instagram flowerock Kind of the opposite of blather in a way. 150928 ... raze you mean in the way it's all about images and not really about words at all? imagine if each picture linked to another related picture when you clicked on it. that would be kind of fun. 150928 ... flowerock In a way it's exactly like blather but with pictures... now that you mention the linked images... the hash tags ( # ) are like that... I can tag #dog #climbingtree And find more dogs and tree climbers... hmmm... But yes, because of the abundance pictures and lack of words, though are some words... 150929 ... raze i was thinking about signing up, if only to have an excuse to take more pictures. then i read about richard price, who's made a career out of stealing the art of others and calling it his own. a few years ago he took a bunch of pictures people posted on instagram, printed them, and then he sold the prints at an art gallery without asking the permission of any of the photographers or models, without giving them credit, and pocketed tens of thousands of dollars. he got away with it, thanks in no small part to a hidden clause in instagram's terms of service that allows users to "re-share" images that aren't their own. what is with these people who think undisguised theft can somehow be called art? 170623 ... raze actually, his name is richard prince, not price. but that seems a fitting typo, given what the dude does and how he's made his bones. 170623 ... amy adaptability I'm so pathetic. I would be flattered. 170623 ... raze i don't think that's pathetic. it's a perfectly valid response. i guess i just lean pretty hard in the "don't steal my stuff" direction after some of the experiences i've had with people either giving themselves credit for my work or stealing it wholesale, and these days the idea of anything i've done getting any kind of widespread distribution or visibility doesn't hold much appeal. the good news is, i'm nowhere near being a good enough photographer to ever inspire anyone to lift my images. ha! 170623 ... amy anthropology I just learned that Richard Price was practically a Founding Father of the American Revolution, but he was Welsh It was to make a point about how people decide what sides of political debates and how they go forward with that. Because this professor is sly. It's a Barnes and Noble audio lecture about the Enlightenment which is highly relevant to what we do here. 170629 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Darn. I was going to go and name my next poetry book The Chicken Angel Woman with Medium-Fi Creative Nightmare Stew. In real news, Instagram is how my bosses are plotting to attract people to our language group classes (as a gateway drug to expensive 1-to-1 tutoring). Because if you see a picture telling you about French classes, you are going to pay for French classes. It's that simple. 170701 ... raze you SHOULD name your next book of poetry that! i would laugh and laugh until i could laugh no more. and then i would probably become a spinning top and start asking hard questions about the nature of my altered existence. 170701 ... nr interesting how social media seems to be moving toward pictures more than words. i like instagram a lot—seeing people's lives and selves and worlds through their own eyes—but i do miss the prevalence of the rambling written word. 170725 ... unhinged a photographer/videographer friend of mine was trying to convince me to get an instagram account after i shared some of my photos with him. i'm still on the fence. i receive a lot of compliments for my photos from friends. not sure if i want to release them into the wider world though 170727 ... e_o_i I was going to make a nod to ovenbird's point about Instagram on the blathe a_question_for_blatherskites, but my post was already too long and off-topic, so...Instagram. I was just going to say I share your frustration with this app hyping videos over pictures. And suggesting that you put everything to music. Then the posts that have music on them tend to repeat the same stuff, and everything is trend-driven...blah. (I mean, things have always been trend-driven, but social media pushes it to an extreme. That's my grumpy geezer idea for today.) I think my favourite video I've seen there isn't a professionally produced one. It's from a fellow artisans club member - she pans over people's craft tables at the summer fair while another person plays the handpan in the background. Not a planned moment, but real background music ("original audio") that was captured well. I don't know if she filtered out other ambient noise or it just happened to be quiet at that moment. I recently added an account for my writing - I already had one for crafts. I thiiink I can use this without being overwhelmed or wasting too much time, if I'm careful. But now my problem is that I'm behind on a project I meant to use my writing account for: writing mini reviews of books. (Simple picture - front and maybe back cover of the said book.) Despite my behind-ed-ness, by experimenting with that, I've found that my favourite use of this account is to promote other writers and works. I also like to promote my own writing, but not as much. Am I selfish? Yes. Am I ONLY selfish? No. But reporting on books and events brings up a weird combination of the selfish and unselfish: see, writing about other writers, "tagging" them, will get me more "likes" (I'm talking e.g. 20 instead of 5). And I have to remember how any account like that is an adjunct to community, not the community itself. I don't mean that community is only an in-person thing (I don't think I'd be on blather if I thought that) but that it doesn't only have one location, one locus. It's more the abstract sense of connection. ...Oh yeah, and sometimes I just don't *get* Instagram. I mean, I have no fucking idea how some of its features work, like why "stories" (or are those "reels"?) will just autoplay a bunch of unrelated things just because the same person posted them. E.g., I gave someone's post a laughing emoji after he'd made a point of tagging me in an elegant photo he took of me and others at an outdoor poetry reading (I wasn't elegant, but the trees around us were). So why the laughing emoji? Because a silly video of his played right afterwards. Then he was confused, I embarrassed, and I explained my mistake in wordily awkward detail. (I wonder if I'd sound cooler if I went, "sry, dunno how tf instagram works" - probably not, if I'm trying to retain some scrap of authenticity.) 251122 ... ovenbird I relate to so much of this e_o_i. Instagram is mysterious in its algorithmic grumpiness but I have also found that it is (or at least WAS) a place that could facilitate something approaching real community. When I joined Instagram it was for the sole purpose of sharing my artwork and connecting with other artists. And it served that purpose. I didn't follow any friends or family there, I only followed artist accounts and it became a strange oasis. Scrolling through my feed meant seeing thousands of beautiful things. I learned a lot from other people's art practices and my own art improved as a result. I also made a real friend, a fellow birder and coloured pencil artist who I actually met up with in real life a few times to go birding. Online spaces CAN facilitate real connection, they just rarely do. Instagram did that briefly, but it's becoming a less welcoming space over time. Blather does it in a truly astonishing way. I come here a lot more than Instagram these days, and it very much has to do with the quality of connection that's possible in this space. 251123 what's it to you? who go blather from