thebarefootcreative-blog

[thebarefootcreative-blog]

Digital heart of darkness

Some times you can't see the wood for the trees or in my case for the past month the Jungle for the leaves.

After a interesting and demanding 2019, involving a change in career position ( from being creative director at an agency to the exciting but sometimes uncertainty of a freelance creative ), the fluctuating and breakneck speed the creative playing field is evolving at ( the change from clients needs from more traditional media to a long list of digital deliverables and formats) plus the never-ending narrative of Brexit and the economic and business limbo it creates.

We decided as a family to pack our bags and throw ourselves in a Swiss family Robinson adventure around Vietnam. 

Now id like to say I was off the grid, a kind of creative Colonel Kutz surrounding myself with ex-creatives from by-gone agencies deep in the jungle formulating a new brand idea for M&S whilst receiving client feedback and repeating to myself the ’horror the horror’. But I wasn't. It seems near impossible these days to be completely off the grid, as long as there are a few fellow humans around you'll probably be only a few hundred yards away from a mobile phone tower.

That said I was detached from the constant bombardment of ads, TV, campaigns and radio scripts that you take in every day. I was also separated from the constant LinkedIn updates of all the great work that people have created, or self-affirmations of the awesome job one has worked on or how many hits the most recent social campaign has had for the new season of ’Love Island’.

There is a magical moment between the 25th and the 28th where on most digital forums the online chatter seems to drop to a post-apocalyptic level. Like Jim from 28 days later walking around London shouting ’ hello, is anybody put there’, you feel comfortable in the thought that everything has finally slowed down.

It's during the past few weeks I asked myself is all this digital overload good for the creative mind? I sometimes feel that if I'm not up to date with the next innovative technique or I haven't seen that recent campaign everyone is talking about I'm going to be left behind. 

A recent article I was reading stated that

staying in the loop becomes yet another item on our infinite to-do lists. There simply are not enough hours in the day to take in all the media that is presented to us. ’Attempting this hopeless feat often leads to a sensation of drowning in a sea of words, pictures and websites.’ This mental exhaustion should come as no surprise given the science of the brain our minds were designed to focus on one task at once. Thus, forcing them to multitask causes inefficiency and cognitive discomfort, triggering the release of stress hormones and adrenaline. The result? A catastrophic concoction of mental fog decreased productivity and creativity, and ensuing inner panic.

When I did finally log onto the creative forums what I noticed was that my mind didn't feel fogged or overloaded it wasn't craving its fix, scrolling down page after page, reading, liking, sharing, but instead focused on the purity and downright creative beauty of one idea that caught my eye ( that I’d missed ironically in my absence) and stirred that old emotion of ’damn I wish I'd have thought of that’. Something we should all feel as creatives every day.

BBC Creative - Dracula 

A tightly edited promo, a striking print campaign and an ingenious six-sheet. No event held in Highgate cemetery where you can throw stakes at Little Minx and have a selfie taken with them, No app that allows your voice to sound like a 16th Century Borat or a social campaign where you can stalk people through the streets of London, jump out screaming “ I want to taste your blood” scaring the bejesus out of them whilst your friend films it and sees how many likes you get. All of the above should be kept for season 2.

So as I sipped my third Mai Tai ( yes three), sitting on my porch planning my return to the battlefield surrounded by jungle and night frogs croaking their harmonised goodbye lament I wondered how I could keep this creative Toaist frame of mind. Does one need to constantly enter this technological heart of darkness to appear out of the other side refreshed? How can one become part Buddha part Picasso in a world full of distraction?

Brian Solis, digital anthropologist writes, "When we avert distraction and focus in order to create and achieve our goals, we feel capable and successful.

Purpose also pulls us out of our harmful self-focus and makes us feel part of something bigger, beyond ourselves. It frees us from our rumination about ourselves and the past and keeps us oriented toward the future, with a sense of what we can contribute."

If we can remove some of our daily digital consumption it may inspire us to stop, reflect, and recover a connection to the creativity and deeper purpose we need for living happy, healthy lives and succeeding as individuals, organizations, and as a society at large in the digital age. 

Of course, I'm super aware whilst writing this I'm in some part adding to the problem. Damn - ’Om’