Archive

Interest in the IndieWeb appears to have upticked ever so slightly over the past couple of weeks, which may be why I've noticed so many more posts about how and why people are posting to their own sites and their various social presences. I meant to weigh in much sooner on some of them.

I take issue, for example, with Colin Walker's post Self Portraits. If I understand Colin correctly, he seems to be saying that while we are telling stories about ourselves on social media, those stories may somehow be the wrong stories. To me, that suggests that there is one true story, one true self to be depicted in the self portrait. I think that's just wrong, and not only in the case of social media. Long before there was an internet, there was Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which made plain what people may have known internally all along, that we present different selves in different interactions. I know my Twitter self, such as it is, is not the same self that I am here or in any of my other web presences. Colin says he's "tired of telling the wrong story". He doesn't say why he thinks it is the wrong story, rather than a different story. Anyway, the reason it has taken me well over a week to get that little rant off my chest is that I've also been thinking about those different selves of mine, and while I regard this self as the Mothership I also have increasingly come to realise that the friction involved in posting here is a definite barrier, especially for rapid conversational responses and the like. This was brought home to me while bringing over an old post from a previous incarnation. I’m a baker, not a fryer, from about four years ago, tracked the development of my online presence through the various bits of software that enabled it. I was pretty overjoyed to go full circle back to static sites, thanks to Octopress. It felt good to get away from WordPress. Then Octopress stalled, and I gave up (prematurely, I now realise) on other static site generators and started moving everything from Octopress to Grav, which now powers this site. Around the same time, I bumped into the IndieWeb. That reaffirmed my desire to continue to have my own sites. I never did go all in on Twitter or Facebook, although I did enjoy Tumblr. I quickly realised, however, that making Grav fully IndieWeb competent was beyond my abilities. With help, I managed to do some bits of it, but I also started getting into WithKnown and, lately, micro.blog. And when I finally got micro.blog and WithKnown talking to each other, I was again very happy, although I did also ask: "what exactly have I gained". So, here I am again, pondering the future of my technology. It is a pain to write new stuff for Grav, requiring a whole bunch of time-consuming steps. There is a version of the theme I use that seems to keep the production site and the development site synced in both directions, which would definitely simplify matters, but I've been afraid of trying it in case I break something. WordPress is becoming more and more IndieWeb competent, but it remains problematically opaque. In experiments, I never did get automated POSSE worked out, although it works fine doing it by hand. It's bad enough converting the old Octopress files to Grav; I've no desire to go back to WordPress. On the other hand, there's so much more interest in static sites, and I know a bit more. Maybe I could shift over to Hugo or Jekyll or something else and still get the benefits of IndieWeb. I can Tweet with ease, when I want, and knock stuff out to WithKnown (which will POSSE easily) and micro.blog, and the connection between those last two can only improve. Maybe I should save this site for longer pieces that reflect this particular me, the one that likes to write and likes to have something worthwhile to write about. Maybe I should embrace the ease of posting to WithKnown and make more of it here on the Mothership. At the moment, the sidebar shows some recent items from my Stream. I wonder whether it is possible to integrate the Stream more fully. An iframe, perhaps? And as for bringing over the old stuff from Octopress to Grav, I think I am going to be a bit more selective. That's prompted by something else Colin Walker noted, the "importance of looking back in order to reflect and remember," which Patrick Rhone said in a podcast. I'm glad I happened to select that post about my online journey to update yesterday.

Geeky

Thanks so much for your thoughts, Jeremy. I will go through them carefully.

Jeremy takes issue with the ideas in Self portraits because, to him it "suggests that there is one true story, one true self to be depicted in the self portrait." He goes on to say that "we present different selves in different interactions." I would not argue with this but feel that he has misunderstood the point I was trying to make. We indeed have one story, our story, but it has many facets. We can present it in different ways and observe it from myriad different angles. We offer up different aspects of ourselves in different circumstances and when dealing with different people - that's not up for debate. My point is that rather than telling it, in whichever form we choose, we instead focus on the story of others without giving our take. Or we sanitise and embellish, warp our offering, solely to appease our audience. It's something I've been cognisant of, and written about, for almost as long as I've been using social networks:

"I can't help wondering if our normal behaviour is influenced by the online communities we join. Do we participate for ourselves or for others? Do we share things we like or things we think our followers will appreciate?" - 2008

Unfortunately, I've often fallen short which frustrates and annoys me. Still, that's not to say that we can't weave aspects of other's stories into our own but we need to explain why. Why do we follow someone? Why did we share something and what do we think about it? This is why I never used to follow accounts that curated endless links without adding any comment or value. They served no purpose for me; I want to know what you think! So, I'm not saying that we can't divide our story, tell it from different points of view for different audiences. But the portrait we do paint should be our own.

This is a real­ly inter­est­ing post from Col­in Walk­er about what we have effec­tive­ly been doing on social media for the last 10 years. Paint­ing a self por­trait of our­selves over time. I’ve nev­er thought about it like that before, and when you add in you’re own blog or per­son­al site, it makes for a rich and tex­tured ongo­ing piece. His con­clu­sions at the end of the post are chal­leng­ing…

We can tell the sto­ries we think oth­er peo­ple want to hear. We can tell skewed sto­ries as we are often not tru­ly hon­est with our­selves. We tell oth­er people’s sto­ries rather than our own, with­out com­ment, with­out opin­ion. What use are the wrong sto­ries and are we doing our­selves a dis­ser­vice by telling them?

I think, that with­out real­is­ing it, over the last few months of try­ing to revi­talise my blog and using Micro.blog I and many oth­ers are try­ing to reclaim our sto­ries and take hold of the paint­brush. Post­ing to Twit­ter through your own site first changes the focus of the ser­vice entire­ly. We go from being a pas­sive con­sumer, lik­ing, retweet­ing, reply­ing, with the occa­sion­al orig­i­nal post, to an orig­i­nal post being the focus. We are cre­at­ing and adding to our own sto­ry rather than expand­ing and adding to some­one else’s. Of course it’s not wrong to be involved in oth­er people’s lives, we are cre­at­ed to be in com­mu­ni­ty, but by cre­at­ing first the involve­ment turns into a con­ver­sa­tion rather than just turn­ing the vol­ume up for some­one else. There’s a bal­ance to be found. Also on: Twitter icon