Putting the “Person” in “Personal Website”
The other day I saw a meme that went something like this:
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.
I thought about that for a minute, then decided: making websites should be the same!
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.
A personal website has affordances which encourage you to create something that you couldn’t otherwise create anywhere else, like YouTube or Reddit or Facebook or Twitter or even Mastodon. Why? Because the context of those environments is outward looking. It’s not personal, but social. The medium shapes the message.
If I were to put this in terms of a priority of constituencies, it would be something like this:
- Personal website: personal over social.
- Social platform: social over personal.
Additionally, a personal website and a social platform are two different environments: one I’ve cultivated, the other I’ve been granted. As Mandy puts it:
[having a personal website] allowed me to cultivate the soil to suit my purposes—rather than having to adapt my garden to the soil I was given
Like dancing or singing, you don’t have to be skilled to do them. Personal websites should be the same. They’re for everyone. Like dancing and singing, their expression can be as varied as every individual human.