Why I love Flickr

When not pontificating on how sore my rear end is going to be after six years of corrupt Olympic-related spending and bullshit, I have been pleasuring myself with a few choice Internet links, including:

• That story about those surfer dude pilots who crashed their plane – ‘We don’t have any engines dude. You’ve got to be kidding me …’
  
• Listening to, and watching, sheep singing William Blake’s Jerusalem
  
• Finding out what a Cleveland Steamer and Rusty Trombone are in urbandictionary (look, they’re both gross and sexual, you were warned)
  
• Looking at pictures of geeks wearing DIY Chris Walken masks
  
• Enjoying American Motel signs
  
• And, above all, spending time on Flickr

What happened to Flickr? Its initial appeal was as a cheap photo hosting service for folks like me who take loads of pictures and wanted somewhere to store them on the Net. Then the social interactivity thing took off in a big way. For many people, the photography side of things seems almost incidental and some of the most active Flickr participants barely upload any photos at all.

Don’t misunderstand me. The interactive side of Flickr is a big plus. I’ve been particularly amused by coming across folks like Andy, Clive, David, Kevo and many others. I’ve been amused partly by their (occasional) wit ;-) but mostly by the thought that there so many other people walking exactly the same ground as Ian and I do, doing exactly the same thing. Sometimes, I’ll be standing in front of a particular piece of graffiti or interesting-shaped door knob in London somewhere and think to myself ‘If I wait here for 1/2 hour someone I know from Flickr will stop and photograph this as well’. At that point I usually scurry off in case that is what happens and someone I know from Flickr discovers that I am, in reality, only three foot tall and that I cross-dress.

Not that it would matter though. Not in the World of Flickr. A passing interest in cross-dressing/ tv is the least of many users’ problems. I’ve never encountered so many people with mental health issues anywhere else, ever, and believe me that’s saying something. It’s quite normal to browse into a users’ photostream and see a picture entitled ‘My Meds’ of them proudly displaying hands filled with pills.

Thanks to Kevo, a user called Quiplash rapidly passed into Flickr legend and became immortalised as a widely-used Flickr verb less than a day after posting this, out of the blue, after he received some criticism on a discussion thread he was administering…

Listen to me.
I take enough antidepressant medication to keep a small village happy, and I am still recovering from a suicide attept last October.
I cannot please everyopne. Every time I make a decision in order to try and appease everybody I get a shitstorm.
I am leaving Flickr.
I hate all of you for heaping more shit on me.

It’s getting to a point where you have to check someone’s profile extensively before saying anything to them in case you turn out to be that final straw that leads them to snap. I’m not sure that this is what I signed up for and, in my more reflective moments, I do feel sad for all those damaged people out there; reaching out for human contact and compassion through whatever medium that comes to hand.

However, I haven’t been feeling too reflective lately but I still keeping watching because I find the whole thing bizarrely compelling. It’s a bit like watching a soap. Only with a soap you don’t have the option to toy with the characters’ fragile minds by stepping in with a choice comment every now and again.

F*ck me, I've just had an idea for a television show ...