In regards to J.M Colberg‘s recent article Are you feeling social enough yet? which discusses the importance that photographers rely on social media to continually promote their work. A few months ago I wrote an article on social media and photography and it’s unfortunately still in draft mode but the gist of it relates to what Mr. Colberg is trying to communicate, that there’s just too many damn social media outlets that photographers feel the need to join in fear of being left behind. Photographers are feeling the pressure to keep up, stay relevant and produce a body of work that will hopefully get the attention of at least their peers or even better, someone in the higher realms of social media stardom to repost, retweet or like their post and hope that the same stardom will befall them.
I’ve been with facebook since 2007 and it’s always been a friends/family only network but since last year I have just as many bands and photography group pages littering my FB stream. The only group that I actually care about is the FPN (Flak Photo Network). Since my FB is being infiltrated by too many outside sources, I’ve ‘unliked’ many pages (except the FPN) and groups and moved them primarily to twitter for the short updates and Google+ for the visuals. Although I don’t post that many tweets, I use twitter get the lowdown on photographers, articles, exhibitions and publications that interest me but when I start work at 8am and get home at 5pm, eat and get the little one to bed, I’ve got over 12 hours of tweets to catch up on. But I personally think that’s where all the good content I read and see comes from so I persevere. As for G+, I barely use it but I’m hoping to get more involved in the discussions when I get the time.
On top of those I have flickr, tumblr, 500px and this blog to update and maintain. As ugly as the flickr UI is, I’m too heavily invested in it to remove my photos as they are linked to my blog. Tumblr is mainly used for my phone cam photography and the 500px account is going to go as it isn’t the right platform for my style. In January I toyed with pinterest and deleted my account after a few days, another waste of time and effort.
So that’s it for me. No more social media accounts and time to unfollow a few tweeters, delete 500px and unlike a few people on FB. Not anti-social, not overly social, just moderately social.