Follow-up thoughts on flickr community

First of all, can I just say - holy shitting fuck, my first comment...!!!!! This wording will become ironic later in this post. Also, more on the whole "other people reading what I've written" thing some other time.

Now, back to what I was writing this post about in the first place...the flickr community, and the concept of "with privilege comes responsibility".

I'm new to all this "human interaction" malarky. That's not to say that I'm a recluse, never speak to anyone, don't have friends or am socially inept...no, what I'm talking about here is being a virgin to having a lack of knowledge of those I interact with, even to the extent that I don't know that I'm interacting with them.

You see, the only things that I've ever created that have been made available to "others" have been released in a fairly controlled way. Technical papers or documents whose audience is limited to the number of people who would actually pick it up in the first place, then by those who could get past the second paragraph without their eyes glazing over. There's no chance of these things going "outside" the people they were intended for.

This flickr thing brings a whole new set of dimensions to the table.

A quick example. I was browsing through the photos of someone I had added to my contacts, when I see a comment on one of them that I think is pretty funny, so I click on the commenters' flickr name, to have a look at their photos. Cool shots, interesting things being photographed, nice light, this is someone I think I'd like to keep track of, there's only about a hundred shots, but they seem to be putting them up more frequently, so maybe it's someone new to photography (or a least new to flickr) like me.

OK, so onto the profile page to click the "add conta...." er...what's this? "I am 12 years old, and my mum (link back to original member I whose photos I was looking at) has lent me her camera a few times."...whoa, hold on there Chris.

See, many times I've added a contact and a few minutes or hours later, a nice email arrives telling me they have reciprocated. That means there's another "contacts photos" page somewhere that gets updated with my pics every time I upload something.

What if little 12-year old reciprocates after I add her as a contact? Where does my responsibility lie? To myself, as an "artist" (yeah, right, I'm an artist...!)? To her mother, who I have a lot of respect for, and who, to the best of my knowledge, runs a very clean, very nice household with little if any room to have whatever "odd" pictures or gratuitously sweary comments (<= irony alert!!!!!) I decide to upload to flickr being brought to the immediate attention of her daughter?

I'm not talking about anything morally deviant here (whatever that means among consenting adults), but for example, I put a few pictures of a row of dead chickens and carcasses of goats hanging in a butchers shop up on flickr the other day. It was a bit morbid and unpleasant, even though I made it black and white, which sanitised it while keeping the drama...the colours were washed out by the harsh lighting anyway (oooh, get me, all photographery and technical!!!). I intend to go back sometime and take some shots of the butcher at work, and it gets kinda gruesome at times. Is a photo of a man with a big knife and blood spattered everywhere pulling the neck off a turkey with all the innards flying about the kind of thing I want to know that I am responsible for causing to pop up in little miss's in-tray? I don't know.

There's no problem putting things up on t'interweb and either knowing your audience is 100% OK with it, or with an anonymous audience. But it's different if you have a 12 year old as a contact on flickr, and you know it's a photo you wouldn't pull out at a family reunion and pass to your 12 year old niece. See, if little miss whoever-she-is ended up browsing my photos by chance, that's a different thing to me knowing that she'll see them. With the priviledge of having her as a contact would go the responsibility of having her as a contact.

Anyway, maybe her dad's a butcher, and this is how she's been brought up, so what's gruesome to me is every day life for her. Maybe she lives on a farm and pulls the heads off chickens every weekend. But maybe not.

Well, I've made my decision on this one, and I'm quite happy with it. I'm not saying I've made the right decision, because there are as many right decisions as there are opinions and points of view, and I know there's a lot of those...I just wanted to document the kind of impact that this social interweb thing can have, and the thoughts it provokes.

I guess this creation and publishing thing is another of those "not a simple as it looks" matters.

I'm learnin'.