Creativity and Community Online: Unfulfilled Promises

My webpage is 29 years old and counting. October 1996 was when it first went live.

I accept no advertising on my website, and I spend zero time and energy trying to promote it. It is a labor of love, not profit – nothing more, nothing less.

I write on it for myself, and I sometimes forget others read it. Many of my best friends don’t know it exists, and I would be a bit embarrassed if they brought it up. I rarely talk face-to-face with anyone about my website. It is sort of a secret, and I sort of like it that way. I write on my blog semi-surreptitiously, when nobody else is watching. But seldom does a day pass when I am not writing on it.

And so the years have passed – over 29 of them.

Online life has changed drastically since 1996. The Internet had a Utopian tinge to it in the early days, and early adopters (like me) found it an exciting place for humans to connect. This was the genesis for my webpage. A person in Nagoya, Japan or in Manchester, England could access my webpage instantly with a click of the mouse? WOW! I could send an email to someone in Moscow, Russia and they would receive it immediately? FOR FREE? How cool was that? My embrace of early Internet culture was almost that simple. The options for communicating globally (or even locally) before the Internet were few, tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. Then it suddenly became fast, easy, and cheap. The future of online life looked bright. What cool and powerful things could everyday people create and share? I was all-in.

I have since been disappointed. A few years later MySpace and then Facebook arrived, and the beginnings of social media were upon us. Then came Amazon for online commerce and Pornhub for free sex videos – supposedly a significant percentage of all Internet traffic consists of pornograpy. It appears with all our science and technology we created the Internet largely to enable shopping at the online mall (Amazon) and porn viewing in the privacy of your own bedroom (PornHub)? Or so you can go to Twitter to pout about politics and rant about it to strangers? “Cancel culture” and political polarization? The most extreme voices amplified by social media? This is progress? I see it as the opposite.

The Internet in the last decade has become more like a meretricious “culture war” battleground and a mindless minefield of distraction. “Brain rotting” indeed! Or so it seems thus we humans have made the Internet, or at least mostly.

Yesterday I saw this video “I’m Building an Algorithm That Doesn’t Rot Your Brain” by Jack Conte and was sympathetic to his arguments:

“UBIQUITOUS DIGITAL DEVICES COMBINED WITH ADDICTIVE ALGORITHMS AND DOOM-SCROLLING ARE TURNING OUR BRAINS TO GUACAMOLE AND RUINING OUR MENTAL HEALTH WHILE DRIVING US FURTHER APART THAN EVER AND TURNING GREEDY TECH MOGULS INTO BILLIONAIRES!!!”

It is hard to argue with Conte’s description of digital life, even if it is a sweeping generalization.

But the online world today is not entirely populated by Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, Reddit, TikTok, Bluesky, YouTube, or whatever. My website is separate from all that. The initial goals I had back in 1996 still hold true today. I have not sold out. My intentions are and have always been artistic sharing, with one soul reaching out to another. This online ether is new, or relatively new. But the motivation to communicate and connect is ancient.

There are a few individuals who have followed my webpage for decades, even if only checking in occasionally. They come from all over the world.

“Well met!” I say to them.

Critics might point out that the some 60,000 visitors to my site every year are numbers too small to take seriously. True enough. My website is not important. Maybe. But it is also not nothing.

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”