Building The World Wide Web
🔗 Long live hypertext! – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden
Hypertext transforms thinking
As an online writer, my philosophy is link maximalism; links add another layer to my writing, whether I’m linking to an expansion of a particular idea or another person’s take, providing evidence or citation, or making a joke by juxtaposing text and target. Links reveal personality as much as the text. Linking allows us to stretch our ideas, embedding complexity, acknowledging ambiguity, holding contradictions.
Online writing is not the same as book or magazine writing, even op-ed or letter-to-the-editor writing. To understand online writing, you also need to understand its ecosystem: online, we think together, iterating on each other and boosting ideas we like by linking to them. Online writing is conversational, social, and deeply embedded in remix culture (all the more suitable for back-linking). It’s interconnected in a way and degree that’s not possible for print formats. Much of the power of online thinking is how ideas synthesize out of the collective.
I love this so much. It comes at a time that I've been making an effort to reframe my use of the internet. It began with a simple observation of how I've been using the internet: Feeds/timelines, primarily RSS, Mastodon and Micro.blog. What I've come to consider a problem is my habit of scrolling and not reading. And while the timelines of Mastodon and micro.blog are people they are still never ending feeds of people offering snippets and threads of conversation. For me scrolling is skimming. Even when I engage it's rarely conversation of any length or substance.
Most of my RSS is news. Not at all personal, just more scrolling of various news outlets that cover the things I'm interested in. It's an excellent way to stay informed of happenings in the world, yes. But I'm realizing how my practice of skimming is not helpful or meaningful.
The process of stepping out of these feed-skimming habits led me to begin experimenting with different forms of blog exploration a few weeks ago. Going forward I'm making it a point to continue a focus on exploration of personal sites and blogs. And as Tracy discusses, I intend to put more emphasis on cross linking because, really, isn't that the point of the World Wide Web?
A surprising sidenote to all this is how it's led to my rebuilding this website. On a personal level, it's been something of a revelation about how I participate in the internet. I feel like I'm still in the moment of grappling with it. I sometimes have a tendency to overthink stuff and perhaps that's what's going on here. But the real truth is that, like many, I've spent many hours of my life in this internet world. This is where we let our minds roam and so it behooves us to be careful and more thoughtful in our stewardship and participation here.
The absolute beauty of the World Wide Web, what fascinated me in 1998 as I built my first website, is that this is our place to create, page by page, a vast cross pollinating garden. Just as my tiny house in the woods reflects my life, so too does this website. From the words to the photos to the design, it is a personal site. It's a sharp contrast to the corporate internet created by Meta, Twitter and Google.
A last thought for this post. The point of the corporate internet is profit. It's capitalism. We all know that. It succeeds by capturing our time and our attention. It has succeeded by quietly reframing our participation, our intent and even our desires. And not just in the passive scrolling and consumption, it's also captured our creative energy with the lure of monetization.
We can't know where it's all going but I'm finding recent flourishing of the personal web an inspiring development.