The very presence of life is often a reminder of death. And this very death compels us to try and create something that extends beyond our life time, as a proxy escape from mortality. In the era of digital content creation and consumption though, the very platforms we depend on to put our work out there, is being encoded with seeds of death, pushing us to churn out more content than ever before.
This is what can be called encoding 'forced redundancy' or a sort of impermanence into the platforms. Think of the story feature that disappears after 24 hours, every day starts with a hollow for the place where the last story was, pushing us to fill the gap. Facebook, Instagram, makes it VERY DIFFICULT to find something that you once saw and enjoyed in the platform, making you consume the newer content rather than revisiting old ones. This pushes established creatives to keep churning out new content, or at least re-posting. While YouTube is way better at cataloging and search function, the algorithm promotes frequency of posting, and now pushes the "shorts" more, essentially making the temporary outputs more lucrative for the creatives.
If you are a consumer, there is one thing you need to keep in mind: more lasting the product— more effort was likely put into making it. A 24 hour story should theoretically take the least effort, while a newspaper article takes more, and a book takes the most effort. Effort usually correlates with the quality of the content. Sounds great but practically very hard to do as the short meme-like clips are addictive.
If you are a creator, the thing to keep in mind is to try and build more long lasting content, even though you get most of your audience through the temporary contents. A plan and desire should be there to make something that can fend of your mortality for the longest time, not just disappear after a few hours after your death.
This is why maybe today the highest coveted title today is that of a "Founder", someone focused totally on creating something that takes his or her vision and takes a life of its own, hopefully surviving decades or more.
Human body has it's own coded forced redundancy, the DNA that replicates, mutates and gets damaged in every iteration when the cells divide. Today studies show that if we live long enough, everybody will get cancer. So we have our inevitable aging and cancer hardwired in the very system that makes us grow: as And we try to outlive that with our love, our creations, our songs and our stories.
Keep creating.
Radi
Dhaka
13 February 2022