Social media offers the creative person something genuinely new — a direct relationship with an audience, unmediated by gatekeepers — and asks in return something that can be hard to see until it has already been given: the continuous performance of a self, the voice calibrated to engagement, the work shaped by what the algorithm and the audience reward. The danger is not that this is corrupting but that it is slow, replacing the inner voice that grows in privacy with a public voice optimized for the conditions of the feed. The maker who uses social media without losing their own ear is doing something difficult that requires attention to the difference.
Each step builds on the last.