Change....

In the short time since I started the pages in 2002, use of the web has changed dramatically.  In 2002, personal web pages were relatively unusual and web access speeds were slow, particularly for pictures.  Since the time to bring up a picture was slow, it made sense to use small pictures and provide only a few larger pictures.  The relatively slowness of the web also meant that text was more important -- the emotional response to a site could be based on 'telling' a story more than on 'seeing' the story.  

Times have changed.  As Marshall McLuhan presaged many years ago, "the medium is the message."  With the wide availability of high-speed online access, users are skipping around and jumping from one site to another, 'sampling' until coming across something that sparks an interest.  Thus the 'foreground' has become much more important -- the visuals, combined with short, terse, lyrical phrases that grab attention and draw the viewer into a particular episode of a longer story. 

Changes in technology have also altered my own perspective.  The web pages were initially created as part of my scholar/activist approach, with dual goals of breaking down the distances that arise between students and faculty, and of encouraging my students and my subculture (gays) to explore worlds that they may not have considered.  These goals remain, but the web pages have taken on a life I didn't quite expect.  There's a surprising amount of contact from random viewers seeking information on places I've visited, sharing concerns about the environment, or retracing their own experiences in the places I've been.   

From these changes in viewing I've grown to appreciate that we all play a part in the cumulative cultural memory that is rapidly developing through web interaction. So, I'm shifting away from focusing on carefully constructing stories, to an approach that provides relatively quick access to materials that eventually build into web-shared stories.

Combining how our information-gathering has changed, with recognition of how we (web users and writers) collectively are building a new type of memory, it is evident that I have to change how my photos are viewed.  To accommodate changes in technology, as well as changes in how viewers see pages, I am gradually moving all of my pictures to a Flickr account.  Flickr allows me to add photos to pages more easily while at the same time giving greater exposure to more potential viewers.  Though telling a story with a set of pictures is more difficult in Flick, I have tried to maintain that standard as I move pictures to Flickr.

As sets of pictures are moved to Flickr, I note that in this website.