So I haven’t posted online for like 14 years. At least not earnestly. I guess MySpace was a fantastic few months of freedom and expression, but beyond that? It’s pretty thin on the ground.
And yet I am perhaps the most qualified person I know to make engaging, wraparound content that can be pumped out regularly. So why is it that the idea of it makes me want to gag? Although I am in the same generation as Lily Allen and Taylor Swift – I am very much not on their level when it comes to sharing my personal self with the world.
Maybe it’s my moon in Scorpio.
Or maybe it’s that I just had other things going on when social media was gathering its pace.
Sure, MySpace was a place to tell people how much I was into Brand New, but Facebook came into my life in 2006. I was two years out of college and it was fun to reconnect to people from secondary school. Greg had grown a beard! Tom was dating his ex’s sister, and all the other little titters of gossip that kept me amused for some time. And of course, I was doing things now too. I moved to London. I was going out and drinking and spending time with new people – why shouldn’t I add them as friends? Why not be tagged chinning roll-ups and sinking £3 pints as a 19 year old freshly arrived to the city?
But I wasn’t going to spend too long online, because I was destined to train as an actor. I wanted to be a success! I wanted to do well, and when I finally arrived onto the campus of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2007 I wanted to keep my head down and get the work done. If I was going to be a well-respected actor, which I obviously was, then surely I didn’t have time for twittering online.
Then in 2009 someone close to me got sick and I couldn’t handle it. Their traumatic slump towards death coupled with the extreme all-encompassing – sometimes verging on cruel – nature of drama school combined to knock me sideways into a seemingly permanent position. My last year of drama school was a blur, as were the few years that followed.
In 2012 I resurfaced briefly – I was in a play that was demanding, painful and incredibly informative. I remember being encouraged to post online about it at the time. I may have managed one Facebook post, and even then I felt mortified about the whole thing. Everyone else within the cast was somebody. They had a modest following, they had credits to their name. I had shrinkingly little and I felt it clearly. Somewhere in the past few years I had gone from not caring too much how I appeared to others online, to suddenly caring a little too much. Online I was becoming waif-like, barely there. A reflection of a boy who once lived.
Sure, there was my post-post-ironic Instagram phase of 2013-15, but that was fueled by a newfound sense of personal freedom I was experiencing at the time. I had navigated out of the bar jobs and coffee shops and into gainful employment at a production boutique, in no small part thanks to meeting the right people at the right time, and being offered opportunities I may or may not have been ready for. I was young-ish still, and the work was engaging and exciting and all-encompassing and fun. And my flatmates were becoming celebrities before my eyes, and I was meeting celebrities for work – I was even making their content! Yes, I knew what content was and I didn’t have to worry about anything. It was the wild west, it was mucky and all over the place. It was fun to shit-post, it was fun to get stuck in with the hullabaloo of it all. But that giddiness didn’t last long, and things shifted and changed rapidly further.
Now whatever my reasons were for not being a poster, it hasn’t stopped me from being engaged with everything that the explosion of social media brought to our landscape. It has shaped my inner and outer worlds for nearly two decades. It has decided how I see myself, how I see the world. Indeed it has informed me what the world is to me, what I am to it.
I have worked as a content producer and director for over 12 years at this point. I have had countless meetings about messaging, brand identity, and audience reach. I have pored over data that tells us how people are currently watching video, then consuming media, and now shopping. The lines between advertising, marketing and content are now so blurred that we hardly recognise our individual complicity at all. And I have been in it for too long, now. I have watched as brands raced to create high-end film for their social channels, as broadband allowed for more video watching, and as 4G made streaming video on our phones easier and easier. It has all sped up, multiplied, outgrown its own pace.
Oh but wasn’t I becoming a great little content producer because of all this! I learned how to pull together a shoot in a matter of days, with the pressure of unresolved messaging never holding back the inevitable rush towards a production day. I have learned how to turn abstract ideas around brand alignment into concrete pieces of content that are ready for release in a matter of weeks.
I also learned to recognise what individuals needed to feel relaxed in front of the camera. What they needed to feel and when, how to listen, how to be heard. How to give them the best chance of bringing their best, most authentic self to screen. It didn’t matter if they had a following of millions or had never been interviewed before – I learned to pay close attention to contributors and do my very best to bring out the best in them.
I remember being huddled into the front room of a single mother who was talking about a recent, traumatic childbirth whilst we had cameras stuck in her face. I was asking for so much trust from her, so much honesty. And in the back of my mind I knew that I didn’t have half the guts that she had. Not only to go through something that tough, but to also talk about it in front of the world? It could have never been me. I was better sticking with learning how to make others feel comfortable.
So I learned all I could on the job, racing from one thing to the next as the content boom of the late 2010s shook me from agency to freelance and across the world, working with bigger and bigger brands and charities until my first TVC director role at the tail end of 2019. And I knew, as I wrapped on a huge, rewarding job for the Kent Police, that 2020 was going to be my year. The year when everything would change.
Well – I wasn’t wrong, was I?
Of course work fell off a cliff. In a lot of ways things never really recovered. Agencies I used to work for didn’t survive the pandemic. Hell, some of my favourite family members didn’t survive the pandemic, for that matter. One way or another my priorities had changed over the course of those years. And still I hadn’t posted online. Barring an earnest, though rather performative black square after the murder of George Floyd.
Social media was growing ever more grotesque in that time, and yet was becoming something I couldn’t pull my eyes from. We were watching the world eat itself, and the worst of us seemed to be the loudest online. Why would I want to join them? What was it that I could say to it all? How could I even help?
So still I watched in the shadows, hiding behind that comforting pale glow of the phone. I watched as we divided further, as content careened into ‘more disturbing = more distribution’. My fascination was turned to horror, to apathy, back to horror and beyond. I was a whisked-up wuss of a man, worried all the time, about all of it.
Which I guess is the perfect place for a consumer to be. Ravenous.
I had gone from being too busy to post, to not caring enough, to then caring far too much. And in between that time I had learned huge amounts about what makes effective brand communications. Just as everyone has become brands. So you might think that this is the perfect combination – surely I have everything I need to get going? Well yes, you are right. I absolutely do. But I have still been terrified, absolutely petrified about moving out into the light.
Because the more I learned about creating content, the more I saw what went into it all. What it took to build a brand, to be yourself, to be open and honest. But also sell yourself, and be pretty egoic all things considered. And I was overwhelmed by the thought of it. I still am.
But I also fell in love over the last few years, and my priorities have shifted. I used to think that I would have to be perfect before I can post myself online. I used to think that I could take the weeks’ of deliberation and collaboration that went into every fifteen second video for Maybelline’s fashion week collabs and apply that to my own output. But I can’t. I don’t have time. I have a person I want to marry and a family I want to start and I need people to know that I am real, I exist and I am employable.
You know, so we can all eat.
In the immortal words of Brian Kernighan – ‘Hello, World’. It’s sort of good to be here.