When I grew up in Germany the internet hadn’t been invented and social media did not exist. That is how I lived most of my life. Now, like most others, I spend countless hours on facebook each week, posting, commenting, “liking”, replying, messaging and the list goes on. Social media has become such a dominant part of my life that I have to devote at least one story to this topic.
I first publicised my photographs on the now defunct website photographersdirect.com, then later I joined the photosharing site flickr where I still upload photographs today, and then I started a YouTube channel for my videos. This all worked fine. I enjoyed showing the world what I had and getting feedback, positive and negative. On the whole this was still a very civilised affair, I didn’t have to spend too much time on these sites, and the time I did spend seemed a good investment. It lead to an increasing number of deals with book publishers, journalists, film makers. However, part of me wishes I had left it at that. But soon I got sucked into this vortex that once you enter is very hard to escape from.
I think it was my children got me onto facebook, hah, blame it on them !;). At first I had trouble understanding what “timeline” and “wall” meant and what a page would do, but eventually it started to gel. My biggest concern was what to do with all the “friends”. Was I really supposed to look at all their posts, even respond to them ? What if I didn’t ? Soon though I realised that, although these concerns were not entirely unfounded, they were the least of what should have worried me. No-one expects everyone to read everything, let alone respond to it, what a relief ! The word “friend” I soon discovered had a very different meaning here, and so did the word “like”.
What attracted me to facebook was that I could have a “page” dedicated to my peacock spider work. A place where I could bring together everything I had produced, photographs and videos, and where I could educate and entertain people about these spiders, week after week. So I started “Peacock Spider”, a page that became increasingly popular, so much in fact that when typing the words “peacock spider” into google it regularly appeared on top of the list of search results. It bothered me that every popular post was destined to soon disappear, overtaken by the next one that I would publish, but that was the way it worked and something I needed to live with. All in all I enjoyed my social media presence up to that point….except perhaps the fact that I became more and more conscious of how much time I spent, or shall we say “wasted” there, time that I had previously devoted on other pursuits.
The first dark clouds on the otherwise sunny social media horizon appeared when I became involved in “groups”. I had no idea they even existed until some guys who got interested in peacock spider photography created one for me and not only made me a member but even an administrator. It was called “Maratus (peacock spider)”. I didn’t know what the responsibility of an admininstrator was, but I felt honoured and did not want to disappoint those guys who assigned me to that position. Groups, on the surface of it, seemed rather like a good thing, a place where like-minded people could come together and share their photographs and information, everyone could learn and benefit from everyone else’s knowledge and experience. I liked it so much that soon I joined more groups, groups on Australian jumping spiders, on macro photography, there is an endless number. Sometimes I even was invited, so it really seemed people appreciated my presence there and my contributions.
One day I scrolled through my newsfeed and found a post consisting of a link to a website by well-known and widely respected macro photographer Nikki Bay, more specifically a link to his blog entitled “macro photography ethics”. When I started with my photography, the ethics of what I was doing had been something I had not been concerned about. I was a scientist, and in the process of whatever project I had been doing, mostly on mites, I used to kill thousands of small arachnids in the blink of an eye, and not give it much thought. Part of the job. However, working with peacock spiders changed this.
I had now spent countless hours observing and filming them and looking into their eyes. I could distinguish each individual, and kept them over long periods of time, even raised them from eggs, and felt increasingly responsible for their wellbeing. I started to think about whether removing spiders from their habitat, keeping them in small plastic boxes to photograph them until they died, was the right thing to do. Did these spiders have some intrinsic right for freedom ? And what would be a legitimate reason to rob them of it ? Could it be justified by simply wanting to post a nicer photograph on social media ?
I noticed that the longer I kept peacock spiders in captivity, the more lethargic they would become. Was this a result of their life in captivity ? Did they require stimulation and entertainment as we do ? How did the lack of natural sunlight, wind and rain affect them ? Or the lack of natural prey, or even enemies that were chasing them. The life I could offer them inside my house, in a small barren plastic container, separated from other spiders, could not have been more different from what they would experience outside. I felt increasingly guilty, and to give each spider a better life, I transferred the containers outside into the garden whenever the weather was suitable, so they could at least enjoy a bit of sunshine.
Fellow researcher Maddie Girard, who I talked to about this issue, seemed to have similar thoughts and feelings which supported me in my belief that this was a topic that shouldn’t be brushed aside. Perhaps naively I thought that it may be of wider interest for the peacock spider photographer community and therefore I decided to share it in my group. I was interested to hear people’s thoughts.
At first there was no comment at all, surprisingly, which prompted me to fatally suggest that this may be the elephant in the room. The 100 comments that now followed make for an interesting read, it clearly had hit a nerve, but not in the way I had intended. I had become enemy number one, to some at least. Maybe some people felt threatened by my post, I don’t know. The harder I tried explaining what motivated me to share the link to Nikki Bay’s blog, the worse it seem to become. Everything I said was quickly dismissed, misrepresented and ridiculed, probably without even reading it. It was a dog’s breakfast and now that they had my head on the chopping block, it was a good opportunity to even drag in another issue for which they hated me, my attitude to “stacking”.
“Stacking” is a technique by which people can produce photographs that are completely in focus over the entire subject, by combining several individual photographs using computer software. It is the only technique by which one can photograph a peacock spider up close and have both the eyes and the expanded flaps completely in focus, so I can understand why people find it attractive. It clearly delivers stunning results and some people who participated in the discussion had become masters in using it.
Unfortunately for me though, I had made it known that for me stacked photographs are not always preferable over single shots. That I saw beauty in imperfection, and that an image where the entire subject is not in focus offers some advantages. This goes back many years when somewhere I saw a post featuring two photographs, a single shot and a stacked shot, and the photographer asked the viewers to tell him which one they liked more. To me the single shot appeared more pleasing to the eye and I have long been thinking about why this may be. I think I have found some logical reasons and I tried to explain these to the people who disagreed with me, but it was a waste of time. They had made up their mind.
I often wondered why people on facebook reacted to what I said the way they did. To some degree this behaviour is perhaps to be expected. After all these were the “gold rush days” of peacock spider photography and things can get a bit rough when everyone is trying to make a buck. However, I suspect some cultural differences to be at play here as well. In Germany where I grew up, we continuously discussed, debated, and questioned everything. In school we weren’t so much marked on the facts we could remember but on how well we could question something. Australians it seems to me have less of an appetite for discussing difficult topics, or at least weren’t enjoying it as much. I also I think that Germans tend to be more direct and as a result don’t necessarily feel the need to immediately read things into what other people are saying. They don’t need to, they simply need to listen to each other. They also don’t get quite as defensive, when exposed to criticial remarks. Its and interesting topic.
There is a lot more I could say here about my facebook experience so far. Even the most innocuous things I was saying could easily trigger a war, and the voraciousness of the attacks left me speechless. So why after all this am I still on facebook ? I often wonder myself, perhaps it isn’t all that bad, and perhaps there are good sides to it that outweigh the bad ones. Even though I have no idea who most of my over 1500 friends are, I feel surprisingly close to some of them and I enjoy hearing from them. Perhaps some of them have become real friends, not just facebook friends. I enjoy the occasional glimpses I get into other people’s lives and their opinions and issues, often diametrically different from mine. Maybe I am now better able to deal with the whole social media thing, know much more about the pitfalls, and care less about what people say. Certainly, retreating from almost all the groups, as I have done, did wonders to my mental wellbeing. So, I think I will stay on Facebook a little longer, trying to make the most out of it while avoiding the worst, and learning from my experience. Though everytime somebody suggests I should join Instagram or twitter I am horrified. Please, please, the last thing I want in my life is more social media.