A few years ago, a dear but distant friend of mine (we'll call her B) stopped using Facebook. This made me sad. I love Facebook because it keeps me in touch with friends like B. It keeps them an active part of my life, even when they're far away. With all its well-documented flaws, Facebook is great for that (it's great for other things, too, and I am strongly pro-Facebook, but that's another post). When she stopped using Facebook, B told me she was using Instagram and loving it. That sounded interesting, so I created an account, uploaded a profile pic, and started looking around. But I just didn't understand. You couldn't upload from a computer! You had to upload from a phone! I love taking photos, but I use a camera, not a phone, and I use Photoshop to process my photos. The unprocessed images from my low-IQ pseudo-smartphone weren't anything I wanted to share. How were those IG people posting such gorgeous pictures? How was one supposed to get the photos from the good camera to the desktop to the phone? I found some apps that would do the job, but it all seemed so complicated. And I didn't get the whole Instagram thing. I'd been photosharing on Flickr for years, and Flickr was quietly dying (well, Yahoo was killing it, but the end result was the same). How was Instagram different?
Of course, Instagram is different. Sometime last spring I got interested again. I finally got a real smartphone with a (sort of) decent camera and actual memory, so I could install a photo editor to edit my phone pics and Dropbox to move the pics around. Perfect! (Full disclosure: I got the new phone a year ago last spring. It took me a whole year to feel comfortable with it, stop playing Bubble Witch, and start exploring the World of Things One Can Do With a Decent Smartphone. I've never seen myself as one to lag behind, but yeah, I lagged.)
I still didn't get the IG thing, but I started posting occasionally. I followed people I knew, and then some people I didn't know, and then more and more of the people related to the people I was already following (and I hardly knew who any of them really were because most of them have different usernames on different platforms and the profile pics are tiny and I can't keep them straight, but I've started keeping a cheat sheet so that's getting better)...and all of a sudden I found myself immersed in Instagram World. Specifically, Knitting Instagram World. And what a world it is! I thought Ravelry was the only way to interact with Knitting World. Now I get it. Instagram and I are going to be very happy together. Thank you, B!
Except, of course, I'm about five years late to the party and no doubt the platform is about to fade into obscurity to be replaced by some hot new thing that I won't hear about for another three years. But that's okay. Knitting will endure.
