A friend of mine has started a Gemini blog, and it sent me on a train of
thought that led to what I guess are philosophical questions, but they're
practical, too.
Namely, what do I really want for a personal home in cyberspace?
What do I think the internet should be used for?
In what ways, if any, should I express myself online where other people
can see it?
I'm a visual artist, and I dabble in poetry and other writing, and in audio,
too. Over the years I've gotten pretty good at compartmentalizing. The way
I enjoy using the internet is vastly different from how most people use it
now--I liked the furtive connections, the sense of discovery, the feeling that
it was all made by people with roughly the same goal: to express something
about themselves. In part it felt safe because it was small and hard to search,
and not that many people used it. That creates the illusion of community even
when it's not there.
I don't want the largest possible audience. I just want interesting people to
be interested in me. Being seen seems like it's only good for a tiny subset of
creative people. For the rest it leads to the misery of fame without the
rewards of success.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I guess it circles back around to what
kind of web presence to have. I've divorced most of these aspects of myself
from my real name, which is now strictly "professional." But there are
lingering questions: How easy do I make it to find me? How easy do I make
it share my work? Using Gopher or Gemini exclusively is a delightful middle
finger to the social media landscape of maximizing views and engagement. Even
a static website feels fairly unconventional, though it can be combed by
Google as easily as any CMS. I like RSS as a concept, but I've toyed with
the idea of flattening my static sites, simplifying my maintenance burden,
and even doing away with that. That's a drastic step back, into a world
where I cycled through a series of bookmarks every day to see which websites
had updated. Though I suppose I do, in fact, do the same thing now. We live
in a post-RSS world where everyone has to visit all their various social
media sites to check their feeds.
Or maybe I'd keep RSS for some sites but not others. I have a visual art
gallery page. Honestly maybe it should be either a blog or a static portfolio,
not this in-between amalgamation it's become. A gallery with RSS notifications.
I don't know. I'm hesitant to abandon the idea altogether.
This amounts to a whole lot of not knowing, I guess. I don't know that I've
actually figured anything out, but I've given you something to read at least.
