Designing for Future by Building on Values

Resurgence of the #IndieWeb

Yeah I have to admit I was being a little snarky, but for a reason. Wall Street was deeply involved with the Web since inception. It is not new. Maybe we are just waiting for the app bubble to burst just like the dot com. Who knows what will dominate after mobile. Platforms have risen and fallen before.

Venture capital and silos have always shaped the Web. Corporations are not new nor are the collectives who preach the values John Perry Barlow coined. Was the manifesto a little hyperbolic and utopian? Of course, but we can have a Web scattered like lost words.

After reading danah boyd’s latest piece I am not willing to accept a bleak future where the web runs on bots and not on Jon Udell definition of the web: “small pieces loosely joined.”

danah boyd is right. The web has gone mainstream. Its no longer a refuge of others but a reflection of everyone. I also recognize that for the past decade scholars researching the web emerged from the original refuge. They built and were shaped by the Web.

Its time for some serious introspection…followed by action.

A lot of romancing the nerd permeates the calls for STEM research, every kid should code, connected learning, and digital pedagogy. We need to recognize the everyday practices of the web and not just focus on the fringe.

This does not mean we need to have a web void of agency. The identity work that Barlow sought to protect, the learning Howard Rheingold studied, and the adolescence that danah boyd lived does not have to be commodified.

Now old men sing about their dreams, women laugh and children scream all over the Web about the mundane. We just have to make sure the lunacy and lightning we call the Web stays open.

We can support a better way forward.

Maybe what we need is proactive scholarship designed to help support a free and federated web. The Web can not proceed by its own design. The words have to be yours and mine.

We need a community and not just a commodity.

I also agree with Jobava that the dichotomy of the Web as a different space rings false. Yet infrastructure must exist. There is some physicality to the web.

And we can look to Silicon Valley as a prophet on the burning shore or a profit. The space of the Web can be open… or openly traded on the stock exchange.

We need #TeamWeb to coalesce on shared principles of the Web as an open resource for all. Will this involve capital, of course. Yet we can coalesce around tools that use open standards, have transparent policies around privacy, and play nice with their API’s.

I still believe the web can be a great equalizer. A few billion people will come online over the next decade. Thats billions more small pieces loosely joined.