Over the last three or four days I have marked two books as finished despite not finishing for a simple reason. I have plenty of books on Kindle, Audible and Kobo that I need to read, but that to read all these books, would take time. I started to read one book and I stopped within pages, every time for the same reason.
In today’s context my disgust with one book is rational.
It’s interesting, isn’t it? Flick is a website that I have been part of since 1996 and I have been so distracted by Facebook, Instagram and other social networks that I have forgotten about it. Several times I expected the website to wither and disappear but it hasn’t. It is still around and it still has an active community. What’s more, this is so many magnitudes better than Instagram. for a start it has tagging, groups, albums and everything else.
In the 90s, people found it fun to share chain letters. At the time, this was something new to many of us, so we found them fun. We received and then passed them on, but over the volume of chain letters become a torrent of spam. The letter is fun the first time you see it. If twenty people forwarded it to 20 more, then we’re speaking about four hundred e-mails.
In the past if you wanted to be a video editor you also needed to be a camera operator, and to be a camera operator you needed to be a video editor. By knowing both skills you shot good material because you knew how hard bad material was to use. As a result of this videos were worth watching with all of our attention.
In recent years, there has been a move towards multimedia editing, where you don’t expect people to watch the video while sitting in front of a TV.
Today I started reading “What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, The Shallows” and I feel that I am on the other side of the experience. I have been through the passion for new content, the passion to constantly write the new things that people write, and the need to be connected.
There was a time when to be connected, to be vigilitant, to be attentive, was rewarded by friendships, meetings in the real world, and at the very least conversations on social media.
We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Some of us go without conversing with people in the real world for days or even weeks at a time. Is now the time to be offensive about people’s social media habits? For plenty of TikTok users, their only window into the social world is their phone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apvLvTQWQwg&fbclid=IwAR0DJKCl6QsV3EnurNj9j4yEvBNu_pQcpsK025DTRdktUk41gVdquig0jts
Plenty of people are lonely, and in need of human connections. Social media is a great means by which to have moments of intimacy, to flirt or even just to have a convivial moment with someone else.
Facebook’s Primitive Content Management System, because aside from being a social media platform, it is a CMS, makes it very hard to delete posts, images, and more in bulk. Facebook should be seen as a CMS because it allows us to share images, posts, events, and more.
As a CMS we should have more control over how we handle our data on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Privacy settings that are not bulk editable retro-actively, are not of much use because no one will spend days or weeks tidying up their timelines.
Recently I migrated my photos from Instagram to a WordPress blog. The process took some trial and error. The first step is to understand how to read JSON files and format them in a way that WordPress can use. The next step is to import that data into Wordpress.
To request your data follow this link, request the data and wait for an e-mail telling you that the files are ready to download.
The Fun and games of attempting to migrate Instagram data continue. I have now spent several days on the task. I have my Instagram posts currently sitting on a local blog. The challenge has been to migrate it from my local WordPress installation to the main website.
After dozens of failed attempts the SQL database, seperate from this blog’s database was getting filled with lines of data. I was up to over 31,000 pieces of data or more.
When Instagram was a self-run startup I loved the product. I loved that it was a way of sharing images with friends. I loved that it was fast and that it was light. I also liked that it had it’s own community. I liked that it was a way of sharing real life with people we conversed with online.
When Facebook bought Instagram that slowly changed. Algorithms and popularity contests became more important than sharing between friends and so the sense of community was lost and we were posting for strangers rather than friends.