I was never able to pinpoint the source of my anxiety when it came to social media. Laurel writes that social media today prioritizes advertising above their users' happiness. Reading that was almost like an aha moment. I very easily get overwhelmed on social media — often avoiding it all together. Part of that is because of the sheer amount of unwanted information being thrown at you from all sides. And the worst part is that the only reason it's there is because someone paid for it to be there. I understand why it's important for individuals to guide the web's future. The peace one can find in a simplistic, handmade, website made only to give the user a sort of experience is incomparable to the experience of scrolling through twitter. In a way, I feel cared for. An artist's website is made with genuine concern for the content they are sharing. And I feel like you can see that in how a website is built.
My favorite metaphor Laurel offers is a website as a plant. I often become frustrated when a result I;m hoping for does not come soon enough.I look forward to trying to keep a patient mindset in creating a website for this class. Hopefully it can train my patience in everyday life.
I just started reading Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr which is described as a historical fiction/science fiction/fantasy, none of which are my usual genres of choice. I’m more often reading a sappy coming of age Sally Rooney or an occasional romance. Interestingly enough, I am finding Cloud Cuckoo Land fairy easy to read through. And it's only because of how much he delves into the emotions and motivations of each character. I think that human emotion is the backbone of fiction. I’m no author but I cannot imagine reading or writing a book without consideration for the emotions my characters are feeling. I imagine that influencing reader emotion is one of the larger incentives of writing fiction as well.
Technology comes in the simplest of forms. The pencil I’m writing this entry with is technology. The screw top water bottle across from me is technology. Surely, human emotion can be considered technology — a rather complex kind of technology at that. I see the importance of considering human emotion in the art you create — the website. You want the user to feel like the experience they are undergoing is coming from another human, and there is a certain level of care in that.
I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to draw attention both to the manual labor involved in the composition of web pages, and the functioning of the web page itself as a 'manual', a 'handbook', a set of instructions required for a computer program to run.
My first experience making a website was in a software engineering class in which I spent the majority of my time copying and pasting code from a series of lecture presentation slides. It was discouraging to learn to make websites that way—with the knowledge that in the next unit we would be using templates to make a recipe site. What is so fulfilling and fun about designing books is the manual labor and the consideration of materials. For me—feeling the materials and having a hand in building and binding the finished product is necessary, especially after having so much consideration for its content. The only way I could learn to enjoy building a website is to have a hand in making the small decisions. Should the margins of this box be 22px or 23px? It is reminiscent of me choosing between glossy and semi-gloss stock.
The “weight” of a website from Low Tech draws me. Its existing context is the amount of energy it consumes—a large and scary and highly concerning rising number. Big websites with big communities take up a lot of space in that rising number and I think about how reliant we are on those big websites. Abe discusses how websites serve communities and naturally larger websites like Facebook draw multiple communities and hosts a space for them to live. Of course it would be better for that number to have smaller sites living separate from these giant corporate sites, but I worry about how like minded individuals would find each other. It’s much easier today to find others in your niche—how would everyone react if they couldn’t anymore? Would they find companionship in people physically closer to them? Or would they just be more lonely.
The way Seu begins this case study makes it hard to focus on anything other than the fact that as I write this journal entry I’m using a mechanical pencil that is a mark maker. It is depositing led marks at my own whim—whichever mark meets my current needs. I’m tightening and squeezing my marks as the page ends faster than my sentences. Philippe Cao, Ritual for Empowerment: Upon interacting with this site, my immediate reaction is gratification. Being rewarded for a simple click of a button that is asking to be clicked by a greeting card sort of compliment does exactly what it is supposed to do. It draws attention to the physical, bodily interaction with clicking a button on a screen. The interface of a html button is an invention to click. And when you click you expect something to happen. In Cao’s website you’re rewarded simply by using it.
My relationship with technology is charged and ever changing. I’m constantly swearing off Instagram and redownloading it because I don’t know what’s going on with anyone. The minute I go on semester breaks my notifications are off on everything, because my days seem to go slower when I don’t have notifications. I am able to stay more present. I would love to participate in the sort of digital detox Chimero describes, a cold-turkey approach. But every aspect of my life involves technology, my communications, my work, my school. A digital detox could only be possible for someone with the tools to escape from the world for a little while.