Life in the Network

I’ll always remember my trip to Laos/Thailand. We visited villages that were five- six hours up the mountains and there, you will encounter a whole new world. Children are running around in dirt roads, homes are made out of hay and all the men and women are out in the fields. This picture particularly makes me happy. We brought toys and clothes to everyone and this picture showed a sense of joy to the children, whom I learned to love during my two week stay in the mountains.

I have recently heard of Flickr but honestly, I had no idea what was offered through the program. I imagined pictures and something similar to photobucket. I found it to be quite interesting because it offers a lot more features and it is very simple. I found my way around quite easily and I think I will definitely use it more for storing pictures and sorting them out. Flickr cites folksonomies which is “tags—one or two keywords—that users of a shared content management system apply to individual pieces of content in order to group or classify those pieces for retrieval.“ (Sturtz, Communal Categorization: The Folksonomy, p. 2) I think this is a wonderful way of organizing and also gives you an idea of how folksonomies plays a role for other search engines such as google.

Most of my pictures are stored in files on my computer but incase of a computer breakdown, I’ve considered transferring my pictures online which may also be easier and the use of tags would be useful in searching for particular pictures. Flickr definitely is a way where one can communicate through images because they are “capable of recognizing and engaging substantive issues along with the ways that minds, sensibilities, and emotions are constructed by and within communities whose members communicate through specific technologies.� (Gurak, Cyberliteracy, P. 9)