Our Spaces on the Internet: Personal Websites and Social Media

In this Interintellect Salon, Dominic Duffin will lead an exploration of our spaces on the internet, how we use them, how or whether they represent us as individuals, their value as places for learning and experimentation, self-expression and socializing.

Most of us probably have multiple spaces on the internet. Personal websites, blogs, social media accounts. These spaces can be places to meet people, to express ourselves, to document our lives or promote our skills to potential employers or clients. What are the most important purposes of our online presence, and how does this differ for different people? Which parts of our online spaces are like digital living rooms, and which are more like digital billboards?

Our spaces on the internet can also be places to learn and experiment. For designers and programmers, a personal website can be a playground for trying out new ideas, a place where there are infinite possibilities, a place for self-expression unhindered by the constraints of working for someone else. Back in the day, before most people’s online lives were dominated by the current crop of largely uncustomizable profiles, making your space online truly yours, whether a personal website or profile on a site like Neopets, was many people’s first introduction to coding.

If you build your own personal website, you have potentially unlimited scope to make it completely yours. If you sign up for one of today’s mainstream social media platforms you can probably choose a cover photo and an avatar, and maybe choose a color, but otherwise your profile has the same look and feel as everyone else’s. For many people, these platforms are our main space on the internet, but can these spaces ever really represent us, or do they just represent the company behind the platform? On the other hand, building your own site from scratch requires skills that many people don’t have. How does the experience of having your own personal website differ if you can build it yourself versus if you have to get someone else to build it for you, or use a template, and does this affect your ability to have a space online that is truly yours?

There are many rules and conventions that constrain our online spaces. Platforms may require that we use our real names, impose character counts, or restrict the ability to have multiple accounts. Most people have multiple identities and interests that don’t necessarily fit neatly together, but there is often pressure to fit content creation within whatever subject area your audience knows you for. In real life, it is normal to share different aspects of ourselves to different people, but that is difficult online where anyone might see everything you do. Where might the continued evolution of our online spaces lead? Can we break free of some of these rules and conventions? How might our online spaces converge with how we live our lives in real life?

Good to check out pre-salon:

• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
• It’s Time to Get Personal
• Why I’m Glad I Grew Up Playing Neopets
• PersonalSit.es
• Welcome to the Spontaneous Internet

Time zones:

Saturday May 8th

12 noon San Francisco
3 pm New York
8 pm London
9 pm Berlin
11 pm Dubai

Save the date:

This Salon is part of a track: Culture and Identity in Digital Space.

Next event: June 5th, 8pm London – Time versus Space: The Geographies of a Digital World

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