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Loose chains of interest

I ended yesterday’s piece by saying I shouldn’t be so ready to slate facebook (fun though that is). After all the quote for yesterday’s title came to me via fb (a link to a Buzzfeed list, so that’s yesterday’s other throwaway target exonerated). It’s a quote from the graphic artist Lucy Belwood, which came via a link provided by the graphic artist Matt Madden, who is a facebook friend.

It’s taken me a while to get my head round the concept of fb friends, I think it’s the emotive word “friend”, once you scrub that mentally and add a more neutral word (say “contact”) the whole point of social media swims into focus. It’s handy for keeping up with family and irl friends, true, but also for roaming the wider shores of your interests (which is where the “curiosity” and “pleasure” parts come in). I’m “friends” with a bunch of interesting people who expose me to things I otherwise wouldn’t encounter, which in turn informs my writing and practices.

Which is the other reason behind this series of mini-essays. In part the discipline of daily writing needs to be re-instilled in me (having fallen away ruinously in recent years), but also the chance to have a bit of a mental wander, to cover subjects which don’t normally concern me (as well as those that do), to give curiosity a bit of free rein and see what happens. So now the explanations are out of the way, I’ll crack on tomorrow.

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