Not Everything Needs a Thumbnail: In Praise of Work That Refuses to Scroll

I am not anti-internet. I have promoted shows on the internet, found collaborators on the internet, and spent more time than I care to admit watching a person in a field explain why a drystone wall is structurally sound. The internet is not the enemy. But the word ‘content’ has done a quiet bit of damage to the way UK creatives think about their own work, and I think we should say so out loud.

The word does something strange to an idea

‘Content’ is a word that makes everything sound like filler. A song becomes content. A zine becomes content. A two-hour show with a live band and a slightly wonky projector becomes content. A thought you had in the bath becomes content. I understand why the word exists — it’s a useful shorthand for ‘things we put online’ — but it also flattens the difference between making something and filling a slot.

I have sat in planning meetings where a genuinely lovely idea was reduced to a question of format. Could it be cut into three clips? Could it be turned into a carousel? Could we add a hook in the first two seconds? Sometimes the answer was yes. But sometimes the answer was yes in a way that made the original thing worse. The idea had been bent into a shape it was never meant to take, and everyone nodded because the schedule said so.

The best bits often happen off-camera

A few years ago, I watched a small storytelling night in a back room above a pub. The projector broke. The microphone squealed. The person running it did a handstand for reasons that were never fully explained. And then a performer told a story that had the whole room leaning forward, the way people lean when they are properly listening. There was no thumbnail for that. There was no hook. There was just a room, a voice and a shared bit of time.

That’s not a sentimental argument for being rubbish at marketing. It’s an argument for remembering what the work is for. If your aim is to make a thing that people remember, you need to let some of it happen in the place where remembering happens: in a room, in a conversation, in a room after the show, in the pub afterwards, in the bit where someone says ‘that bit about the bus’ and everyone laughs because they were there.

Mess is not a marketing failure

The feed rewards certainty. It rewards finished things, clear hooks, bright colours and a strong point of view. I like all of those things. But a lot of good work begins as a mess: a half-finished song, a zine with the wrong staple in it, a show that has a wobbly second act, a piece of writing that takes three weeks to find its point.

If every idea has to be packaged immediately, you lose the chance for it to become something else. You lose the long walk. You lose the bit where you show a friend the rough version and they say, ‘What if it’s actually about your dad?’ You lose the accidental discovery that the best joke is in the pause, not the punchline. The feed doesn’t have a pause. The feed has a scroll.

What we lose when everything is a hook

I’m not going to pretend metrics don’t matter. If you’re putting on a night in Birmingham, you want people to know about it. If you’ve made a zine, you want someone to pick it up. Promotion is part of the job. But there’s a difference between using the internet to invite people in and letting the internet decide what the work is allowed to be.

When everything becomes a hook, the audience becomes a number and the work becomes a performance of itself. You start making the thing that gets the reaction, rather than the thing that deserves one. You start writing for the comment section. You start thinking about the clip before you’ve written the scene. And somewhere in all that, the actual connection — the reason you started — gets a bit thinner.

A modest case for the un-feedable

I have made things that performed badly online and mattered enormously to the people who were in the room. I have made things that performed well online and vanished from my memory by the following Thursday. Neither of those experiences is a perfect guide, but together they have taught me something useful: the algorithm is not the same thing as an audience.

So here’s my modest case for work that doesn’t fit the feed. Put on the night with the weird running order. Write the long thing that takes a month. Make the zine that doesn’t have a viral moment. Sing the song that needs three minutes of quiet before it gets to the good bit. Let the show have a slow start. Let the audience find you. Let the thing be a thing, not a unit of content.

In 2026, the pressure to package every idea is only going to get louder. I get it. But not everything needs a thumbnail. Some things need a room, a bit of patience and a person in the audience who leans forward. That’s not a failure of strategy. That’s the whole point.