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What we are on the web Internet for — on the Internet? In the web?
I am in my studio. I know why I am in my studio. Heck, here I even know who I am in my studio, at lucky occasions.
Mobile media, apps, didn’t kill the web browser. So why do I not too often visit any websites anymore? Why did the number of web visits decline so fast after I purchased my first smart mobile device, an iPod Touch, only on 24 December 2010, at Schiphol Amsterdam airport, heading for the gate, off to Indonesia, where a touch screen hadn’t happened yet at the sites that we visited. What have I been in touch with since, over generations of Apple pods, phones and pads, delivering me Facebook, Path, Whatsapp, iMessage, Find my friends, Findery, Twitter, Youtube, Vimeo, Google, Goodreader, Tripadvisor, Pocket, Medium, and so forth and so on...?
Is it content? Is it people? Places? Things? Is it context? Is it links to all of the above? Do they connect me and my interests, my quest for a life, to its realization?
I love my apps for what they provide me with, no matter where I am. I love my consumer mobility. As far as productivity goes, I love Drafts for all writing (except the one that I am doing now, in Pagespinner, but that’s for later). I love Procreate for its incredible effect on my gestural freedom. It brought my handwriting back to me, my signature motor system.
Since I rediscovered my motor system, I started applying it to material manipulation again. At the studio, where else? I love the new shop for its space, for its light, its table tops, its material stock, its straight walls and shelves, its heating, water and gas. For its neighbours, its street, the birds in the little park behind it, the folks that pass by the shopwindow. Last but not least, I love its shared with the neighbours wifi.
Counting the flakes
STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF THE INTERNET, LOOKING OUTSIDE THE SHOP
Where are we when we are on Facebook? On Facebook? ‘Wat ben je aan het doen?’, ‘what are you doing?’, it is a good question that I have to thank FB for, every time I consult it. I don’t even wonder who’s asking. So what am I doing: there? And where goes what I am doing, from there? I am asking.
‘Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet’ was a valid quote in the early 1990s. I know who was asking then: Dave Winer brought it to my mind.
Ever since social media’s rise — which is the rise of part of the Internet’s endless possibilities for its servers, of collecting, processing, connecting and (re-)distributing data, some of it being content, or people, or places, or things, or context — many apps ask you to do something for them. Doing something for an app is not the same as doing something for the Internet. Doing something for an app is at best doing something for (a part of) the community that is served by it and that is serving it. Some apps I am happier serving than others. Just like with people, or places, or things, or contexts. Same all over.
This morning early I re-installed the ‘Medium’ publishing app. I once downloaded it, only to throw it back after a while, not using it. A FB post guided me to an article about Google giving up its librarian ambitions, killing it softly. I looked it up at the source, in Medium. ‘Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job', by Andy Baio. Published in ‘The Message’.
I am increasingly using FB to ‘share only with me’, for later reading or passing it on, whatever fits the purpose of doing something for myself, for my friends or family. Doing something for the Internet, or for any app, is doing something for a larger picture and what we hope that it will show us and make us do. It is like doing something for the arts, for science, for your street, for your country, for your belief system, for politics, for the better of something whatever it is that you think that could be improved by your contribution to it. Don’t be shy, don’t be arrogant. Every individual contribution is a modest one. Even the biggest breakthrough contributions to the biggest systems are performed standing on the shoulders of others.
Actually, what any of these Internet supported applications and platforms can do for us, is exactly what we do to it: communicate and share ideas and their realization in any aggregate, online, offline. Which brings me back to the question where we are — where we want to be found.
Which brings me back to NQPaOFU. Which brings me back to Pagespinner. Which brings me back to my studio. Which brings me back to my motor system, which over the past hours I only used to touch the right keys on my Macbook Pro. Which brings me back to opening this channel to friends, to family, to a context, to a bigger picture. Which brings me back to a reader who is not ‘on FB’ but who is addressed through a web address, hosted on a server of my choice. No, it is not sitting under my desk but in some park in the US. Is it safe for you and me to meet here? Safe in the sense of staying accessible for future visits, by you or me, by folks that follow links here? I have no idea. I just pay the rent. In return I can feel chez moi and invite you for a visit. ‘Web for One’ the way I imagined it, was a liberating idea in 1996. If I have to leave FB to get a bit closer to it, I count on Pagespinner 5.0 and Fetch 5.7 to keep me on track.
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