What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? "A Digital Creator."

[MineralMan]

I'm seeing the "digital creator" profession more and more on random Facebook posters. They are the people who copy and paste Reddit posts, images and content from other posters, and page after page of bogus "Tipping" receipts as their "work."

It has become a huge thing on Facebook. Now, I don't know if Facebook pays "creators" who generate lots of clicks, but it looks like all those folks are trying to make a career out of stealing other people's content and posting it as their own.

Facebook, by the way, doesn't care. As far as it is concerned, "digital creators" are legitimate users.

I think it's disgusting, though. Nothing is created - just copied and pasted over and over again.

[Wild blueberry]

1. With you

No creating. Sort of the Silly Putty of activities.

[patphil]

2. It's an electronic version of collage.

Collage is the "art" of cutting and pasting existing materials together to create a "new" whole image.
I think a better term would be "digital assemblers".

[haele]

3. Content "creators" get paid through advertising.

Advertising does not tend to be original, but is based on the target of the advertising making emotional associations with the subject being advertised.
It's rather an enclosed, circular environment based only on emotional public responses.
As a creator, they are dependent on the Internet or social media advertising interest to survive or shoot up in popularity, and the advertising companies need cheap, quickly produced content with a "hook" to compete for basically daily public interest.
It's all based on the hook - the clicks. Actual creativity is a secondary or tertiary function to success in the various social media content.

While there are subscription services available for more professional content creators - the journalists, the videographers or documentarians, and visual or musical artists - so they can make somewhat of a living actually creating or researching on subjects they actually care about (much like other artists, academics and writers), they still need to work a second job or set up a business to "sell merch" to pay staff and bills - including paying someone to spam social media with hooks and what my social media savvy grandkid calls "Aura" - which has now apparently replaced "Rizz" (?).

I watched the jump-start of cultural changes brought about by technological expansion in the early 1980's - just as my parents told me about the cultural changes occuring in the mid 1940's to push the previous community and family social norms into a more homogenous corporate led structure through the introduction of mass produced technology to the home.
Original art, original content was replicated, re-shaped, and re-purposed for mass broadcast. Did the original artist or creator approve?

There have historically been a lot of artists who were basically creating art for themselves or their communities. And a lot of famous artists who "appropriated" that more personal or localized art for their own profit.
It's just out there more now on Facebook or Youtube, where everyone can be constantly updated on whatever Frankenstein's Monster the advertising algorithm wants to push at them.

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