Well, it is done. I've spent most of this week updating the 1200 or so posts on this blog.
I'm filled with a mix of joy, but much regret that I haven't paid more attention to it in the past few years. The first few years worth of posts, from around 2008 to 2011 give a good diary-style account of my art activities in a nice format. After that, Facebook, and other similar distractions, intervened and came to replace these posts, but in recent times, Facebook has become a strange and unpleasant environment.
There are a few reasons why, I think. First, the site has become complicated to look at and to use. The pages are flashing, blinging, instant attention-grabbing displays. This is something that, on the internet, has grown notably more of a problem in the past few years. Even the BBC news website annoyingly includes links to other pages in the middle of stories. People might complain about the reduction of attention spans, but then exploit this by trying to distract people more and more. It's like a disease: distractomania, where people dart from one thing to another, like a fear of focusing on one thing, a fear of missing something better, perhaps.
This was always a bit of a problem on everything internet related, but in the past two or so years, Facebook has been so focused on advertising that every other post is an advert; items designed to distract. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with advertising, but distraction makes people unhappy because happiness is giving your care, attention and focus on one thing exclusively. Distraction, therefore, causes unhappiness, and naturally causes anxiety because anxiety is a chemical breakdown of extant neural pathways in anticipation of forming new ones; a mushing of learning. It makes us ready for new action, but is, as a result, the opposite of relaxation, which is, neurologically, riding the rails, so to speak.
Secondly, the 'social' aspect of Facebook itself is rather odd, and changes as the number of 'friends' grow. We are expected to connect with our friends (and people we might encounter once, and strangers who might become friends). These begin as a limited group of people we know well, then expand into a larger group of slight connections, and into total strangers. The vastness of the group makes it feel less 'friendly', but at the same time, it is too small to broadcast general information to the world, thus, Facebook recognises that many people want to make posts public, worldwide and eternal (Twitter-like formats have a better system for this, everything is visible to everyone and we can, in turn, choose who to listen to).
On Facebook, this is all to confusing. Having more Friends is better, but too many is unwieldy, yet we can hardly cull a few off; that would feel rude, but also would reduce our feelings of impact in the world. It's like a lose-lose situation.
There's no intimacy and few actual feelings of friendship on Facebook because the place is like a virtual expo, something like the E3 show, a bustling hall full of several hundred people and sales-stalls. The people, in this vast swirling exhibition or sales fair, are chosen by Facebook's algorithm, so although we're not seen by everyone in the hall, we are seen at sort of random. Any conversations with someone in a virtual corner and not remotely private. We all have megaphones in this hall.
We also discover that we all have sales stalls too, and this makes everything worse, for we distract each other as much as we are distracted.
The very instant nature of social media makes posts short and snappy, and also ephemeral. Long posts like this would be difficult to type and edit, and so many sites are so geared towards tiny phone screens, that large posts, even news stories by major news organisations are discouraged.
One big positive that Blogger has over Facebook is that the content is relatively simple, that we can download our stuff, and delete it if we want. With Facebook, we have the impression that they own everything, won't delete our content even if we ask, and that we can't control what they do with it. The Donald Trump election and the Brexit vote were key events in the history of Facebook, they made the social media experience horrible en masse; it was like entering a battlefield of angry catchphrases.
To the future. For me, I've posted some updates of my activities here and there, but the blog became a resting point for the ArtsLab listings, the weekly list of the music and guests on my two-years of local radio broadcasting. I also shared a few philosophical and pseudo-scientific ideas that I also included on my website; but a general of what I was doing, feeling and thinking as an artist has often been lost, or scattered across Facebook and Twitter (which is as good as lost).
I toyed with the idea of locating some of these posts and posting some sort of update here - my obsessive neatness and desire for completion would be the end of me! But I've settled for tidying up the HTML of every post here and adding new, more easily located, tags/labels about painting, music, poetry etc. I've removed many links, as these tended to go out of date scarily quickly, and dead links can lead to exploitation. You might have to search for the ends of those links in old posts, but that at least, today, is easy.
Gosh, this is a long post, well done for getting this far! I'm assuming that you are now some researcher of art from the distant future, and so, hello from the murky past of 2019.
I haven't really written posts since before ArtsLab, so I'll work on a post that tries to summarise my more recent art activities that are absent from this blog. This is nearly impossible, as my posts can be as long as this for one day, but I'll try at least because I wouldn't want my life to miss out a huge chunk, like van Gogh's did when he paused writing his letters to Theo.
