Deactivation

  Yesterday I instructed the person who was managing my Michael Penn Photography & Art facebook page to deactivate it. Why? It's become absolutely useless! With over 4200 followers there was engagement by only the same four people. I keep weening myself off of Meta's insipid platforms, but sometimes I come back in a smaller way. Like my Instagram accounts that is for individual projects, but even they have proven to be a failure too. My Devil's Pool portfolio which started somewhat strong with engagement, quickly crashed and burned. You just can't win when an algorithm is being used. Proof? A friend of mine reached 73,000 followers after he was featured in a documentary but his "like" count has really increased. If he gets 500 likes on a photo, where are the other 72,500 people? Why are there only a handful of comments?

   I've asked several artists on their thoughts on how to proceed without social media and none had an answer and all seemed frightened at the idea of going completely silent in this very noisy online world. A couple suggested that I try Meta's new Threads platform that was meant to put Twitter to rest but has proven otherwise. It's another flop loaded with stupidity and people typing messages saying "Dear Algorithm Please Find Me More Followers" like it was some kind of God. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people ? 

   Have people forgotten how to live and function before not only social media, but before the internet itself. There was a time when a website or blog is all that you needed and the rest of the time you lived in the physical world. The problem is that people have become too lazy and complacent to bookmark or search for those things. This has caused me to delete my website and solely use my blog. When I began my blog I would get a hundred or more views per post but almost 5 years later I'm lucky if I get 10. So for now I'll post like no one is watching because in reality, nobody is.

Old City 2013