From the desk of Jake Parker:
In a simpler age, long before the social media giants had risen from the depths of the ocean to eat away the online landscape and rule it with their algorithmic iron fist, there was a peaceful archipelago of thriving websites. People could hop from island to island at a leisurely pace and consume content at their discretion. It wasn't gamified, and it didn't exploit the underlying motives of human nature.
One of these islands was Flickr. A simple platform to share photos and creations. I used to spend a lot of time there over a decade ago. I recently found myself there again this week and rediscovered all the images I favorited. It's a nice collection of everything rom 70's futuristic architecture to amazing LEGO creations. There's lots of old toys and pulp covers.
This is the stuff that influenced my work 10 years ago, and I feel bad I had forgotten about it, drifted away from it, and got lost in the sea of Pinterest and Instagram. The algorithms end up working in a way that shows you stuff it knows you'll like. Which means you rarely get surprised anymore, and aren't exposed to new things as much.
Surfing Flickr may be less efficient, but it has what I call the "library effect" on you. When you go to a library to check out a specific book you have to pass through all the sections of the library that might not be what you're currently interested in. However, by walking through you get exposed to books that catch your attention, and make you think about something tangental or adjacent, or even the opposite of what you're interested in. You end up leaving the library with a stack of books that you had never planned on cracking open when you walked in.
When I compare my Pinterest/instagram (P-I) feed to my Flickr feed the P-I feed is much more targeted and narrow. The flickr feed; much more broad and varied. The effect these two have on me is after surfing P-I everything feels derivative, and I feel as a creator that I don't have much more to offer. After surfing the randomness of Flickr I feel inspired because so many different things are bumping into each other making me connect dots that I never thought to put together before.
Anyway, that's my case for surfing blogs and flickr, and pining for the old internet. Here's a random page from my Flickr faves: LINK
-Jake