Where to from here?

I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘internet presence‘ and what the landscape may look like in 2014. I also regularly wonder about the ‘place’ of the blog, this blog especially …

Now I’m no expert in future-trend predictions … and while I do have a number of friends who are most excellent at it, I have in fact deliberately not discussed this topic with them yet so I may be sure to develop my very own thoughts first.

My feeling is that the last decade has been about ‘getting global’ – getting your stuff ‘out there’ and making a connection with the whole wide world if possible.

Initially this was via blogging; and more recently has been facilitated via Facebook, tumblr, instagram and Twitter as the trend moves away from musing and complex text to image-rich and/or short texts. [also check out Annelies’s series of posts on social media for artists]

While there will always be a place for websites for artists and makers – a static presence rather than regularly updated (and hence obvious when outdated) one – I sense the other platforms may be losing their lustre (though I’m way too old to know what the young people are into now!).

I expect over the coming year the number of active blogs will continue to ebb, with fewer new bloggers entering the field. And while the use of Facebook for makers/artists pages may not fade, I do not think it will grow much further – the platform has become ‘mainstream’ now, with commercial entities using it far too much for it to be the place of the creatives any more, and news feeds becoming unwieldy and too full.

My wistful mental meanderings have led me to wonder if the next year or two will find makers gravitating more towards smaller endeavours, a lighter internet footprint (though still enough to communicate what you do), making connections on a much more intimate and local level, a kind of quality vs quantity kind of approach.

What do you think?