Balancing Being a Craftsperson with Social Media

I’ve been thinking and writing about this topic a lot lately, how the introduction of social media has changed the landscape of being a craftsperson. It’s been an unusual 12 years since I started posting online every day, to see how things have developed, how it’s changed my life and many other craftspeople, as nowadays I think we’re expected to do so much more. We’re editors, narrators, videographers, writers and occasional customer support operatives. It’s an additional role that’s been patched onto being a craftsperson that didn’t exist in the past.   I think as time has gone by, the more I’ve come to realise that ultimately social media is a dual-edged blade. It can be life changing but also draining and to some degree, I think it’s changed my relationship to craft and what I do as a job.   Ultimately, it’s created a new avenue into certain industries that’s entirely self-driven. For instance, in the world of cooking, which I consider a craft, there’s training in the traditional sense, that is often underpaid and has some of the worst hours out there. Or, you can now attempt to utilise social media to skip much of that, even the training, in favour of videos and methods that exploit novelty and clickbait, the attention economy. Together, this creates a field where the overall level of skill isn’t necessarily the most important aspect of what we do, as in many ways, to be successful these days has just as much do with story-telling and how you present yourself, as it does the craft you produce.   In a way, if this continues in combination with educational systems that are famously declining, how they have been here in the UK at least, I can only see the overall ceiling of skill lowering when these two overall factors combine.   Like I said, I could write about this for hours. The way craft, entry points into the industry and the general level of ability has all been affected by the introduction of social media and I’m eager, or not, to see how things develop over the coming decade.   #pottery #satisfying #maker #smallbusiness #ceramics