scarcity
a camera and closed communities
I bought a camera a couple months ago. It is to capture the moments that sometimes we forget we enjoyed during our daily lives.
It is to notice patterns of different cultures that are not so visible without deliberate attention.
It is to take photos of my friends when we are deeply connected for a small amount of time so as to later remember these moments.
As you can see I am not a great photographer (what a surprise!). Thus, I wanted to learn how to be a friend with the light and how to make more interesting compositions.
As a first step, I read a couple of photography books, namely: The Photographer's Eye from Michael Freeman and Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. Then, I wanted to see more examples of mentioned techniques. I started to follow photographers who are either famous or have similar taste as me on Instagram. Some examples;
They are amazing. Great compositions, beautiful light, passing emotions from lenses.
The thing is that they are among millions of photos. I only look at them for 3 seconds and they are gone. There are thousands of new interesting content in front of me. They are not important anymore. No content is important anymore.
Imagine you are a movie maker. You spend hours to perfect your storytelling, your image and when you publish it, it just gets lost.
I cannot even watch movies anymore. I feel like whenever I open a platform to watch something, there will be hundreds of mainstream content and I will get lost.
It wasn’t like this until a couple years ago. You were mostly seeing your friends on Instagram and Netflix wasn’t that popular. Now, we have so much abundant content, I feel exhausted when I open a platform. I don’t even wanna see a discovery page anymore.
I want scarcity. Internet should improve my real life, not consume me in the digital life.
Instead of crying all the time like this, I start to look at cool things people made where there is a scarcity of content not abundance.
One app I am excited about these days is beReal. Once a day, I see funny pics of my friends and I make small talks.
The other is glass.photo which is a community for photographers.
I also started to watch movies on Mubi (when will I go to the cinema again??).
I think the point is I am leaning towards closed communities, instead of big open spaces on the internet. I try to find calm spaces that are designed with scarcity in mind, where you have only a few options, content or friends. In spaces where your creations don’t get lost in one second.
Last week, Andrea Hernandez wrote a long piece on her newsletter Snaxshot1 where she argues closed networks are the reaction to mass social networks by new gens.
When social networks sprung, the utopian ideal of connecting all of us was promising, that is until algorithms led to the corruption of the ecosystems, algorithmic individualism has manifested itself in extreme tribalism online, so it would be of no surprise that Gen Alpha is rejecting social networks in lieu of closed networks like Discord, Geneva and even a simple group text. In these closed networks, socializing is the only end all.
I hope this will become the new thing and we create new closed spaces to improve both our physical and digital lives. And I finally go out to take better photos instead of crying about these things.
see you.
