To Whom It May Concern - Identities & a Kilo or 2 of Words

"IDENTITIES"

Dear Pen Pals:

We log & comment in Nom de plumes & online guises. In the CB world they call them "Handles."

The anthropology of this Village of alias ID’s and it’s global barter of images could be a case study worthy of Margaret Meade.

It sometimes reminds me of the social whirl in the hallways during the class breaks in high school. “Hey Dude! Loved your pic! – And don’t forget to give me a click” Or what my brother in New York and I call “people out whoring” – littering the FotoNetscape with little kisses to drive traffic to their sites. I’ve done this myself on a slow night.

I don`t mind getting these little kisses left on my own cheek by the way. At least I know the SOMEBODY has taken the trouble to give me a click. But what astonishes me is the efforts the some hounds must be going to when you see their calling cards marking the door posts all over town.

The upside is the genuine euphoria and outcries of pleasure that greet really good pics. And the images you are posting, my fellow loggers & commentators, transcend all our Focus Groups’ two-cents worth. They are powerful and amazing.

Looking at this Dialog of Images - while I snap & tack up my own pictures- is what makes clicking through the streets of this Village so pleasurable & interesting. It challenges me to take better pictures and I learn so much from what I’m looking at.

The admin guys need to make it much easier to window walk – by the way. We should be able to see whole pages of thumbs of the most recent posts. Archived by 24 hour day. As it is now new images are up for a few seconds and vanish. Which leaves you poking around through people’s favorites- which tends to be a well worn feedback track of great but already familiar artists & picture takers.

As Yogi Berra said - rephrasing one of Newton`s Laws: "Momentum has a life of it`s own."

Browsing off the beaten trail by going through the alphabet of screen names, or states or countries with it’s skinny columns of thumbs– instead of easily viewable pages – is hard work. There are great photographers in the dimly lit back streets of this town and they need to be more easily seen. And being seen is one of the reasons we are all here.

When I initially started this log – when I first saw fotolog – I thought well it’s about shooting where we live – and the neighborhood where I live here on the West coast of Canada definitely isn’t the streets of New York, where my brother is logging, or Seoul, where my son is currently logging as Telemetry. – And it’s not Europe & definitely not Brazil – so I tried on the “nom de cam” you see on this page.

But now this feels… I don’t know … confining. Well worse than confining. O.K. Here it is. I`m having a full blown screen name identity crisis.

What’s in a name? Well a good one is worth a few billion pictures. George Eastman invented the word “Kodak” out of thin air.

I have somewhat of a public life in the community where I live & I am not interested - at this point - in logging with my real name – even though it is not quite as googleable as Kodak. But I am ready for a change in Logo. Something with a more generic swoosh. Something with a little more….well – William Gibson type “Pattern Recognition”.

So I am beginning a new log which will incorporate some of what is currently here & elsewhere & whatever comes next. I made a collage which in turn gave me an idea for a new moniker http://www.fotolog.net/_pixelated

It is a screencollage homage to bsamp. His work – which frequently uses the whole screenspace - showed me this way to collage images together. This is my first whack at it. And it is an example of what I mean by “dialoging in images.”

There has been a http://www.fotolog.net/burbz/?photo_id=305985 here with Mr.Walker & Mashuga and others in this log about permissions to take pictures. There is also the subsequent issue of posting recognizable pictures of real people here on the net while the fotologger retains anonymity. I have been doing this. And I don’t know what I’m going to do about this in the future. But it fits with the subject of the note I am leaving on the door here for anyone who comes along to read it.

See you around.
- Morphing Over to My New Roadside Attraction. Whew! I`m starting to feel better already: http://www.fotolog.net/_pixelsnstones/

Guestbook Comments (14)

inthegan said on 7/25/03 7:25 AM

...a beauty