So I’ve been running these Flickrmeets in Birmingham for a few months now and it’s been very good on so many levels, as you’ll probably have picked up from the hyperbolic posts on this blog that follow each one. You’ll note that they’re called “Flickrmeets” being, as the are, meeting of people who use the photo sharing site Flickr. This is entirely accurate since none of these people would probably have met without their using Flickr, discovering the Birmingham group and finding like-minded souls on there.
Flickr was set up by a bunch of groovy folk in Canada a couple of years back. It quickly became popular because it was innovative and seemed to attract nice people who took good photos. Popularity in website terms is a double edged sword and scaling the service to deal with this new growth, especially as it was still in development (or beta, as it’s known), proved to be a problem. Flickr was often slow and frequently offline as databases were stretched and more storage added. It looked like the service might buckle and die until Yahoo came along and bought it. Yahoo is pretty much a multinational corporation. While they left Flickr alone the service had become, essentially, a corporate entity. The founders of Flickr found themselves on the Yahoo board and everyone moved to California.
This is, of course, a good thing because it meant Flickr didn’t die. A significant number of original users were up in arms, predicting a mass rape of the service just as Yahoo did to GeoCities back in the old days. I was pretty sure they were wrong as it was clear to anyone keeping a clear head that Yahoo didn’t want Flickr – they wanted the people who created Flickr to make the rest of Yahoo more like Flickr and the only way they could do this was to adopt their baby and keep it safe. And it would seem I was right.
As Flickrmeets started to pop up all over the world the bods at Flickr noticed this as being an important part of the whole thang, so they set up a sidebar on the company blog and asked people to let them know when such things were occurring. In return they would send out some badges and stickers to persons organising events to distribute. Figuring free badges were free badges I duly gave them my address and a month or so later a large envelope arrived.
Flickr call this stuff “schwag” which, if you’re somehow not familar with it, is a slightly sarcastic term for promotion items given to prospective clients at trade fairs. Those branded pens you’ve got that you have no idea where they came from – they’re schwag. The t-shirt with a logo and vaguely witty phrase that you wear on Sunday mornings – that’s schwag. By calling their offer of free badges and stickers schwag Flickr, probably unintentionally, played a postmodern gen-x slight of hand. We know you know these are promotional items and that our sending them out for free means we consider this to be a worthwhile investment in the promotion of our brand and we’re not going to hide that because we’re not a faceless corporate behemoth of a company. We’re Flickr! We just found ourselves in the position to send you stuff so why they hell not?
But a spade is a spade and schwag is schwag and Yahoo is a multinational corporation with a net income of $1.896 Billion that does deals with the Chinese government.
On top of this I have something of a history as an anti-capitalist. Okay, typing that makes me cringe a little bit but I do have the first printing of No Logo, have been on a number of Reclaim The Streets and Mayday protests and had a subscription to SchNews. While I was never really a hardcore activist that was where I was coming from and in a number of ways still do.
And so here I am part of the street team for Yahoo.
You can understand my unease.
On the one hand I’m very happy to promote Flickr to those who might find it useful. I’ve gotten a hell of a lot from the service. In fact I’d say it’s Flickr more than anything that’s helped me improve my photography over the 18 months simply by giving me the motivation to take and post up my photographs and by exposing me to a wide array of quality images. The Flickrmeets too have been useful, allowing me to see how others see the same things I’ve seen. I would recommend anyone who is vaguely serious about the photos they take to get involved in a community that is friendly and supportive and doesn’t have all the technobabble that usually comes with photographic sites.
And yet by organising these meets along with loosely co-managing the Birmingham Flickr groups to make them more useful and attractive to people, I am promoting a revenue earning division of Yahoo inc.
I’ve had this discussion with a couple of people and the general conclusion is it’s not really a problem. The benefits do outweigh the moral dilemmas. As a user of the internet corporations like Yahoo and Google (who, I should add, I earn about $30 a month through hosting their adverts on my site) are unavoidable. But still, when I look at the photos from the last Flickrmeet and see everyone, including myself, branded with the Flickr logo pinned to their chests…
In conclusion the disconnect seems to come from how we use Flickr vs what it actually is. The system allows you to filter so that once you’re set up you don’t have to experience the millions of shit photos taken by idiots out there. You have your own small organic community of 100 or so people and the ability to follow leads to new interestingness. It certainly doesn’t feel like part of an international corporate brand. It’s more like a club or a gang, only new people come along via tags and the Explore pages. So a Flickrmeet just seems like a physical manifestation of this thing that we created online – Flickr just sold us the tools just as Jessops (or whoever) sold us our cameras. And, of course, online the Flickr logo is at the top of every page. Why shouldn’t it be there in meatspace too? When I take photos the Fuji and Nikon logos are there loud and proud above my lens and on my strap. Flickr is just as if not more important to my photography so surely it has its place there? Right? Not right?
Y’know what? I wish I’d never sent off for that schwag…
Jeez, so harsh on yourself. The fact is, that as a product of ‘advanced’ civilisation, you cannot escape it. There’s no such thing as ideological purity, nor ‘is there any way of getting away from it all’. You cannot even go live in a remote jungle, because you’ll be carrying your legacy with you. So the options left to us include making deliberate choices about what we support, even though those choices require further participation in destructive, oppressive social processes. It can boil down to supporting the preservation or development of alternatives, for whatever little bit they may do.
So why participate in Flickr when there are other photo sharing sites? Is it that the primary or secondary differences among them are rather insignificant? Or is it because you can do things with your Flickr badges that strike fear in to the hearts of corporate media relations people? That Flickr is yours to do with as you please once you’ve got your little piece of it? A bit of culture jamming can hardly go amiss.
I think there’s a distinction, and indeed a fine line, between using a service and promoting a service. It could be said that my use of Flickr alone is a form a promotion because I entice my readers into it when I post stuff on this blog (not to mention linking to other things there).
Something I should have mentioned in this post was a phone call I got before the last Flickrmeet. I put my mobile number on the July meet thread so people who got lost could call me but this guy used it to find out what the meet would be like in the context of wanting to talk to people about whether Flickr was worth using. Again, pretty innocent, but the sense that I was acting in some capacity as a rep for the service was very mildly unnerving, especially as I’d put myself in this position voluntarily. Not to mention it’s unpaid.
It’s not that I’m after ideological purity. I’m just trying to articulate a feeling I’ve got about this. Don’t want to live in a remote jungle!
The main reason for participating in Flickr (as you put it – I’d say I create stuff with it rather that participate, but that’s just semantics) is because there are good photographers who aren’t full of shit on there. It’s a nice middle ground between the pro/art scene and the amateur scene and it suits me fine. I don’t know of any other photo sites that aren’t either hardcore critical or bolocksy cameraphone.
Cultural Jamming makes me smile. It’s a kinda naive idea that that sort of thing works these days. The fact that Flickr is full of anti-Flickr groups pretty much says it all. By playing with the brand you become part of the brand, co-opted by your own actions. Flickr is more like a map or filter that my photos fit into which brings them to life, just as the network of blogs brings my tedious writings to life and puts them in a variety of contexts. It’s all about the intertwingle.
End of the day this is not about Flickr or the people who use it. It’s about me and my surprise at finding myself a willing unpaid corporate shill and the fact that I’ll continue to be one even with this awareness.
You can resolutely work outside the system, or work inside it. (i.e. you pay taxes, yes?) And if you pay Flickr for a pro account, you are a customer and client.
What’s disconcerting to me is that Flickr now reminds you to link back to their photo page when you publicly post photos, as per their rules. I know lots of people who don’t link back. The terms of service are pretty much in their favor. So could this result in arbitrary suspensions and deletions some day?
Re: linking back. I doubt it. It would require much to much work and the publicity would be bad. There are currently 191,778,493 photos on Flickr with a million more arriving every few days. That’s a lot of photos to keep tabs on and it’s probably not worth it. But putting in that reminder about linking back does make a difference.
It’s an interesting one. I feel much the same about Blogger, as a part of Google, and MySpace, as a part of the Murdoch empire, but try to convince myself that I’m simply using their “tools” to create something rather than actively promoting them and being used myself. I think you could get away with an anti-Blogger Blogger blog, but then there’s the question of whether that’s of any significance – you’re still using the service, so in that sense no matter what the content of your blog you’re still supporting them. As you say, even accepting the impossibility of ideological purity, there are choices you can make and trying to negotiate the minefield is difficult.
But I can see that your situation with Flickr is subtly different and how you might feel you’ve somehow found yourself as a rep – I’d feel a similar sense of unease, I think.
Another way of looking at this is whether or not Yahoo (Flickr’s owner) is a good corporate citizen. To my way of thinking it doesn’t seem to have any major problems in this respect.
Having read No Logo, I feel strongly about supporting a product that may have been made in a sweatshop and don’t understand why I should have to advertise a product by wearing it (remember the inside out labels a few years back?) The Nike Swoosh annoys me intensely, so I go out of my way to avoid it. But other products, particularly those marketed by consumer-responsible companies like REI (USA) and MEC (Canada), tend to be just as good, carry little or no logo, are a lot cheaper, and give me the satisfaction that they were probably not made in a sweatshop.
I must admit I don’t think Yahoo when using Flickr except when having to log back on. And I don’t really mind advertising the Flickr community because I would like more people to join in – I and they should benefit, right?
As a small group moderator I find Flickr’s rules to more like guidelines. There is a lot of experience out there for me to draw on and make my own decisions about. And in general, the user is definitely in control.
If Yahoo! don’t Screw! Flickr it’ll be the exception that proved the rule. Geocities is not the only example, and don’t think they all involve people from far away from Birmingham. (Declaration of interest: I have previously been shat on by Yahoo! Wankrs.) It’s not as if Flickr is any less prone to “having a massage” now than it ever was. So what have Yahoo! done for Flickr, if the infrastructure’s still as flaky as ever? If you’re making money from adverts, surely Flickr could have done?
As one of the millions of other idiots out there, I’m interested by your focus on closing down the group to your own set of contacts. If so, what do you gain from its vast reach that you couldn’t get elsewhere? Surely these FlickrMeets are simply the equivalent of the local photography club.
I use Flickr to host pictures, because I find the offering works for me. I don’t regard it as some kind of benevolent saviour of the web. I have google for that (please note tongue in cheek).
(My millions of shit photos are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whoknowswherethoughtscomefrom/ )