magazine

The Creative Person’s Guide to Technology & Social Media

My first experience of digital technology was the Lynx home computer bought by my father in the early 1980’s. Fascinated, we investigated how to change the screen from green to red to blue using ‘if this, then that’ Basic commands. I was hooked.

The Story of a Techno-nomad
From then on computers, in one form or another became part of my life: I learnt to type on an electric typewriter with a tiny one line display showing the last seven or so words typed; I struggled with AutoCad in a minute, dingy room at art school and typed my dissertation (and earned spare cash typing up other student’s) on the ubiquitous Amstrad word processor. My first digital graphic design experience was a course in Quantel Paintbox (two screens - tools on one, design on the other), then came PageMaker and Corel Draw under Windows 3.1! The list goes on and on: Email when the address was an impossible-to-remember-number at compuserve, becoming a digital graphic-design nomad in ‘96 with a laptop and a mobile phone — both of which weighed a ton — and a hand scanner; Dodgy, slow dial-up connections, more Microsoft operating systems from 95 to XP, a stream of digital cameras, Mac OSX from Tiger to Lion, broadband and an increasing number of i-devices. The list continues to grow.

What do all these have in common? That, except for those in the last few lines, none of the rest are in use anymore. Yet at any point in that potted history, salespeople the world over were assuring that THIS was the ultimate. And it was. But the ultimate has an extremely short lifespan and it’s best not to get too attached to it or to worry too much whether you have it or how you use it — or not.

What’s all this got to do with Artists?
What’s important about technology is not what it is or how cutting edge or popular it is but how you use it. As artists, or creatives of any kind, hopefully this means artistically, bravely, creatively.

After all, if every time we wanted to paint a picture or write a poem, we sat down and read a “30 best ways to” article about how to do it, we’d not only never develop our own style but we’d never paint any pictures or write any poems!

Own Your Social Media
So instead of reading another article entitled 25 ways to sell your art through Pinterest (or Facebook, or LinkedIn or Google Plus), sit down and tinker with the media in question as you might with a new kind of paint. Push it and pull it and see how it feels. Then go on and brainstorm 25 ways this technology might fit in with who YOU are as a creative, how YOU feel most comfortable marketing (or not) your work through this kind of social media, what kind of benefits or inspiration it could mean for YOU.

After all this stuff doesn’t stay around for long so you may as well treat it as something ephemeral to experiment with than something that’s set in stone; think zen sand sculpture more than monolithic stone.

Remember, being creative is about forging new, exciting combinations not blindly following what other people say — especially when they are trying to sell you something.

Quantel Paintbox anybody?

Do share any creative uses you’ve made of social media in the comment box :)

Photos all CC clockwise from top left:
Lynx – Anders Sandberg some rights reserved, derivative work: Ubcule
Amstrad PCW – Boffy
Paintbox – Ye old quantel paintbox on-air broadcast graphics, some rights reserved