From Pessimism to Promise, page 7
Small-time artists try their luck on Instagram by getting extremely specialized and contextual. Relatability boosts engagement. The local can transform into the universal by tapping into global aspirations for travel, food, entertainment, community, and intimacy. Content creators need to carve their niches and stay with it, as one ghostwriter for a media organization explains:
Whatever your niche, whatever be your category, on that basis you have to create content because people follow you from that point that this is a dancer, this is a food vlogger. . . . On that you can’t switch your niche. So, decide first your niche and then on that niche relevant content should be posted.37
Niches have limits. Micro entrepreneurs must balance scalability and selectivity due to limits in logistics. While their businesses may be entirely on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp and promise unlimited growth, they still have limited offline production and delivery capacity. Artists have modest aspirations for follower counts since their price points are high and thereby affordable only for premium clientele. Civic activists may have specific causes that are tied to a mission or an event, which may not align with the medium of virality, as one NGO member shares:
The entire social media game depends a lot on making reels.38 But as an organization, it also gets difficult to make reels, because what are we supposed to do . . . the topics that we work on are so sensitive that we can’t make it, you know, we can’t always make certain things that goes along with the, you know, trending audios. But we can’t dance to audio, right? We can’t do the trends. So, we can’t jump into every trend with the sensitive topics that we have. So, it gets very difficult to engage at times.39
Typically, though, aspirational influencers aim for masses of followers to attract advertisers, paid partnerships, affiliate marketing, and ads on reels. They optimize many platforms, including Indian apps like ShareChat, Moj, Josh, Nojoto, and Chingari, beyond the usual suspects such as Facebook and Instagram.40
Many content creators recognize that their content is niche. To survive in this game, creators need to be authentic to their context. Their cultural capital, where they come from—their village, or what they wear, or what they eat, or how they dance—can be turned into useful data if remixed with the right K-pop dance or Bollywood song. What was once considered “primitive” is now prime for the algorithm.
Product Is Process
Creativity is collaborative. An aspirational influencer describes her creative process:
When I have to create a masterpiece, a very visually appealing content, and I do not want to deal with learning how to use a difficult application, I choose to collaborate. In such a situation, I get to focus on the content part of the project, like the storyline/plot, and the other team member who is an expert with an application will manage the visuals.41
You can create a digital “masterpiece” and yet share creative ownership. Young creators view themselves as creative “geniuses” as well as collaborators. They don’t view this as a contradiction; it is their creative reality. Aspirational influencers put tremendous energy into the creative process; staying trendy can be exhausting and putting their content out in the wild can be risky. It helps to have a creative community to transform concepts into content, test ideas in a safe space, and build relationships and buy-in with peers. Reciprocity is fuel to these creative fissures. Online groups play a vital role in reinforcing the collective creative identity of members. They help resource-constrained users access expensive applications and learn resources through designer-driven mentorship programs online, “giveaway” awards in competitions, and joint scholarships for licensed apps.
Marginalized creators find cultural belonging for their creative expression. They seek out “DIY Clubs,” hashtag networks, and curation communes. Followers also have a role to play in this creative collaboration. Aspirational influencers seek to co-create with their followers to keep the conversation going and deepen fan loyalty. Influencers and creators establish authenticity, trust, and credibility by sharing their raw products with their audience. At the same time, creators’ obsession with novelty gives way to remixing as the creative standard.
Remixing is at the core of self-expression and is well suited to digital cultures that are built through networks, cross-posting, and collaborations. Creators view the process of building on other people’s content as creative and critical in this trending culture. Youths are unapologetic and frank about their creative approach; as one of them explains, “Remixing content, mashing things up, and reviving old trends are very important because you do not always have something to say.”42 Content without visibility is meaningless, as one Gen Z youth puts it: “What is the point of making [something] if I can’t post [it].”43
Culture of Credit
Attribution over ownership is the new ethical code of practice among creators. Rising creatives value giving credit to originators via online tags to acknowledge inspiration. It is flattering for many creators to be copied; as one remarks, “I feel good that someone is copying. I feel that I must have at least done something good to warrant that.”44 However, it is inexcusable to not give due credit.
This is felt most acutely among rural and semi-urban creators. They are deeply tuned into the copyright regime as they have been at the receiving end of intellectual and creative theft from mass cultural industries for decades. They want content protection like watermarks and fair remuneration systems. However, in the face of these challenges, they are resilient, as one rural influencer defiantly remarks:
Today they [other content creators] might copy and take one or two creations of mine today or tomorrow, finally they will have to do something on their own, how long can they be dependent on me. If they take one or two palm full of water from an ocean, what difference will it make?45
Increasingly, creators are demanding that attributions be factored into the design of the platforms. With rising protests by influential creators of color, TikTok’s director of creator community Kudzi Chikumbu in a 2022 press statement announced the new “culture of credit.”46 The goal is to introduce features that will make the algorithm more equitable for underrepresented creators. Chikumbu promised creators that they would finally have crediting tools like the ability to directly tag or mention in the video inspirations behind their content. TikTok has added user prompts to nudge creators to give credit, educating users on the importance of crediting via features like pop-ups.47 TikTok also debuted an “originators series” that highlights trendsetting creators on their site every month to build awareness of creative attribution for a global creator community.48 While it is a step in the right direction, this does not fundamentally align with redistribution or profit sharing between creators and platforms. Moreover, attribution is still talked about in terms of individual creators online, with little attention to the offline social networks of creators that enable these creative products and processes.
Creativity has long been a collective process.49 This is especially so among artisans in the Global South. Our algorithmic cultures, however, are biased toward computing individual people’s products and processes. For instance, in Bangladesh, women make up 60 percent of the labor force in the creative industries but barely eke out a living from their creative work.50 Prominent heritage crafts like kantha are made by rural women who gather in a household and repurpose worn-out clothes with intricate embroidery. Ownership, here, is by the village where it is produced.
The pandemic pushed many of these artisans to sell their creations online, inspiring several social entrepreneurs like Shimmy and Bengal Muslin to step up and equip these women to leverage digital resources and boost their living. Many women artisans have had to rely on male family members who had better digital skills and access to mobile phones. These new intermediaries have resulted in further cuts from their already meager livelihoods.
There is a double standard on platforms like Etsy, which claims to be a digital space for “millions of people selling the things they love.” In practice, its typical creators are middle-class white women who do artisanal work as a hobby. Their craft is recognized as personal, handmade, and authentic. However, if the kantha women’s groups came on Etsy, they would be viewed as commercial and mass produced. In conventional design hierarchy, individual and unique creations trump mass products and collaborative processes. Templates are out to disrupt such hierarchies.
Template Is King, Vernacular Is Queen
Western designers hate templates.51 Many see templates as the beginning of the end of creativity. Then came Canva, cementing the hate. Canva is an Australian multinational graphic design platform that is used to create social media graphics and presentations, offering users with easy-to-use, ready-made templates that they can customize to produce professional designs. Founded by Melanie Perkins in Perth, Australia, in 2013, this template-driven design platform was valued at $40 billion in 2022. With a monthly user base of 75 million, it is considered one of the most influential design apps worldwide. This mass production of creativity has many designers in Silicon Valley appalled.
Drew Clemente, a systems administrator engineer, captures this angst in what he calls a “dangerous trend” of “bad design.” In a rant titled “Why Do Designers Hate Canva?” he speaks on behalf of his cabal by accusing Canva of producing designs that are crude, chaotic, unpleasant, garish, tacky, amateurish, and lacking in sophistication.52 He laments that their business model perpetuates a new aesthetic lacking in “basic design principles.” He detests Canva’s premise that “design is easy” and sees it as a direct insult to professional designers whose careers are threatened by this new worldview. He is convinced that Canva has made “the world a worse place” by making it “harder for people to appreciate good design when they see it.”
Against this passionate sentiment, the young content creators we interviewed in India see things differently. They swear by Canva. They do not believe in suffering through a rite of passage to reach a “designerly” level. They want to hit the ground running. They don’t think design is easy; they expect design to be easy. Amateur aesthetic overrides sophisticated designs in allowing creators to respond to trends in a timely manner and showcase their authenticity. Design principles, for them, take a back seat to what the trends demand. These youths have no intention of pretending to be professionals. Their amateur status sometimes gives them more credibility among their followers. What may be garish, tacky, and unpleasant to designers schooled in Western aesthetics may just work in the Global South, given the right mood, theme, and context. Creators place a premium on emotion as a driver for creative expression.
Across income groups, creators prefer using templates for three reasons: templates enable the foundational work of content creation, allow for aesthetic consistency, and make it easier to cross-share. Low-income creators are avid fans of these ready-made formats and features. They insist that contrary to the idea that templates reduce creativity, using templates frees them from technical functions and carves out more time for them to be creative. On the one hand, creators want to be original, but on the other, they want to fit in, and templates allow them to do both. Customizing templates then helps creators build ownership and originality. As one creator states, “If there is a template which has ABC elements, I try to remove 2–3 elements and then I edit . . . and make it my own and then I post it.”53 Some creators interpret “templates” to mean distinctive styles of content posted on their accounts.
Every bit of a creator’s decision-making personalizes their templates. Their choice of captions, tags, filters, hashtags, color schemes, post timing, and occasions contributes to making the template their own. Creators in NGOs recognize that some designs can be off-putting to their target audience and “very arty or out of reach.” There is a class dimension here; creators in NGOs are often middle-class, while their audiences may be from lower economic segments. “We try to make it as bright and nice and beautiful as possible in a way that doesn’t isolate or alienate the people.”54
Desi versus the Instagram Aesthetic
With twenty-two official languages and almost twenty thousand dialects in India, local or vernacular design is on the rise, catering to a variety of sociolinguistic needs.55 But vernacular design is not confined to linguistic needs; it also valorizes diverse cultural aesthetics. “Desi” (a colloquial term for Indian) aesthetic is becoming increasingly popular among civic collectives, artists, and a broader swath of middle-class youth in India. Young creators feel cultural pride in heritage designs and colorful palettes. They recognize that Western minimalism is just one aesthetic, and not the idealized taste marketed in design schools over generations. However, creators complain that some of these indigenous apps are too busy, dense, and unintuitive in their interfacing.
Aesthetics are not abstract principles. They are tools for mobility. The “Instagram aesthetic” is an aspirational aesthetic, especially for creators from rural and semi-urban areas. It gives their expression a “foreign vibe” with its minimalism and use of whites and soft color palettes. Marginalized creators see themselves as global citizens and make social media their digital neighborhood. This doesn’t negate their cultural capital. Creators generate desi templates for the numerous festivals, rituals, and events celebrated in India. Rural creators like their bling as it captures the festive mood. However, if the mood is more thoughtful, they adopt a more sober aesthetic. They try out drafts on indigenous short video apps like Moj, Josh, and ShareChat, before going “public” on Instagram.
Global South creators are aware of the creative tax they pay when using vernacular-based design. Western platforms’ grammar of virality does not easily allow for a diversity of languages, cultural slang, visual representation of emojis, and themes. The obstacles of font options, formats, and language syntaxes push them to strive for a purely visual aesthetic. At the end of the day, however, engagement metrics rule the roost and dictate aesthetic choice. This demands constant learning and applying if creators are to stay relevant, connected, and visible.
Jugaad Learning
I have previously written about how the global poor have been celebrated for “hacking poverty” through jugaad, an Indian term that means “to improvise, particularly as a response to scarce resources and rigid social systems.”56 The term has entered the Oxford dictionary with a definition that emphasizes its innovative angle—“the use of skill and imagination to find an easy solution to a problem or to fix or make something using cheap, basic items.”57
Jugaad as a creative practice is intrinsically cross-cultural. Chinese people call it shan-zai; Brazilians call it gambiarra or bacalhau, and Americans call it “hacking” or do-it-yourself (DIY). Jugaad strives to be more time-, labor-, and cost-efficient. As a product, it implies an affordable replica applied in different contexts, or an alteration to and even improvement on an existing feature, function, or entire design.
Jugaad through informal learning is increasingly taking on new and creative forms. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted formal public education and legitimized DIY learning among youth.58 Creators’ choices online have expanded significantly, helping them build their own “curricula” of mentorship, knowledge, and networks. Many low-income youths perceive lengthy online tutorials and formal curricula as out of touch, slow, inefficient, tedious, and unnecessarily complex, viewing these traditional methods as “passive learning.” To produce as you consume is the active way. Creators learn through YouTube videos and Instagram reels, with trial and error leading the way, as one aspiring designer explains:
I think training is not the right word, maybe practice like if I have. . . . For example the first time I did embossing, I learnt it from a video that I saw online, the first time I did it, it was a bit weird, and the embossing was falling off from places. Once I did that technique 5 or 10 times, with practice I got the hang of it.59
Another creator shares her challenge of trying to complete an online Domestika course but dropping out due to lack of time. She then joined creative communities online and started to fiddle around with different interfaces, to see what sticks and what doesn’t. “If it [online feature] works then I make it like a regular thing in my job. If X feature is working well and the output is nice, I’ll continue using it. If it doesn’t then I scrap it out.”60
Self-Taught Is Cool Yet Cumbersome
Self-teaching has become “cool” across different groups. Creators gain respect from their peers when they learn by doing. Creators’ DIY education can cover how to use software tools, set up a profile, and employ different tactics to increase reach and engagement. Experimentation unpacks the metrics that dictate their daily curricula. Since digital creativity demands nonstop content production and analysis, creators put a lot of pressure on themselves to be consistent in sharing content. Some creators record videos of their work to analyze later and gauge how far they have come: Why does one post gain attention while another post is ignored? What format works well for which type of content? What kinds of popular content forms should be remixed to optimize engagement? An aspirational influencer tries to figure out, “if I use a song that has only 7000 people using it, that might do well because that will show up on people’s pictures. And then it depends if I show my face. I get more views when I show my face.”61
