Random Flickr-Blogging: IMG_4360

[Random Flickr-blogging explained. See also excellent posts from Karen M, Patrick Johanneson, George, SAP, Ben Varkentine, Nobody in Particular, and Doug Hoffman.]


Uploaded by Association Alexandre Potier

I'm not really blogging this photo as such; I'm posting it as a representative of my real subject, which is the first page of results I got when I searched for IMG_4360 this morning. The first thing that struck me was the international mix: there were images from Madagascar (shown above), Morocco, Japan, Libya, Taiwan, Switzerland, Germany (Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Berlin), France, Cambodia, and the People's Republic of China--10 different countries (plus the US and Canada) in 25 images.

My two first loves were maps and flags. (Also dinosaurs, but that's not strictly relevant here.) The very idea of foreign countries fascinated me. (Non-'country' places--territorial possessions and whatnot--confused me; if it didn't have a flag, I ignored it.) I would browse the atlas and try to imagine what these places were like. A few places had visual images I could associate with them--Russia's onion domes, China's pagodas, Egypt's pyramids--but most were blank spots in my mental map. I grew interested in countries based on the coolness of their flags (Ceylon¹ good, Poland bad) or their outline on the map (Brazil good, Mali bad). I had no idea what these places looked like.

To put it more succinctly, I'm old enough to be repeatedly impressed by the genuinely international nature of the web in general, and Flickr in particular. I don't have any broader sociopolitical point to make with these images; the world isn't flat, and we aren't going to have world peace just because we can look at wedding pictures from Belarus. This is purely a gee whiz kind of thing for me. How cool is it that I can browse pictures of Albania, say--which when I was young was completely closed to, well, just about everybody--or North Korea, which remains closed today?

I do worry that something is lost in the imagination when curious kids like I was can actually satisfy their curiosity. I'm pretty sure my imaginary Paraguay was a lot cooler than the real thing.

Still: definitely cool.


¹Yes, I know it's Sri Lanka. This was a very long time ago.

[That's all, folks]