Willa Magland
IndieWeb Carnival: Digital Relationships
Posted Feb 4, 2024
A favorite blogger of mine, Manuel Moreale, is hosting this month's IndieWeb Carnival, and the topic he has chosen is Digital Relationships. I think this is a great topic, because as a community we're starting to look back at the pandemic and evaluate how we reacted to our new, technology-reliant environments, as well as how we changed them, and in turn, how we changed the relationships we had through them.
It didn't matter so much when sending a message or setting up the occasional video call was secondary to real-life interaction, but when technology became the only way, it was suddenly very important that it functioned well and reliably.
Coming out of this digital quarantine, I kind of hit myself with another one when I did my study abroad in Germany. Then, not only were my friends digitized, but my family too. Suddenly "okay" technology wasn't cutting it, and I needed to adjust things to make it fit my needs as well as possible, and with the right software, I was able to do that. WhatsApp worked so well for communicating with my family that we still use it today, along with Zoom for (the now rare) video calls. In need of a curated way to access foreign-language learning material, I started using RSS, a system that I was able to design to streamline my language learning and communicate with my German friends and family.
All of this because of my relationships with other people, and I think that's what web technology should strive to do: provide tools for uplifting and free communication.
The extent to which we use this technology is a spectrum, though. For someone I see every day in the real world, I might only have their cell number, and communicate purely through SMS. I don't have a place to send them large mp4s or photos, but that's OK, because my relationship with them is mostly in real-life, and I'll show them that video tomorrow.
Compare this relationship with that of my long-distance friend, which is entirely digital. We have multiple outlets and means of communicating with each other, and have experimented and invested time into different kinds of technology to see what works best for us. The result is communication as simple and streamlined as simply speaking to each other.
In both of these cases, I have shaped technology to fit my needs, all with the focus of human-to-human communication. The present web has become increasingly hostile to this kind of personal interaction. How much of the content do I consume is explicitly from people I know? And how often do I interact online with words and thoughts, rather than with simply a like?
This website is an attempt at making my online experience a bit more personal, my little corner for exploring the IndieWeb, Small Web, Personal Web, and whatever else is out there. Thank you Manuel for organizing this month's Carnival, and I'm looking forward for the wrap up at the end!
Willa
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