Buckle up Dorris, you’ve entered the borderland between my visible life and the slightly veiled kink one. I will ignore this under the premise that you think you think I am learning ties for rock climbing. Speaking of rocks, I must have a couple in my head because I thought I’d throw my content up on TikTok (Sorry Unicorn). For those playing at home (cough), this week’s task is content proliferation; moving out of the safe, somewhat understood silo of Instagram so that I can negotiate a new audience.

Instagram has always been synonymous with aesthetics to me, a place of colour cohesive, overly filtered ‘dream scapes’ and maybe this is to its detriment. TikTok has an openly thriving ‘beginner community’ and the ICK is strong in saying this, but it’s more authentic. As our online and offline selves merge evermore, people expect and respond to more natural situations. EPIPHANY – STOP TRYING TO BE PRETTY AND JUST MAKE SHIT. This community celebrates the raw version because I believe our culture of needing to present a persona in a predetermined template is disintegrating. Yes, I do see the irony here.

This appears to be the answer to my question of where all the beginners are. People fearlessly teach here in digestible, succinct and accessible modes. Popular videos are abundant with text overlays which broadens their audience and they are more narrative driven. This means I needs to shift my content into alignment with this space – voice my videos and stop worrying about overly staging them, I’ll keep the pretty pictures for the gram. My persona is an inclusive beginner, so how do I achieve this?

Another epiphany this week in the realm of Shibari content creation by way of observing this niche, is crochet Rory. Who’d have thought that dungeons and dragons would come sweeping in to appropriate Japanese rope bondage into sorceress harness’s and the like; the comment section is like deciphering hieroglyphics and the creator dutifully responds to his fandom. The tone is wildly different from the instagram crowd, who stand back with voyeuristic adoration of poses and attire with little interaction bar likes. I am ensconced by this unique persona, that employs overlays of D&D fonted speech bubbles of his obviously mute maniquin and crochet friend.

Rory’s Brainworks Youtube channel has over 200,000 subscribers, all assumptions about Shibari lay in my next roll, insert DnD in joke here (I don’t play but I’d love to, is this my in?). This has been a critical week of Ah-Ha moments that I can now actualise in my own work as I refine and experiment with my persona.

References: Moller, K & Robards, B, Walking through, going along and scrolling back ‘Ephemeral mobilities in digital ethnography. Digital Design, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, krimo@itu.dk
II SchoolofSocialSciences,MonashUniversity,Australia,brady.robards@monash.edu