This section explores the lived experiences of content creators. Through their personal stories — from their creative beginnings, moments of burnout and negotiating audience expectations, to the pursuit of authenticity, they reflect on what it truly means to build influence today.
The Depth of Content
I’ve always wanted to write and work in media. In the wake of legacy media outlets closing their doors or not mentoring young talent, I thought it’d be a good idea to start my own newsletter, THE CHOW, which reports on “the business of subculture.”
I’ve written about hip-hop as a lens into US–China relations, rave culture and Asian modernity, the visual culture of industrial decline, the Asian epidemic of faux Japanese-ness, and the punk revival in Hong Kong as “the world’s most expensive city.” All my reporting on the newsletter is part of a larger project exploring this question: What can subculture, be it hyperlocal brands, “underground” art and design, communities outside the mainstream, tell us about economic shifts and emerging business trends?
When I started the newsletter, part of it was for personal enjoyment, but more of it came from seeing it as the only viable way to build a career as a writer in the internet age. I’m still a fan of old media. I just bought 10 books during a recent trip to New York and regularly subscribe to magazines, but I am trying to see how I can interface the very analogue form of writing into the attention economy and into social media.
Would I rather have 100,000 people watch a 30-second Instagram reel of my morning routine, or have 1,000 people sit down with an essay I wrote? My answer would be the latter.
Newsletters are an especially difficult channel to grow when you look at it purely in terms of numbers and KPIs. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s a certain power in the depth of your reach — that is, whether your audience is high quality and engages with your ideas rigorously. A big part of influencer culture in Hong Kong and around the world is in seeking the widest reach possible — the most followers, likes, comments, shares, etc. But I want people to learn something new from what I write. I want them to feel like their perspectives were challenged and, hopefully, for them to resonate with what I have to say.
Many of the day-in-my-life or gymfluencer creators are creating to pursue metrics. This way of playing social media is a race to the bottom, promoting more forms of superficiality. But I also think that everyone pursuing likes for the sake of likes will get one-shotted by the algorithm and AI, and it’s why I don’t care at all to create short-form video content. Creators with audiences who genuinely care about what they have to say will stick around, no matter what medium they use.
I really jolt at the word “influencer.” I much prefer the word “creator,” though I’m really not sure how accurate that is either. But I am a writer. And that means trying to sit down with ideas and examine them rigorously, and spitting them out with a keyboard in a way that is artful and perspective-changing.
If my work promotes any “values” or “messages,” then it’s really just to encourage people to think harder about things and pay closer attention to how so much of our world is interconnected. ■