This post is a response to Do people IRL know you have a blog?
A short while before I came across bacardi55’s call to conversation, I asked my wife if she wanted to see something cool. She said yeah. I showed her the Reading section, and explained that I was constructing the functionality to track my reading on my own website.
Her response was a blank stare. Nonplussed, she asked me why anyone would care about which books I was reading. I told her that it didn’t matter, because I do. And to do it on my own website — as opposed to Goodreads or some other such walled garden of a corporate behemoth — is a small act of defiance. It is to stand up to the tech overlords and cry “No!” It is one small step in the direction of preserving the independent web.
By the time I finished my speech, she had moved on with her life. I think she was in the next room, folding clothes.
That’s the usual response whenever I try to talk about my website — this website — in real life (IRL). In the nearly twenty years that’s passed since I first published this website, the times I’ve brought it up in conversation I’m usually confronted with why. People around me didn’t get why I wanted a personal website in 2005. With the rise of social media platforms, they certainly didn’t get it a decade later. And my feeling is that, as yet another decade has passed — with popularity of big tech platforms on the vane — they still don’t get it.
I’ve always thought of this as a kind of freedom. A licence to be myself. To explore my interests unapologetically and without having to explain myself. If nobody cares what I’m doing here, it means I’m free to do whatever I want. To say what I’m thinking about whatever I’m thinking about.
At the very top of my to-do list for my personal website, I have highlighted the following quote:
No one else has anything invested in this. No one cares if you do it, or don’t do it. To the world this pursuit is just your cute little hobby.
My personal website has never been popular. No post I’ve written has ever gone viral. At most, an online acquaintance or two has responded in some way to anything I’ve published. Bar the odd exception, nobody I’ve met in real life has ever commented on something I wrote online. It is a form of anonymity through obscurity and disinterest, which I’ve grown to appreciate.
This has freed me from my website becoming a worry stone, as highlighted by Robin Rendle in his post I am a poem I am not software. He writes:
There’s a constant tug of war between wanting to be professional and wanting to be cool online. Sometimes those things overlap and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes the folks who have the opportunities to make a weirdo website are doing so because they’re not financially dependent on their website selling a service or landing a new gig. Their economic livelihood isn’t at risk if someone is turned off by the strange fonts or experimental navigation on their website.
My personal website has never been a source of income. It never will be. To the extent that it is boring, corporate-looking, it is just because I am a boring, perhaps slightly corporate guy. But through browsing the small and independent web, I pick up new inspiration all the time. Perhaps that will eventually see me become a more daring, more edgy person. I wouldn’t hold my breath. But if it does, you can be sure that my website will reflect it.
Either way, I doubt the people around me IRL will take much notice.
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