the joys of social media

Hello, you. Long read ahead.

I want to talk about Instagram (IG) for a sec.

There was a time when my IG feed was full of inspiration and people I love and follow. It was a mutual admiration society until Facebook (Fb) took over. They introduced an algorithm that took away chronological postings and reoriented what shows up in your feed. No longer did people I loved and followed show up in my feed. Instead, it was an avalanche of complete strangers having nothing to do with calligraphy. At all.

And it has been that way for several years, with many calligrafriends complaining that they no longer see anything that I post (and vice versa).

It's become a superficial platform lacking substantive content that isn't user-friendly anymore. Fb is constantly rolling out new things that make posting painful. If you can't keep up with their developers, you get easily lost within their interface. I didn't sign up to become a techie.

You now have to dominate your posts with reels to compete with Tik Tok. Reels are mini movies that take time to plan out, film, and edit.

I mean, who wants to work that hard?

Most of you know that my Aloha Calligraphy account was hacked and I was frozen out of it, meaning I could not recover it by following IG's unhelpful tutorial. They never responded to me and removed the account without asking me. I found that they have no customer service. Thanks Fb.

Ever since then, calligrafriends encouraged me to open a new account or use my other first account which was primarily about coffee and calligraphy. I've been reluctant. Also, I am relying less on the Fb-IG ecosystem because of the privacy scandal and global outages, so I am employing this side-platform based on Google/Gmail.

While fasting from IG, I realized that a certain *addiction* to scrolling had become a mindless preoccupation which forced the question: What is being human all about?

It's going outside without my smart phone. Looking up at the sky. Making eye contact with someone and enjoying a simple interaction.

As someone who is always learning and teaching some form of calligraphy and art, I'm only interested in the human connection with my colleagues and students.

I hope to encourage you to be a bit more human today. Breathe in the air.