Imagine that you’re a content creator of some kind; a journalist, writer, director, publication studio, anything you want.  Imagine that you’ve been working on something for what you would consider to be a long time, and means an awful lot to you because of it.  Today is the day your story or publication launches. You might be nervous, and that’s ok. There’s nothing abnormal about it. The time finally comes, and your publication launches.  You feel a small sense of relief wash over you, seeing that your work is out there. Hours pass, maybe even days, and you begin to notice something. Not everyone likes your work. Some are going out of their way to criticize your work and highlight why they don’t like it.  On Twitter, Youtube, even in real life. You see it everywhere, even if it’s the minority that’s complaining. You begin to fill with uncertainty. How would you react to this?

We’re going to cut that story off and continue it later.  Criticism isn’t anything new. Since the dawn of theatre and the arts, people have always been able to share their opinions about media, entertainment, or critical works.  The medial form of criticism, however, only truly became mainstream and profitable until the early-mid 20th century. As the decades went by, newspaper and magazine publications saw an opportunity to begin producing works of criticism within their publications.  Critics were beginning to grow more of a voice than ever, and continue to shape how we view media. For a lot of people, a literary or visual work can no longer be just a fun idea, but a well executed one at that.

The modern age has revolutionized both how we view media and criticism, and who makes media and criticism.  The current generation flocked to the internet due to the promise of creative freedom. Anyone could make their voice heard, as long as you had the willingness to commit to it.  The same goes for becoming a voice of criticism in the modern world. Nowadays, a single opinion by a single person can echo throughout the entire vast landscape of the internet.  Criticism becomes easier to hear, and can often times become challenging to escape.

Because of the modern environment and nature of the internet, I wanted to create a publication dedicated to those who want to create something.  Truthfully, it doesn’t matter what you’re creating because criticism exists in all forms for all types of products, whether creative or practical.  Because of this environment, I’ve seen too many examples of how not to both give and handle criticism, that I felt personally motivated to write a guide on how to handle criticism properly.

My goal is to signal boost the best ways to properly deal with criticism in a modern day environment, while also promoting awareness towards ways not to handle criticism.

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HOW TO PROPERLY HANDLE CRITICISM

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 Firstly, you should weigh the positive and negative in their entirety.  Even if the positive reception is strong, sometimes just a noticeable negative reception can weigh on the mind more.  Try to not let it get to you, seeing as how it’s not very professional to let criticism anger you.

Regardless of how much negativity/criticism exists about your product, you shouldn’t dismiss it.  Even if it feels like the criticism pales in comparison to the praise of your idea, you should keep an open mind to improve.  You don’t have to like whos viewing your creation, but what truly matters is what they say about it. Throughout all of the criticism, you can find, attempt to find the criticisms that are repeated the most since those are probably the most important criticisms.

Just because you don’t know a critic personally, or online or at all in general, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t approachable.  Reach out to your community in any way possible to show that you’re actively taking criticism, in an effort to make things better over time or in the future.

After you’ve taken if everything that has been said, and you’ve proactively reached out to your community, be sure not to forget to actually apply what you’ve learned.  Even if your project can’t adapt to be better over time, be sure to have some form of taking away for when you try again. Showing improvement over time and patience to keep in mind everything that has been said will help improve your image to your community.

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WHAT NOT TO DO WHEN HANDLING CRITICISM

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When faced with criticism, you should try not to let your emotions get the best of you and absolutely control your actions.  Even if the criticism you face is harsh or even if people are just being rude, you should stay as level headed as possible. Letting your emotions get the best of you could either beat you down mentally or cause you to lash out.

By all means, you can disagree with the criticism.  As long as you can give a reason as to why you don’t agree with said criticism, or give some pathway into your reasoning, you can effectively rebuttal certain critics.  However, regardless of whether you agree with said criticism of you or your product, do not try to silence those who criticize you. The internet has opened a massive gateway towards freedom of expression, allowing anyone with two thumbs and a brain cell to give their opinion online.  As stated earlier, while you can challenge these opinions, you should never silence them just because you don’t like them. A frustrating byproduct of internet expression is the fact that there have to be checks and balances to prevent misinformation. Take, for example, youtube's copyright claim system.  The Youtube Content ID system exists to help catch people breaking copyright law online (and also because Viacom pressured them into implementing such system due to a possible multimillion-dollar lawsuit). In a perfect world, I wouldn’t be talking about this system in a passage about not silencing critics, but unfortunately, a lot of people in the world seem to hate each other.  Going back to youtube's Copyright system, youtube also allows people and corporation to manually file claims towards anyone they believe is infringing on copyright. This system heavily favors whoever files a claim, and doesn’t offer a fair chance to the content creator to rebuttal the claim without giving up extremely personal data to the claim holder.

Because of this, the Content ID/Copyright claim system has become a key tool for people to effectively silence critics.  While this system and other systems of silencing critics may effectively work at silencing peoples’ opinions, it isn’t ethical to abuse a system online for personal or moral gain.  Thus, your public image and works would suffer due to the massive amount of negativity surrounding your actions.

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CONCLUSION

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Overall, a lot to do with handling criticism comes down to how you handle yourself online in general.  If you remain level headed and actually use criticism to improve your product and/or defend certain actions with further insight on why these actions were taken, you will have a positive effect on those who criticize you.  However, if you remain negative by letting your emotions control you to the point of you taking drastic action, you will have a negative impact on you your work is viewed, and how you are viewed as a person.

To give to final examples of this, let’s return to that story we started at the very beginning.  We’re going to go down the two most common paths, to showcase handling criticism properly and vice versa in what would be a real-life situation.

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OUTCOME ONE (positive)

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You take a deep breath, in an effort to keep your head from detaching itself from the world.  You’re not too sure what they’re talking about, so you decide to look into what is actually being said, instead of letting it all fly through your head.  Looking further into each point made, most of what people are complaining about seems to be oversights on your part; simple things that you might not have taken into account at the time.  Disappointment begins to fill your mind, as you think “How did I not think of that? It was so obvious!” Once again, you take a deep breath and attempt to calm yourself down. You begin to think about how they don’t know what you went through to create your product. “If only they knew it was a genuine mistake, and that I truly want to fix it,” you whimper into the echoey halls of your head.

An idea hits you.  Something you were bound to think of sooner or later.  You begin to swell with anticipation once again, realizing that you can tell the world what you intend to do.  You decide to reach out to an influential critic that covered your product in ways you wanted to handle. It turns out, they were quite approachable and were glad to hear from you.  You detail that some of what you work was being criticized for was just an oversight and that you promised to make sure it would never happen again.

Soon after, people may still have their gripes with your current work, but they begin to understand that you are aware of what went wrong and that you wouldn’t let it happen again.  While there may not be much to do now, I’m more aware than ever about what I create in the future. Your mind fills with great anticipation as you begin to ponder what you’ll do next, knowing that you can stick by your word and create something even better.

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OUTCOME TWO (negative)

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Your mind is overwhelmed, and you begin to feel a frustration deep enough that your brain can’t breathe.  You hurl silent retorts from your mind back at the screen, but see nothing change. They don’t know what you went through.  They don’t know how hard you worked, how many hours you put into your work, only to have it seemingly scathed by the mobs of entitled people who don’t truly understand your creative process!  Frustration grows deeper, making you want to lash out at everyone.

You decide you want to make a statement.  You see one person keep appearing online, and the sight of everything he says enrages you.  He created a youtube video highlighting everything that has been said about your work. The more you look at it, the more it sickens you.  Suddenly, you feel more empowered than ever to do something, seeing as how you can abuse Youtubes internal claim system to finally make him shut up.  You frantically type away at your keyboard, rushing out any sort of excuse for a takedown that you could possibly think of.

Your body tenses up the more you type, writing the videos death sentence.  This will finally send a message as to what you think of all of this. You finish writing out your claim and submit it without a moment's hesitation.  What’s done is done, and there is no going back.

A couple of days pass.  You wake to find that video was taken down due to your copyright claim.  You feel a fleeting moment of relief seeing your handiwork. You decide to go back online to see what everyone else was saying about your work.  Returning back to your community however, you’re hit with a realization as large as a truck.

The critic you attempted to silence spoke out about what he believed happened.  Everyone knows what you did, and there’s no going back now. Not only is your work tainted with the image of narcissism, but your public character has been dragged through the dirt.  After racing through your head for what felt like an eternity, you ask yourself a question of grim realization;

“What have I done?”