I have taken a lot of photos around Fitzroy, since I began this blogging caper. Before Flash I was just someone walking the dog, discovering my phone camera (Nokia N73) and getting into this thing called Facebook. It was the birth of my awareness of audience, as separate to my ‘connection with people’.
Audience is not the same as connection. The audience is the ‘masses’ that we fantasize are watching and reading us. Audience is sometimes the voice in my head that reacts to thoughts that I have before I even write them down. Audience can feel like a cheering crowd or an empty room – a party with the cool people or a party where no-one shows up. I wonder about the implications of giving the entire western world the same neuroses previously bestowed only on writers.
Before all this self-consciousness, like so many as vulnerable as I to the reward of public approval, I started to share. I jumped eagerly from the bandwagon into the ‘social media’ river and floated with it as it got bigger, faster and more difficult to navigate safely. I could talk forever now about the ocean of technology and the tides of privacy and ownership that ebb but rarely flow onto the shore of the individual’s ego. I probably will, but not today, because it is midday and I am still in bed and, well, it is time to get up. I will leave you with some snaps from 2011.
