I almost forgot…

Today is my blogiversary. Seven years ago I began complaining here about digital culture, and I’m still a crabby guy. Today it’s a bit harder to know what to write about, and to make the time to do it. I’m happy for the community it’s brought me and the many ways it’s helped me stretch what I do. I never thought that I would be a person who insisted on having a camera with them all the time, or that I would know half of the people I know here now.

In some ways this activity has drifted far from the “sitting in the cafe with my notebook” origins of all my journal keeping and we don’t yet know what the cumulative effect of all of these millions of self revealing documents will be. Here’s a time where more people than ever are leaving a record of their thoughts and impressions, but doing so in a medium that is shockingly fragile from a historical viewpoint: barely more lasting than speech.

Perhaps it’s fitting that thought, which begins as patterns of energy, should travel the world the same way. The printed page provides us with an illusion of continuing past the end of our bodies. Very few artifacts will ever survive the demise of this planet and most of us have had no hand in them. I make art objects in the hope of providing pleasure and possibilities for other people, but do they really need to stick around physically? Framed that way, I should probably lighten up. None of the things I fret about here matters all that much. Think I’ll crab on for another year.