An Introduction
August 25, 2006
First of all, I realized I’m going to sound like I’m a scrapbookcritic.blogspot.com wannabe. As a matter of fact, upon reading the now almost-blank blog, I felt like I should have started this a while ago. It’s really something to be annonymous — makes you more open and free to voice the opinions you’ve harbored for a long long time. I think the scrapbooking community are nice people. A lot nicer than any kind of virtual society found around the net that is.
If you ever participated in forums like Craigslist, Imdb.com for example — now that’s a whole set of different people. They’re more vulgar, more opinionated, they’re more than likely to bash you and be a troll. Maybe we need to tell ourselves that. It’s not possible that everyone likes everything. I have never come across any negative feedbacks on somebody’s layout — in the digiscrapping community at least. I felt like I’m under the pressure to only say good things, to not even consider voicing how I really feel about a layout. It makes me feel like the lack of comments might just mean the layout is mediocre (or lost in the sea of layouts).
And so, maybe that’s why it’s so difficult to read the blog I mentioned above. I’m not justifying the person’s way of expressing herself but I guess I’m just trying to decode this whole issue of criticism in the scrapbooking world.
Anybody else with a different point of view? Did you ever find yourself wanting to criticize somebody else’s layout but feels bad about telling the truth? I’d love to hear what you think.
OK, I’ll bite.
By and large, people post their layouts to on-line galleries looking for praise, not criticism. So if I don’t like a layout, I just skip over it. For most people, it’s such a personal thing, I feel that if I can’t say something nice, I shouldn’t say anything at all.
But I think “celebrity scrappers” are a completely different topic. They’re putting themselves out there as professionals, so critiquing their work is completely different and, I think, totally justifiable. And it’s nice to see that not everyone fawns over certain people or are slaves to trends.
Let’s see your layouts. Then I’ll answer the question. Attention whore.