Crossing, headless, with baggage

In one of blip’s bizarrenesses, this is a significant day. Not my third birthday, which is in two days’ time, nor my three years completed, which is tomorrow, but my 1095th blip. Every now and then over my last three years blippers have laughed at the strangeness of blip-counting. But were this counting system brought in today I suspect that there would be an outcry. Quirkiness we all took in our stride in the land of grey now makes us uncertain, wary, fearful. Which is unsurprising, since the last fortnight has sensitised blippers to change.
 
Humans, eh. Us. We have evolved to dislike change: Are the prowling wolves drawing nearer? Is this the year of locusts? Are those dark clouds heading our way? Change threatens us.
 
But we have also evolved to create change: domesticating the wild, breeding resilient crops, providing sturdier shelter. Change rewards us.
 
Whether threat or reward, change disturbs, unsettles and creates holes in our knowledge. And we humans can’t stop ourselves filling holes with words.
 
That, I think, has been the biggest mistake in the current changes to blipfoto. Not the white, not the i-outage, not the disappearance of formerly-derided spotlight, not the confounding are-they-or-aren’t-they forums, but the information vacuum. Quick as an adrenaline rush, blippers started trying to fill the void. Thousands and thousands of words of distress, anger, logic, questioning, blame, alienation, criticism, speculation, vitriol, conspiracy-analysis, rationalisation, reassurance, sniping, faith…
 
I’m convinced that ordinary, fallible people, people who like sharing photos, people quite like all the rest of us, are working like fury in Blipcentral to improve things for the community as a whole. Had time and hindsight been on their side and they’d filled that abhorred vacuum with reassuring, reliable information, then the vast goodwill of this place would have seen us through the inevitable turbulence of website change with tolerance and good humour.
 
But...    And here I was going to make a plea for all of us to be excellent and for Blipcentral to tell us more about their plans but I’ve just seen that, belatedly, they’ve started. Hooray! Let’s hope that means more words from them and fewer from us.
 
 

For me 1095 consecutive days are significant also because that chunk of time happens to be my approximate attention span. I take things up – woodwork, graphic design, running a school newspaper, being the communications manager in a major change project (yes, really), education campaigns, poverty campaigns – and after three years I’m restive and ready to explore new corners of life. Nothing new is tugging at me at the moment but over the next clutch of random days I might just leave some holes (photographic ones) and, since I do have a desperate urge to get reading again, fill them up with words.