Sunday, January 22, 2012

Bah. I keep forgetting this is MY blog and I can say or geek out about anything I want. This is what's in my head coming out, it's not a conversation or discussion. It's not a free speech zone, comments are moderated. I'm not writing for a readership, nor in reality do I have a readership.

Furthermore, in light of my not posting much lately, I probably should be making more of an effort in shoving whatever's in my head onto these pages. It may be boring as hell (to both you and me), but I should treat it as my last will and testament.

I think there has been a reason why I've been posting less and less. I've been disappearing from all of my web presences because I've more and more come to realize there's no point.

I review my web presences and I understand why I created them, but after time I feel that those things aren't for anonymous public observation. I'm thinking of privatizing them and making them accessible only from this blog.

This blog should, to me, continue to have a point. It's the only portal that should have a point, and any other entry points to who I was shouldn't exist.

I haven't posted to my main fotolog since September because it got boring. Photography got boring. For me, digital is killing photography. Digital is killing seeing in photography. And my foray into digital with my brother's DSLR was boring.

Digital was fine and good for snapshots using point and shoot cameras as far as I was concerned, but DSLRs have leveled the playing field and while when I started learning about photography and using a darkroom, I was the only one I saw regularly walking around with a bulky SLR in hand.

Now you can't not see them with their full kits of lenses and tripods. When I started — and I was among the last generations that didn't have a digital choice I shouldn't wonder — if you saw someone else walking around with an SLR, you knew they were doing it with some sort of art in mind, for the seeing.

Now it's not about seeing. It's about technology and the camera and images that may look good but anyone could take them. People aren't really looking, and they're definitely not seeing. They take pretty photographs somehow thinking what they're capturing is better than the real thing. And we're all to blame for being impressed by that. I know there's another side to it . . .

And of course there are people who are seeing and are thinking and capturing worthwhile images and they know who they are. I'm not criticizing them, and when I come across their images I think, "Holy fucking shit, why can't I see like that?".

So I've been disappearing from the web. There's no point, no worth.

By no worth, it's not a psychological or an esteem issue. It's a realization of the vast machination of globalization through the internet that renders each of our anonymous voices only as significant as we think our egos are.

And as much as ego is a focal point of understanding in Buddhist practice, my decreased web presence has been an expression of recognizing that ego is illusory. It's not that I don't matter. I do matter, and if I wanted to, I could matter even more, but I don't want to.