Well…
As you can sort of tell, I’ve been taking some time off from blogging, and the little blogging I’ve done here has actually been primarily commentary on photos I’ve taken and posted to my Flickr account… which is not really the same thing as blogging, at all. But I have been conscious of how my work online has not been focused of late, on any forum in which I participate: Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, and Facebook. Of those, Facebook and the new Google+ have been the most active this summer — but I don’t have access to stats for either of them.
The other three, though, do provide me with stats, and they’re instructive.
- My WordPress blog, this blog, has received slightly under 35,000 views in the years it has been in operation.
- My YouTube channel has not quite 20,000 views, most of them in the last two years since I did all those videos last spring.
- And my Flickr account will surpass 150,000 views sometime in the next few days.
Some people may think I’m bragging here about my stats, and maybe that’s true. There’s certainly a frisson of ego that goes along with thinking that 35,000 people have read my words.
But from another perspective, a more humbling one, it reminds me that there is a primacy of image in our culture. My YouTube video collection reached 20,000 views far faster than this blog reached 30,000 views. My Flickr stream, though — of static photographs and drawings — has had considerably more visitors and viewers than my blog and YouTube channels combined.
The message to me is clear, that we ought not to neglect the education of students in the visual realm. THey need to know and recognize symbolic language, and understand when it is being used to lift them up, and when it is being deployed against them.
