Putting the “Person” in “Personal Website”
Isn’t it crappy how basic human activities like singing, dancing, and making art have been turned into skills instead of being recognized as behaviors? The point of doing these things has become to get good at them. But they should be recognized as things humans do innately, like how birds sing or bees make hives.
The original vision for the web, according to Tim Berners-Lee, was to make it a collaborate medium where everyone could read and write.
Social media sort of achieved this, but the incentives are off. And it’s not just about ownership of the content you produce and who can monetize it, but the context in which you produce it. Mandy nails this in her recent piece “Coming home”:
While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.
Yes! This is why I believe everyone could benefit from a personal website. Its form encourages you to look inward, whereas every social platform on the internet encourages you to look outward.
