LETTER FROM THE TEAM #2: MARGARET MURPHY ON DIGITAL DIARIES

Each week, the EXPANDED team shares what’s on their minds. This week: Margaret Murphy on digital diaries and why storytelling is important for artists.

I started keeping a diary at age five. Recently, I asked my parents if they could recall what motivated me to do so. I couldn't remember a specific reason myself, but knew that it was just something I committed to. My parents also weren't exactly sure, but it was possible that books I read or movies or TV that I watched included a female character who kept a diary. The most likely motivation was that I was a very active reader and loved a good story. My parents read to my sister and me. My father would tell us stories from his childhood, embellished with details that we never knew if they were real or not.

At some point, though, I vividly remember discovering one of my grandmother's diaries from her childhood and being enthralled reading about her life as a young girl. This certainly impacted the way I journaled; since I myself had read the entries of my grandmother, I thought maybe one day someone would read mine. I would go into great detail explaining people, places, and events. This continued well into my late teens until I became a bit too preoc cupied with the new experiences that came with attending university.I suppose that I, like Taylor Swift, kept a diary as if to unlock a key to my identity. (This summer, I went to see Taylor Swift on the Eras tour. Twice. In a row.)

I guess you could say that I experienced "main character syndrome" at a young age, where I imagined turning my journals into a best-selling autobiography. The internet has really changed this. Sharing yourself and your thoughts online is now ubiquitous on platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok. It makes me wonder where the line is of oversharing. Sometimes I see comments on people's especially vulnerable (or cringey) videos that say, "I beg of you: invest in a journal" or something along those lines.

It feels like there's no going back from this, though. I can't even imagine an event that would drive a mass exodus away from social media and back into written diaries. Sure, there are "offline retreats" and "dumb phones". I often wish that I could delete my internet presence and simply exist, but it's part of my, our, identities now. Personal and cultural. As an artist in Web3, to turn my back on X would mean a complete severing of myself from the NFT community and from being able to sell my artworks. So where does that leave us? How do I feel as an artist that has to be on social media in order to exist?

As an artist, it is expected that you have a social media presence. I, like many people in my generation, grew up on the Internet with my first social media profiles beginning at age 14. Social media has allowed me to connect with new friends, discover music, fashion, and art, and in general, participate in culture. At first assumption, having an online presence as an artist doesn't seem to be difficult—we're all already using these websites and apps already, what's the difference? Well, that difference is storytelling.

It's why Taylor Swift has become the most successful pop star of all time—the stories she tells are incredibly relatable to millions of fans worldwide, especially women. Her ability to take her personal experiences and translate them into songs sung by thousands of people at her shows night after night is because of the level of vulnerability she accesses. She shares her stories and we can see ourselves in them.

But is it right to ask or expect artists to be this vulnerable? That their success hinges on how much they reveal? If we're "just here for the art" like everyone says, then why do we need storytelling from artists at all?

In graduate school, I had an epiphany. One of the things I learned was that an artist needs to be able to write; more specifically, they need to be able to write about their art. It was something that didn't occur to me from the start. In writing my thesis, it became clear that the things that had influenced me were things I had related to. This relatability is the key to good storytelling in art. It provides context for your work in the grand scheme of art history. It allows people to get to know you and what drives you to create. It engages with people in a way that enables them to connect with your art.

The most accessible way for an artist to achieve this is on social media. For my series RE: ROAD TRIP and LOS ANGELIZING (with Tender on Verse), I wrote about my experiences with road trips and falling in love with Los Angeles, respectively. People may have enjoyed the images, but the way I spoke and wrote about them was what resonated with people. I talked about feeling dejected as a young woman falling in love with the genre of road trip photography, only to realize that men had carved out the genre decades before me. I shared how a breakup led me to reinvent myself and blossom in the new city of my home.

For artists, telling our stories is arguably just as important as making art itself.

NEXT WEEK'S LETTER FROM THE TEAM

Anika Meier on curating:

"NFTs have made collecting digital art as easy as collecting Pokémon cards. So, it's no surprise that digital art resembles... Pokémon cards."