The Blogosphere Of Poems
Folks are starting to respond to Robin Rendle’s declaration “that we are a poem and not software”, and that perhaps the personal sites and blogs we make for the web ought to reflect this.
I’m sort of dragging the conversation in a different direction slightly here but what Katherine touches on is the oldest question on the internet: what should our personal websites do? Should we prioritize getting a new gig or selling a service? Or can we be ourselves? Weird and fun and peculiar? Should we talk about topic X but avoid topic Y? That’s a common one I hear from fellow bloggers.
Manu:
These are all very interesting questions but for me, the more pressing question is a slightly different one: which you is your personal site representing? We often don’t pay too much attention to this but we all have different ways of being ourselves.
I realize that the main issue here is that I need to be more comfortable and patient with myself. I also need to share whatever I want, because at the end of this day, it’s my personal site. I’m not selling an image on here. I don’t have a brand, classes, e-books nor am I asking for money.
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Winnie’s exhortation that we ought “normalise being whole persons”, a construction I’ve cited way more than once, most recently when picking up on Kevin Lawver’s description of the blogosphere as the great empathy engine of the web.
Manu is right, of course:
A personal site is—or at least it should be—a reflection of whoever you want to be. It could be the complete you, one of the many versions of you, or even an aspirational you. Just be comfortable in your digital home. It’s all that matters.
What I still want, though, is that normalization of whole-personhood. Understanding all the reasons of—if nothing else, but certainly not limited to—privilege that keep some from being able to embody their full selves online, it’s the web (and the world) that should be.