In which I rant about my frustrations with the modern web and reminiscence on my early years developing for the web....

The angst of automation

Most of what you see today in social media is curated by a carefully-crafted algorithm and/or a statistical model that decides what to show you based on how you've engaged with the web.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with this current model (and there is certainly a purpose for it, especially when there is a lot of information to sort and sift through), it can be alienating to engage with others on the web in a manner that, at least to me, feels utterly inauthentic. The personas we present on social media are often "optimized" to be marketable even if we're not selling anything. This is by design because our personal information, our usage habits, our preferences comprise the real currency of digital media: our data.

Hidden in those Terms of Service agreements most people tend to disregard (because of how opaque the language in them is) are conditions that allow these platforms to use your data in some questionable ways, even not-for-profit services like the Crisis Text Line who claim to scrub Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from your data when they sell it off to a third-party.

Sure, it may be notoriously difficult to obtain sufficiently large (whatever that means) bodies of data for Natural Language Processing pipelines, but to use data from vulnerable populations, from people who are already struggling to find a confidante in their own lives, betrays a level of trust far beyond what these services and platforms can even hope to regain.

Feeds of frustration

The predominance and prevalence of feed-based social media, powered by these algorithmic curations, has seeped into what previously were personal sites with a lot of personality.

Nowadays, we see a lot of the same formats, the same, cookie-cutter WordPress/Ghost/Medium blogs where it's hard to stand out as a creator, Facebook and Twitter feeds

With algorithmically-curated feeds, we're exposed to information that may be popular and highly engaging but inaccurate or lack sufficient information.

(And also, must everything be SEO-optimized even if I'm just running a personal site about heirloom tomatoes or something??)

We traded convenience at the cost of character, exchanged the personal for the profitable.

But you know, it wasn't always this way.

In the beginning was...

(c. early-to-mid 2000s)

The cyberpartment

The first website I ever built was a virtual apartment, or cyberpartment as I termed it, that I showed off to a handful of my (2) friends. None of this involved JavaScript, of course, because I either hadn't learned it yet or it was unable to achieve what I wanted it to do (Both?). It's been 18 years, so the details of this endeavour are vague, but in essence my little cyberpartment was a collection of HTML pages linked to each other in some manner. Each page was a different room in the virtual apartment, and to enter one, you simply click on a graphic of a door.

On the home page, visitors would be greeted by the image of a door I had clearly made in MS Paint. Clicking on that "opened" the "apartment", or to put it in a much more banal way, brought you to the next page I'd coded up. There was even a window in one of these "rooms". What I put in these "rooms" I can unfortunately no longer remember, but perhaps that is to everyone's benefit (to be spared of my cringiest years).

I was particularly proud of this very basic website because it was being hosted on a web server I set up on our shared family PC running Windows. I configured KF Web Server to serve the pages up to the public because I was 12 or 13 and blissfully unaware of security practices...and I was also probably running afoul of our ISP's terms of service by running a web server.

But none of that mattered to me because I had a web presence at last, and one that impressed my (2) friends.

The Great White Way on the Web

Soon after I explored the world of other HTTP servers (Apache, which intimidated me, Microsoft Personal Web Server, which seemed a lot easier to use I suppose), the conveniences of WYSIWYG web page editors, and the quirky character of Geocities pages, I became enamored with musical theatre and all things Broadway/Off-Broadway/West End/Off-West End (I was far too pretentious at the time to acknowledge that regional and community theatre can be just as incredible).

My closest friends in meatspace (I made some new ones after transferring to a new school) for the most part did not appreciate the art of musical theatre, so I turned to online communities that lived in PHP-based forums to find my niche of people. I was pleased to find many (at least 5) other people who shared my passion for Sondheim, Wicked, Les Miserables, The Drowsy Chaperone...(this list is by no means comprehensive as I was very obsessed with musical theatre).

Like many fans, I had even entertained the possibility of becoming an actor in musical theatre but soon learned that such a career required much patience, discipline, survival on very little money, hours upon hours of practice, actual acting and singing ability (as it turns out, starring in a middle school production of a famous musical did not quite capture the challenges of that career).

So instead I turned to building fansites for musical theatre actors as my creative outlet. All that energy I would have expended on singing lessons I channeled into this mix of the creative and the technical. I worked with my online friends (all of whom were teenagers at the time as well) who were more versed in graphic design to put together a unique, colorful, and oftentimes whimsical expression of love for musical theatre.

The present day

As a sort of rebellion, if you can call it that, against the tyranny of timelines and bubble feeds, I built this Digital Garden as a way to present my ideas in a format that I don't find nearly as constricting as a blog, like the one I had here. This site, while not quite as organized as my beautifully-made, MS Paint graphic-decorated 2003/4-era cyberpartment, is a better reflection of my brain than anything I've ever built as a personal site. I tried the whole static site blog thing after I grew weary of WordPress and Ghost (which are both excellent, just not my cup of tea) and found that I seldom updated it (it's been 6 years since I updated that blog).

There's something liberating about this format that's not bounded by timelines, chronology. The data I have here is not linear and not static (although the site itself is static). I can continually update this page if I wanted to (and I probably will).

Some other notes...

Yes, there is an abundance of alliteration here, but that wasn't intentional, I swear!