On jumping on the bandwagon

There's plenty more cat microblogging where that came from.

I am just about the last person on Earth to make this announcement, but I went ahead and joined Instagram.

My beloved old lady cat died suddenly in mid-January, and after she was gone I went looking for pictures of her. I didn't have all that many. It made me resolve to take more photos in the future -- of the cats, my family, and everyday life in general.

For a while I did a series of posts on this blog called "Weekending," with photos and short captions describing our weekend activities. I've found that I like being able to look back on those posts and I thought that Instagram might offer a more frictionless way to accomplish something similar.

Most of the people I'm following right now on Instagram are artists or creative types of some sort.  I wasn't particularly expecting this, but I have been fascinated with the way this platform offers a glimpse into creative endeavors in process. I think it's a nice antidote to the focus on product or outcome that tends to arise from the blog format.

I mean that you can start to get a sense of how long it takes for a creative project to come to fruition, and how this is interwoven with the more mundane aspects of a person's everyday life. Of course, I know that these images are "curated," but I guess I'm choosing to believe that at least in some cases, in some ways, these visual narratives are telling an authentic story.

For example here is a post that's worth reading in its own right, but that became especially interesting to me in light of knowing that the writer had previously shared most of the images on the post via Instagram. So instead of seeing these words and images as being fully formed, final products that sprang out of nowhere, I have a sense of them being part of a questioning, experimental process. That's a really useful perspective, I think.

For myself, I'm hoping that sharing little snippets of projects in progress might create some kind of accountability to encourage me to follow through and finish them (which we all know is a perpetual problem for me).

So if you've jumped on the bandwagon and joined Instagram too, I would love to connect with you. You can find me here.