I am a practicing musician and am naturally aware of the globalization of music, spurred on by the global travel of musicians and, more recently, by telecommunications and recording techniques. Directly, this has been reinforced by my personally having performed as a solo singer in a number of venues in a number of cities scattered about the world. I am also keenly interested in the visual arts, and spend a large number of hours each month in various museums both in New York City and elsewhere. In addition to being interested in art because of its globalization, I am also active as a sketch and watercolor artist, and have produced several thousand works over the last two years. I see sketching as a tool to explore global communication, too, because, like music, sketched images can communicate across language and other cultural barriers. It is little wonder then, that creating websites has attracted my interest, because they can include both music and visual images, and their topic can be focused on demonstrating and explaining globalization and its impact on human society and cultural artifacts.

This site is only one of a number since 1996 that I have created, precisely to explore these ideas. All the sites have something to do with education, in some degree with redressing the imbalance (1) between learning based on text and learning based on other representations of intelligence, and (2) between societal understanding based on local, narrow outlooks and that based on a broader, more global outlook. Several of these sites are accessible through Related Taylor websites below and elsewhere, and of them, intransit, praha, and seminario, focus upon or strongly reflect aspects of globalization. Others - webbery, tcfolks, and flowery - focus on image-related matters, like the role of sketched images as miniatures, the relation between image and text, and the general limitations of no-scrolling, one-screen-at-a-time format. Background observations below also deals with the web's usefulness in exhibiting images. R. P Taylor --January 29, 1998.