Connections and Disconnections

Pictures, connections, screentime, mysteries


I have two things to tie this to. One is that there will be a chat Wednesday about the dangers of the internet (fears around the internet, and confidence and advantages). August 21 Chat on Dangers of the Internet
(The original post had an aouncement, but time has passed and there's the transcript.)

The other is that after a couple of people asking me about the images I choose for Just Add light, I wanted to use this one as an example. Maybe different people will take different things from it, and I would like to lay it out here, the text and the photo from Wednesday's post, to see what people can glean from the combination/juxtaposition of the two.

I took the photo of a flag on a boat in the Albert Dock in Liverpool in July.

Any speculations about what I was thinking, putting that with Karen James' quote?


I'll take a stab at it. What I love about this flag (and I'm not someone who is any kind of expert on flags of other countries or ship flags etc) is that there is a lot going on on this flag. It seems to be a combination of at least 6 flags all connected by a symbol that looks sort of like a gear, or a wheel or something from the far east or maybe...

The internet is like that middle symbol - a central location or portal, if you will, that can "take you" to places through words, pictures, and images all over the world.

It looks like there is a dragon on the flag in the lower right corner and it reminds me of old maps where as they got to the edges of their "known universe" the cartographers would put pictures of sea monsters and sometimes even words that said things like "there monsters be...." A lot of people feel that way about the internet - they have their areas of comfort, Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook, Wikipedia, Amazon (not the jungle/rainforest...) but know that if not careful you can click into dangerous territory (sort of like taking a wrong turn and ending up lost in a bad neighborhood late at night). A lot of parents fear the internet - like it's a bad neighborhood filled with predators and pedophiles around every corner, trolling xbox live games, giving out "free lives" on candy crush saga and armor and supplies in World of Warcraft....

The flag also seems to be a loud noisy jumble of colors and patterns. Computers can be that too. Sometimes my computer is a crazy quilt of text and images and music and maps....right now I have seven windows open on this laptop, The Just Add Light window with the picture of the flag, my email, a wikipedia page on the history of the barber pole, two Youtube video pages (one Minecraft walkthrough video, and a room tour put up by a tween girl who is showing off her hamster cage and holiday decorations) a map with directions to someplace in NY State, and Facebook. Those windows do a pretty good job of covering time and space and people I know, close friends and family, people who are living and dead, and some people I only know through words and pictures, and pixels blinking on a screen.

Sylvia Woodman


When I first saw it the other day, I thought, "Wow. That's a pretty colourful flag!" Now, that I look at it more closely, I see a lot of things going on in there. Things, that if I was planning a flag, I might not think should go together. If I was really attached to the style of the Canadian flag, or the Japanese flag, or the American flag, I might think this flag has too much going on. But, it's wonderfully complex. I don't think I, personally, can know everything that's going on in the flag--the relevance of everything. I'm not sure I need to know to enjoy it. I might want to know if I was to learn from it, however.

Karen James


Connections Screentime Transcript of chat on internet dangers

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