Son of a Chef

The end of something is the start of something else, right? These days, it feels like I’m nearing the end of my time heavily using social media. I’m unsure what the benefit is to me anymore.

In the past, I wanted to blow up as an artist and have people pay attention to the photos I was taking. Instagram was the best way to do this. Posts on the platform used to generate hundreds of likes and traffic flowed to my pages.

I ran a couple of accounts, each crossing into the thousands mark. But these days, followers means nothing. That’s really concerning.

Instagram wants you to compete against attention spans with every post. In my work, I try to speak to egos and superegos in photos and words. Battling for the attention span of the public id isn’t a game that I want to play.

It seems like a classic misunderstanding of our era. Instagram decided that it has enough users where it can do what it wants. Trained consultants with shiny educations have been gobbled up on the business side of the company and metrics rule operations.

Yet, there’s a hidden side to metrics. Things like breaking points and thresholds are hidden beyond pure numbers. It might be easy to measure watch-time and engagement in real time but demand elasticity and brand favorability are more challenging.

Instagram seems more hated now than Facebook ever was. Yes, it was extremely profitable last year. I’m not sure why.

Of course, I know the answer is advertising. Yet, it begs the question who wants to advertise their brand on a platform that people are actively hating? Who wants to advertise on a platform that received so much backlash from adding a store that they had to remove the navigation button for it?

In time, I’m not sure it’s sustainable. If the attention span of people like me is the product, they’re going to leave. It’s already begun, too.

So, it is time to set forth a new plan. I want to write more. I want to engage on my terms. One person reading through a pile of words and looking at my photos in the crop that I select is better than constantly pitching into the social media lottery.

Of course, I’ll still post on Instagram. One photo a day, one story when one expires is my current habit. That’s not what I’m giving up and absolutes aren’t worth it anyway.

I’m done allowing my time to be a cheap commodity for the app. I’m done liking other people’s images from the explore page. I’ll watch my friend’s stories because that’s pretty much the only place instagram shows me the people I selected to follow. I give up on playing the game. I won’t watch a new YouTube video every few months for, “what works on Instagram,” now.

That leaves a different question of what’s next. I always used to say it was YouTube. Yet, I’m not so sure now. I hate making videos. That’s part of the issue with instagram. I don’t want to put in the time on a different artistic medium, one that isn’t my medium.

This is a sobering thought. If I’m not trying for YouTube eventually, maybe I should approach things differently. Maybe I need to find a way of making YouTube videos that works for me. Actually, I think this is it. But I need a break.

For the meantime, it’s the blog. The blog is the answer. Let’s post here more. Photos, cameras, food, history, it can all shine in the same darkness as the rest of what I was posting.

Ultimately, what’s the difference between a social media presence that generates few interactions and a blog that generates few interactions? At least the blog is mine. At least I control this more directly. So that’s the path forward. I hope you stick around. Cheers.