“Parasite: An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host. One who habitually takes advantage of the generosity of others without making any useful return.”
When we started our first blog, almost five years ago, facebook pages were not significant if they even existed. Back then, we used to navigate freely, almost erratically, scavenging in the middle of the night, searching for those hidden blogs and forums. For us, special-twowheeled-heads, forums like the Jockey Journal or the Adventure Rider were a jaw-dropping, almost mystical, knowledge reserve. Then it was the blogosphere. A band apart. The SouthsidersMC, Church of Choppers, The Vintagent, Bubble Visor, The Selvedge Yard, Le Container, BikeExif, Occhio Lungo, Sideburn, Shinya Kimura’s… among a thousand others. All beautiful corners of the web, showcasing the personal universes of their creators, caring individuals with a fabulous joie de vivre and a great pedagogic sense directed to spread their knowledge, their energy, and document meanwhile the culture blossoming around them. Blogs were community builders and supported independent thinking.
Since then, we have seen facebook tragically slaughter this fabulous diversity. Slowly but incessantly, blogs became deserted. The brilliant pearls of wisdom that enriched every other post became mirages. Audiences got broader so did stupidity. The one picture, no text, format, made any communication effort useless. The learning experience disappeared, and all we got instead were those lame banal likes, good for Paris Hilton fans but not good enough for us, independent fuckers that dribble through traffic on, surely illegal, two wheeled artifacts. Facebook is just about feeding sheep, quick bucks and fake art directors, and we are not on cosy on that boat.
Trying to remember now, how we landed strepitously on facebook two years ago, still shocked by blogging sudden phagocytosis. Surprisingly we were quickly seduced. The divulging power, immediacy and simplicity of the job got us caught. What was at first a fabulous “walking” agenda to keep all your friends under one roof deployed its biggest smile & conquered us. (Remember when you had thirty or forty friends?). Back then it was awesome. But Sucker-berg was genius & greedy, (As every parasite is), and had a secret plan. Rich was not enough, he wanted filthy rich. Stock markets dictate the path now and we are the free meat they intend to squeeze & suck the juice from. Accordingly, their sponsored bots started pushing silly content on your wall, the same pictures of poor good old Steve Mcqueen were raped on every wannabe motorcycle page. The algorithm took over while the amount of “friends” skyrocketed, drifting the quality of the interaction with other users, pages, or groups to rotten bounds, disintegrating into none. The homogenization of all interests made us even see the birth of what we know around here as the FCB™ or Facebook Custom Bike. A flaming parade of creativity.
El Solitario is a tiny company of three and 1/2, comfort zone dilapidators, with a high risk tolerance and a profound disrespect for mediocrity. To make things even smoother, we deliberately situated this chimeric company in the middle of the woods of a forgotten land. Because of these plus acknowledging we live in 2013, we will keep our lame facebook profiles open but from now on we will give the beast only the attention it deserves and not a single word more. In the meantime and before the devil’s substitute sees the light, we will focus on our blog obviously, and Twitter & Instagram, as they are more open, personal, spaces for those that actually make things and get burned doing them, with no trolls or bots and yet no way to monetize us. Yes, we know facebook owns Instagram, so it may not last long, but that is what we have so far and why not admit that we love it!@#$
El Solitario on Instagram: http://instagram.com/elsolitariomc
El Solitario on twitter: https://twitter.com/elsolitariomc
7 Responses
Hi guys. I agree almost 100%. There is very little wisdom being shared, very little creativity and very little passion on FB with the constant regurgitation of Steve McQueen images. The blogs do allow for longer form articles filled with good stuff. But I find that FB has become just a photo and maybe a caption. And Instagram seems even worse in this regard, just a photo with no description whatsoever. The items that I publish follow that pattern too: lots of info on the blog, a little on FB, and none on IG. I view posts on IG and FB as advertising for the good content that is on the blog. Each format is just a tool, but I prefer the more powerful tool myself. Stay tuned. There are a few people like you, Shinya&Ayu and myself and the others that are still putting out original work, photos and stories. stay tuned. 🙂 and keep up the good work!
I think that it all depends on new devices. Informations are now created overall for smartphone. If we have an identity in contemporary motorcycle culture, we can use our social to reinforce it but, to know something new and really interesting, we have to be curious and to scroll the desktop. Ah, and support indie publishing…
Excuse my French, but fuck Facebook, delete it, delete it all and just do what you want to do in the way you want to do it…. Did Facebook kill blogs? Nope, it just made people lazy, and grew a hunger no one knew existed… It appeals to everyone as 99% of people just want to be liked. Post a picture or a topic and you get that instant gratification…. What most people don’t get on the blog world is that you don’t get the feedback like in other platforms, but that’s the point…. It’s a narrative to your life or journey or story… Plenty of people read them, but you don’t nessasarily comment, you don’t need to you assimilate the shared knowledge (or not) and carry on with your life.
It’s all indulgent, even blogs… I would like to just think that there is less ego and needy-ness in the blog world….
In my humble opinion, it’s not so important. You can use FB to keep contact with persons who are not usually very near you, and why not, persons who are not strictly friends (in fact, I’ve never written any personal / important information, nor pictures of anyone in FB, but it’s a good tool to share videos or interesting pages). In fact it can be funny and opens discussions which can be very rich. Of course there’s a lot of trash, and advertising you have not applied, but ads appear everyday, even in very interesting pages and blogs. I visit those pages everyday and only a few times their parallel FB sites. Sometimes in their parallel FB sites some “minor” works appear which can be even more interesting. Anyway, many, many persons go away from FB and remain in instagram, flickr, pinterest or blogs.
This is what I am talking about!!! Good people sharing stories nothing more nothing less !! On my way to Yokohama my friends and promise to drink of every glass burn whatever I am permitted to and shoot thousands of camera photos to then share with you in this forgotten corner!!!
Me parece lo más sensato que he leído últimamente.
I started the Vintagent 8 years ago – an Internet eternity. It’s going strong, but readership has been flat for years, no big growth. My Vintagent Facebook page has, on the other hand, shot up in readership, but is still less than my monthly readers on my blog. BUT, I make my living partly from my web presence, so the 80k+ FB number is important. I try to make the one pic/caption thing as good and informative as I can, but that’s the limit of the medium.
I gave up on my personal FB page over a year ago, and can’t bear to look at the feed…I get sucked into the horror of stranger’s opinions and wholly incorrect info, and it upsets me – its clear from people’s posts that we are doomed as a species!