reading responsesreading responsesThe phrase handmade web encapsulates what I imagine more artistic web design to be. I appreciate the connection drawn to zines. I find that zines can easily lean towards being anarchic because of their DIY-origins and aesthetics, and their accessibility, and the comparison draws well with websites that are hand-coded and created not with the intention of marketing and consumption, but rather actual creation. Even though there is the strong juxtaposition in design between traditional/hand-done mediums (such as letterpress/screenprinting) as opposed to digital media that so many new designers are entering, handmade web is a neat little intersection that honors the history and spirit of design. The slowness and smallness he references in the last passage really embodies that authentic design that isn't rushed and nearly automatic.
This reading was a very good way to kick off Handmade Web. There totally is a corporate focus on the web and nearly everything we consume on the web will have some ulterior marketing going on - but I really love her idea of individual artists reclaiming the web by personalizing it and identifying that in and of itself as a radical act. All the different forms of websites she outlines too - like website as garden, as puddle - just bring across the idea of the website as being an empty vessel or slate for artists to sculpt into whatever we want.
Her reflection at the end is very thought-provoking too, because the internet really is only 29 years old. The internet precedes me by less than a decade, I literally remember not being able to do phone calls and web browsing at the same time. We’ve come so incredibly far, even just thinking about graphics and animation on the average website. But the internet’s newness also means there is so much more of it to be shaped and so many places we can go from here, and that’s incredibly exciting.
This website is really engaging in the way that it emulates our notification stream and uses it as a means to convey all these ideas surrounding technology and the way we consume it. It was a little hard for me to navigate - not sure if it was an issue with my browser - which made it overwhelming, but that also definitely brings the point across. There are lots of interesting ideas brought up, such as the idea of premediation and how there is an artificial sense of urgency that makes people drawn towards a lot of media.
A part of our class conversation that I would have wanted to go more into given the time is the idea of parasocial relationships. Fan culture has been around for a long time so I do feel like parasocial relationships have existed pre-Internet, but the Internet has amplified it in such an intense way. This is even weaponized in domestic cases, like if you look at the enter Depp-Heard trials, everyone was so highly invested and passing judgement on these people’s domestic abuse trial and the way that people were talking, they felt like they knew the two personally. But we truly have no idea how well-/misrepresented the case was, aside from the fact that there were actual Internet smear campaigns. Lawyers had found that Depp’s team was creating bots that smeared Heard, and I had even seen tweets representing facts (that were never brought up/proven in court) that the public ran with with no verification.
Aside from celebrity culture, the relationships between individuals and peers are getting weird too. Like the blurring lines between work/leisure, life keeps becoming more ambiguous from reality as so many of us spend so much time on the Internet. It’s crazy that we have access to THIS many people, more people than I feel like I should ever know about. Like the page in the reading that talks about, “if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product” - that most certainly is a lot of social media channels. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, all capitalize on our attention and clicks, but that makes their practices so sinister in trying to capture our attention. Not sure if this had been brought up, but the inventor of the infinite scroll has come out to express serious regret in his invention because of how he has seen it affect society.
There’s so much in this article that there is to unpack but I’ll just focus on a few standout points to me. Very similar to the idea of resistance that Laurel Schwulst is talking about but in a tone that’s a little more grim, Chimero defines what he sees as a good “room”/space and calls for the web to be one of those good spaces. One way that he identifies this corporatization of the web that really made me think was when he said,“The compatibility between a company’s needs and the public’s needs may only be temporary”. I just think that’s such a succinct way to describe our relationships with corporations, because their images are focused on convincing us that they are thinking for us and working with us. In reality, they are working on fulfilling their revenue needs and that is almost never entirely compatible with public and societal needs. I do think this is just a root capitalism issue, but the web manifests it in such a way that is so easily engaged with by mass populations.
It’s so interesting we get to hear about the Amish too, because I feel like most people knew that they were generally ‘anti-technology’ but it makes sense hearing their collective values: identifying whether something will strengthen the family and strengthen the community. “What you let in will eventually form you” is the perfect descriptor of our relationship with technology, because being surrounded by so much of it, it does form us. Like Chimero was talking about earlier in the article, so many alt-right or white supremacist or violently misogynistic communities are extremely easily accessible and honestly I think are a big part to blame for the polarization on the right recently.