Thinks happen

Flickr Rant

Things ain't what they used to be. (In fact, they never was.)
The Profile (more than you really wanted to know) is here.

Flickr is a complex organization. There seems to be several motivations for posting pictures or graphic visualizations on a Flickr stream. There’s self-advertising, family albums, event documentation, on-line storage and certainly many other reasons. The most genuine and sincere of these is the quest for encouraging and instructive comment from other Flickr members in an effort to grow in artistic or communicative or photographic skill.

The quality seems to range from the silly to the strikingly artistic. There are floods of camera phone self-portraits (sideways) posted to annoy or interest someone in particular. Obviously there isn’t time in this life to select the best shot so all of them, sometimes hundreds are posted.

There are endless collections of blurry smears of color or speckles and splatters in hastily collected frames meant to impress a close circle of friends; to evoke the occasional “oo-ah” from someone; to gain acceptance as a “cutting edge” artist or photographer or something.

And there are those frames posted now and then, that have such striking power they leave one staring in disbelief or satisfaction or exhaustion. Some present such a story or drama or action they tell you on one look what is happening. Some are so visually provocative that your other senses are activated; you can hear it or smell it or taste it. Some frames are so communicative that you are taken back in time to that moment; you are not looking at it, you are there, in it.

Acknowledging good work can come in several forms. There’s the straight out comment, enlarging on the feelings about the photograph. There’s the “Favorite” button which places that photograph into a personal array situated all in one spot so that an observer can view them as a collection. A photographer one wishes to watch more closely for new postings can be added as a “contact” and this will place a thumbnail of their latest offerings on the member’s Flickr front page.

Now, adding a “Contact” or a “favorite” requires only the minimum of effort, a one or two click operation. The seasoned Flickr member knows that being added as a “contact” for a member who has two or three thousand contacts is not much of an honor. Having a photo added as a “Favorite” to a collection of five or six thousand “favorites” is not much of an honor.

The only acknowledgement that consistently carries any weight seems to be the “comment” and even that can be trite when it becomes repeated “Nice” or “Good shot” or “Super” with lots of exclamation marks.

Most of these huge “favorite” collections or gigantic circles of “Contacts” or one-word “comments” are just to elicit a visit to their own Flickr stream. And when you do, it is usually not much of an event.

Those Flickr members who become friends are those who regularly discuss a presentation in a conversational way. They communicate.

So that’s the rant for today or this month.