My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?
Laurel Schwulst
I loveeee the metaphors in here! I never thought about “the cloud” like that. It was very eye-opening that we just accept things without questioning them, and how that mindless acceptance affects our perceptions and ways of thinking about things. My favorite in here is “website as room.” I love hanging out in my friends' rooms and seeing the pieces of them in the objects that they keep and the way they decorate. I think we can also learn a lot about someone and see pieces of them in the websites they like to visit or even the websites they make.
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A Rant About "Technology"
Ursula K. Le Guin
This reading reminded me of a video I watched called “convenience culture is killing our creative impulses.” We are just chasing convenience, which makes us take for granted the “low” technology that we have in our lives. In this piece, Le Guin writes “...as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers…” we dont recognize and appreciate how much of a convenience chairs, medicine, wheels, etc. are!
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A Handmade Web
J. R. Carpenter
“I evoke the term 'handmade web' to suggest slowness and smallness as a forms of resistance.” This!!!! Especially now with AI and seeing the way people are giving up their brains and creativity to get quick “solutions,” I value work made by hand more than ever. Learning, and the slowness that comes with learning and creating, is what makes us human. I love human touches, I love “messy”, I love when time and intention are put into work.
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Rediscovering the Small Web
Parimal Satyal
I used to play Fantage with my cousin when we were young, and we both still think about that game. I remember the day it got shut down, all of the users gathered together and said goodbye. Looking back, it feels bittersweet to remember seeing so many people together online, not on a social media platform, not for views or likes or to sell something. It was my last big memory of the web before it became commercialized and a space primarily for content consumption.