wwwelcoming change

April 2000

At the center of life is change. The new replaces the old which in time becomes the old and is itself replaced by another new. This cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death is the inescapable framework in which we work out the pattern of our lives. Human creativity is predicated on the possibility of change, and at the same time mocked by its inevitability. We build knowing that our structures, no matter how magnificent they may appear to us, will pass away.

No doubt it is our awareness of the temporariness of our lives' specifics that propels us to seek some permanence, some immutable truth. The problem arises when we imagine we can seize the eternal and encompass it in our all too finite

understanding. God may be unchanging, but our distorted and fragmentary perceptions of God must continually be renewed and revived. The temptation to replace the living God with a more manageable dead one marks the sorry history of organized religion.

If change is life's hallmark, then we live in a time of particular vitality. The communications revolution spawned by the development of the internet as a practical and generally available tool will effect every aspect of life as we know it. Ideas and information which in the past have been controlled by a privileged few, will soon be accessible to all. How we think, how we work, how we play, how we do business in the coming years will undergo remarkable, even unimaginable, transformations.

The Guide too is part of this sweeping change. Next week we replace our old, rather limited and static, web site, with a new and, we trust, far more exciting one.

For years we have been stymied by the economics of the print medium. The increasing cost of producing and distributing the magazine in its paper format has effectively set a ceiling upon the number of copies we can make available if we are to keep our ad rates within the budgets of the small gay businesses who make up the core of our revenue base. Our new web site makes possible vastly increasing The Guide's availability without incurring prohibitive expense.

Suddenly an entire Guide library, including both current and past issues, becomes available to anyone who has access to the internet. Furthermore, the user friendly way the material is organized allows one to zero in on areas of particular interest with a minimum of difficulty. Check it out at www.guidemag.com. Give us your feedback. We view this development in the history of The Guide as part of the ongoing process of change that signifies life.

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