Reenvisioning the Internet: Embrace Its Multiplicity
Metadata
Highlights
- That the World Wide Web that followed was neither especially wide nor encompassing of the whole world at its inception reflects the aspirational utopias embedded within it. Folded into those early days was an earnest enthusiasm for the potential of one world, flattened and connected.
(Only people with nothing to fear see the idea of a completely connected world as unequivocally good.)
- The internet was one thick line that toppled over cars and lawns from my house to hers.
- My web friends existed in a mosaic of time zones, so company was a lavish resource. We shared art, wrote impassioned responses to one another’s stories and articles, and never gave our real names. They were the least important thing we had to offer. Through snatched minutes and hours, we happily claimed our own corner of the web, which belonged not to any one of us, but to all of us, yet only us.
- If artists want to reimagine the web, we must set aside the tendency to subscribe to a universal “us” that is blank, neutral, and anonymous (a.k.a white, Western, and tech-literate).
- But the experiences I had online were as much as about the distance the medium provided as the intimacy it enabled with each other. In fact, the two were intertwined: My web friends and I were never bodiless atoms, divorced from reality. It was our histories, our cultures, our interests, and our identities that tied us together in the first place. Whereas Barlow wrote: “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” we might have said, “We have created a world just for the six of us, where we feel safe expressing the things we would not speak elsewhere.”
- And why should a utopia sidestep the messiness of multiple identities and collective living, when for the hardest things there has always been no way out but through?
- There is no World Wide Web, but many worlds of webs, wherein different groups with particular aims and interests bump into and overlap with one another. The groups, like the voices they represent, morph and shrink daily. But this is not a bug. There is power in the shifts.
Reenvisioning the Internet: Embrace Its Multiplicity
Metadata
Highlights
- That the World Wide Web that followed was neither especially wide nor encompassing of the whole world at its inception reflects the aspirational utopias embedded within it. Folded into those early days was an earnest enthusiasm for the potential of one world, flattened and connected.
(Only people with nothing to fear see the idea of a completely connected world as unequivocally good.)
- The internet was one thick line that toppled over cars and lawns from my house to hers.
- My web friends existed in a mosaic of time zones, so company was a lavish resource. We shared art, wrote impassioned responses to one another’s stories and articles, and never gave our real names. They were the least important thing we had to offer. Through snatched minutes and hours, we happily claimed our own corner of the web, which belonged not to any one of us, but to all of us, yet only us.
- If artists want to reimagine the web, we must set aside the tendency to subscribe to a universal “us” that is blank, neutral, and anonymous (a.k.a white, Western, and tech-literate).
- But the experiences I had online were as much as about the distance the medium provided as the intimacy it enabled with each other. In fact, the two were intertwined: My web friends and I were never bodiless atoms, divorced from reality. It was our histories, our cultures, our interests, and our identities that tied us together in the first place. Whereas Barlow wrote: “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” we might have said, “We have created a world just for the six of us, where we feel safe expressing the things we would not speak elsewhere.”
- And why should a utopia sidestep the messiness of multiple identities and collective living, when for the hardest things there has always been no way out but through?
- There is no World Wide Web, but many worlds of webs, wherein different groups with particular aims and interests bump into and overlap with one another. The groups, like the voices they represent, morph and shrink daily. But this is not a bug. There is power in the shifts.