Around this time last year I stopped using Facebook. This was not a principled, or even conscious, decision: one morning I pulled my phone out, and as my finger hovered over the Facebook icon a deep and uneasy resistance came over me. After a few days the initial desire to log in faded and a kind of reverse inertia set in: not checking Facebook became as much a habit as checking it had been.
It was a bad year, scandals-wise, for Facebook, but the haphazard nature of my nonparticipation kept me from feeling smug. Plus I'd really ramped up my Twitter use, and Lord knows that platform has its own issues. What's more, Twitter amplified a side of my personality in a way that Facebook didn't (or at least as much): mean-spirited, factional, shitposting. Anger is an important emotion, and expressing it is important; but there are times on Twitter where I just feel *hostile*. Unkind. Certainly unministerial.
Meanwhile in the real world, I spent the last year diving much more deeply into my photography hobby/habit, film photography in particular. I wrote a brief piece (https://www.35mmc.com/21/08/2018/5-frames-summishica-andy-karlson/) on an unusual lens/camera combination that I developed, and realized I had more than five images I wanted to share. I also had, I remembered, a blog!
Even though Blogger is a Google joint, there is something about posting here that feels more personal, more differentiated, than on the algorithmic dopamine-click-driven social media platforms. At least so far. I mean, I've come back to this blog with good intentions to post here frequently at least three times before and ...🍑💨. But with a goal and organizing principle of sharing my photography, and eventually maybe selling some prints, I think I will be able to channel a goodly chunk of my social media energy into this Antisocial Media website. And heck, I've got a backlog of several thousand images that I like well enough to share, and there's no time to start like now.
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