While wandering around Mackworth Island this weekend taking hundreds of terrible pictures, I had a (very) minor epiphany regarding the personal attraction of social applications like del.icio.us, Flickr and even blogs.
The realization was simple: I like these services because at their core, they are intrinsically not about shameless self-promotion. I know, it seems weird, given that they are of supreme utility in personal branding, etc, but let me explain.
As background, the folks who know me well realize that self-promotion doesn’t come naturally to me. Humility, apparently, was stamped into me at an early age. More often than not, my colleague is the one emailing around my blog entries or publications to our clients or other interested parties on my behalf because it’s simply not in my nature to do so. I’ve had to fight this tendency at times, because my career has demanded that I develop at least rudimentary sales skills, but it’ll never be a process I’m entirely comfortable with.
And if that’s the case with the content I generate at work – an arena where I’m confident in my abilities – imagine how I feel with photography, where my skills are far more limited. Ok, nonexistent. I simply can’t imagine pimping my terrible photographic portfolio on too-patient friends or family. It’s one thing if you’re Joe Beda, but for the rest of us, it’s a more problematic proposition.
So pre-Flickr, that meant that photography would be a solo endeavor, and on rare occasions when I really thought I had a good shot, a friends and family play. Not much appeal there, at least for me.
Enter Flickr. All of a sudden, I’m taking pictures not just for myself, but for an anonymous multitude of individuals with a multitude of interests. The individual is on some level de-emphasized in favor of the subject matter, be it the Sox or Colorado scenery. I can shoot knowing that the pictures will not ultimately stagnate on my hard drive, expiring due to a failed hard drive. They’ll have some sort of life online, some value, even if it’s infintesimal. You might even get a kind word here or there. Flickr neatly transforms the act of taking a picture into a participatory event (I’m avoiding the obvious but crude metaphor here intentionally), without the overhead of lethally boring slideshows for your friends and family. It’s participation by choice, rather than by social obligation.
The thought of generating content that might be of interest to someone, somewhere, has made photography interesting for me again. It’s the network motivation at work.
Blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us and the like essentially amount to take or leave it propositions for visitors you know and visitors you don’t. Its consumer pull, rather than author push. Throw material out there, and let the consumers take what they like, leave what they don’t. Beats pimping your own stuff, at least for me.
