Freedom to be Creative

Social media bring lots of benefits as well as many problems. The thing i have noticed, I actually saw this coming it long ago, is that the restrictive ways photos and posts must be formatted and submitted, definitely limits and fences in creative expression. First we could blame the way the popularity is scored, should I rather say celebrity-like biased feeding frenzy. And don’t get me started on the very biased algorithmic display bubbles. The Online – Social Media Aesthetics we see today suck.

So what to do about it?

Should we #TURNOFFSOCIALMEDIA, we can and in the short term that can be a big relief (unless your hooked). However it means that you end up in a much smaller isolation bubble, aka you cause yourself to be largely overlook. Some presence at least seems to be expected of us these days, for example you might hear “He doesn’t have an Instagram account he can’t possibly be a real photographer", which of course is rubbish.

Even this blog, and blogging in general have become overly constrained by restrictive SEO scores download speeds and bounce rates. Whereas I feel it should be accuracy, reliability of information and ideas, inspiration and originality that should be rewarded instead in is popularity! Enough of the rant. Back to what is worth embracing and why. The big plus of sharing things on the internet is extending your exposure. In theory that should happen if what you share is good and/or informative.

I was getting particularly frustrated on the restrictions and difficulties of posting several pictures using Blogspots web based post tool. (I missed the ease and flexibility of Open Live Writer, but that can no longer upload photos, #FAIL most likely due to google photo changes). So after listening to Brooks Jensen’s Online Aesthetics podcast I decided that making an occasional PDF would be firstly easier to create (using anything, word, Canva etc) and also easy to share. So I have started with a photo essay of the murals in Townsville.

So I began with a simple page for an Instagram story, and guess what you need to format the image as a thin vertical. Whereas  I do a lot of #3by1grid, where I subdivide panoramic images into three square images. Most people wouldn’t realise this since you need to look at my Instagram profile to make sense of these grids. So only a few people in the know will realise what I am doing here. Anyway my Instagram story did get about 25 views.

Thus the search for creative expression that is not beholding to the Online Aesthetics of Social media continues…