Hobbies
Many people have Facebook accounts that they do not use. They are dormant accounts. Maybe their owners never used them at all, but merely joined the service to meet some requirement. Or, maybe they once used their accounts, in the beginning of their Social Media experience, but have since moved on to other media - like Instagram and Twitter, for example. Not me, though. I use Facebook every day, and enjoy it. I post regularly. My aim is to accumulate 100,000 posted photographs on FB. Currently, I am just over 65,000 posted pictures - all neatly arranged into labeled albums - which represents almost all of what I have saved on my computer. Plus, I have my blog. Every blog post is linked to my Facebook account, and every Facebook post is linked back to my blog. Originally, I joined FB for the explicit purpose of attracting more people to my blog. I don’t know if the plan worked, but I do know that FB itself took over. It’s a drug.
Collecting books used to be my primary hobby. By 2017, I reached approximately 10,000 books, and then I turned a corner and began rapid and radical downsizing of my library while turning to other things. Hobbies change over time, and now my Piper Paper, my blog, my Facebook page, and the photography I do to support my FB page have become my new hobbies.
My affection for books is linked to my admiration for the reality and the longevity of paper. Paper is a seminal invention of civilization. And, the printed codex book is a nearly perfectly engineered object - a thing of beauty by itself. I think that surrounding oneself with beautiful things enhances one’s life.
When I finally discarded 20-years of accumulated school papers in 2018 - notes, notebooks, lecture notes and essays stretching from elementary school to the end of seven years of university - it was a major house cleaning that pleased my family. But it was also the annihilation of a life.
Or not.
More and more, knowledge is becoming a privilege of membership as information is privatized and monetized.
Today, I still read a print newspaper every day. I like to hold it, feel it, manipulate it, mark it up and cut it up. By comparison to paper, digital is less real and certainly less sensually satisfying. It’s more virtual. When the Internet was first created it was called Virtual Reality. Since the mid-1990s, the term “virtual reality” has evolved to refer solely to the creation of 3-dimensional digital images or environments that can be interacted with by people using special electronic equipment - such as a hand-held controller, or a sensor-activated helmet or visor - while playing a game. But that’s not what it meant at the beginning.
More and more, knowledge is becoming a privilege of membership as information is privatized. Don’t give up your library card. Rather than offering free access to the entire accumulation of human knowledge as it was originally intended and advertised, digital information platforms are creating a world of Information Cliques representing monopolized information. More and more, partisan information platforms control the information their members can see and effectively block access to certain competing spheres of information and knowledge. Facebook monopolizes one sphere of information. Twitter another, etc. Even our local Public Libraries are making access more tedious (while boasting the opposite). Pretty soon, we will have to pay membership fees for social media services, for Wikipedia, and for access to websites and home pages, and the notion of free access to the entire accumulation of human knowledge will be annihilated. The idyllic future promised to us by engineers and salesmen will turn out to be something completely different.
The idyllic future promised to us by engineers and salesmen will turn out to be something completely different.
To my disadvantage, I’m not a big fan of joining groups and becoming a member. I don’t play well with others and at best my regard for rules is casual. But, of course, I joined Facebook. I hope my hypocrisy level is not disqualifying, discrediting, or disgraceful.
The computer revolution ushered in the Information Age, but simultaneously a new Dark Age as well. In the United States today, more photographs are taken every ten minutes - with cameras and phones, security surveillance, etc. - than were taken in the entire world in the entire 19th century. And, as to the new Dark Age I mentioned, every ten minutes more photographs are deleted than all the pictures taken in the world in the entire 19th century as well. I call that’s a lot of lost information. (Maybe much of it is not important information, but that’s not the point. It’s information.) While we’re creating, we’re also destroying. Maybe it’s two sides of the same coin.
So, photography has become one of my new hobbies. Digital photography has taught me HOW to take proper/better pictures, so the pictures I take now are much better than what I took in the beginning. In a case of learning by doing, I learned about framing, focus, shadow, glare, contrast, composition, perspective, texture, foreground, background, blur, etc. I take pictures every day because I want to completely document my life now that I have less time in front of me than behind me. I record my surroundings so that my family and friends in Canada can see exactly what I see every day. I know that in reality, no one really cares. But I’m having fun doing it, and I live in the hope that there is some purpose to it. I create my own meaning - which is what we all do.
Over the years, I’ve only taken a few truly exceptions pictures. And when a photograph is truly exceptional, it seems to be mostly by accident. But practice makes accidents more common, which is equally an argument that they're not accidents, after all. There are no accidents. Practice makes perfect.