Post 1: The 30 Day Blog vs Instagram Showdown

You’ve received an invitation to an art exhibition that will showcase work from your favourite artists. Your friends will be in attendance too; hopefully you bump into them and have some fun together at community-participation creative stations set up around the gallery. You’re excited to be inspired and make connections.

Once you enter the building, it gets overwhelming quickly. There are aggressive marketers pushing products and lifestyles on you. You elbow them away but there are too many and they are insistent. Meanwhile, hecklers try to pick fights with you about opinions you express. You desperately burst through the chaos because you’ve spotted the work of a photographer you love, hanging on a distant wall, but can’t break out of the crowd when random strangers join the marketers, shoving their own art into your face for you to see instead. You also realise you’ve been watched, because the advertisers you listened to the longest are now returning more frequently and becoming more convincing. By the time you’ve thrown off the crowd and reach the photo you wanted to see, you no longer have the energy to appreciate it fully, and you’re in the wrong headspace for any inspiration.

Maybe you’ll go create something instead. You walk over to a creative station and start dabbling with the materials provided. Someone beside you has a style you love and you strike up such an easy conversation about mutual interests that you agree to meet up for coffee later. Ding ding ding! The glow of new friendship evaporates into shock as your name shows up on a giant glowing billboard that dominates a full wall of the gallery. You see it’s a popularity ranking, and what you’ve just created has earned you a pitiful spot near the bottom. Ouch. Maybe you’re not that talented, or the world is unfair.

When you leave, you ask yourself:

Was this a worthwhile, enriching experience? Would you return to this gallery?

It’s a relevant question, because we do return, again and again, often for hours each day, to Instagram. It is shocking that we have normalised the mistreatment described above. Some people have more positive experiences with the app, being better at ignoring the marketers, dodging the hecklers, keeping an intentional and inspired headspace, gracefully extricating themselves from the addiction of external validation, curating a healthy feed, all the while reaping the benefits of social connection. But this is only sometimes the case.

I want to see how it feels to remove most of my photography from social media. As I said on my Instagram post yesterday when I introduced this idea, I want to keep using that platform, for the connection and community it allows me, but at the same time, reduce my support of a construct that is often problematic, immoral, and antithetical to my values. So I will only post my portfolio work there, and everything else will go here instead. This gallery with have calm white walls, no ads, no hecklers, no randos. I’m trying it for 30 days and evaluate my next steps after that.

Thank you for your visit here and I hope it is as serene as can be.

Photos are from a rare capture of the full moonrise in June, over Durdle Door. It was a sweaty endeavour as the moon rose after the parking lot closed, so we had to race back up the cliff to the van hoping to avoid a ticket for overstaying by half an hour. Luckily our note on the dashboard worked and we made it unscathed.

Feel free to comment your thoughts below!