Chat With Seán
Metadata
Highlights
- Getting back to your questions: there are certain online spaces which make me feel like a guinea pig running on a wheel and others where I feel like a human being making meaningful decisions. The former type of experience encloses me in a state of aimless, desperate compulsion, whereas the latter empowers me to preserve my rights & values and to live with mindful intention. When considering these experiences, I keep coming back to a root question underlying this distinction: in which direction are the incentives aligned? Towards power or empowerment? My sense is that chipping away at an answer to this question requires some measure of both romanticism and futurism. (View Highlight)
- My entry point for this way of being online was really just the general excitement which I originally felt about the web as a realm of discovery, creativity, and connection. I remember how magical web spaces felt during my earliest days online, and how empowering it was to learn that anyone could create or enter digital spaces freely as a means of exploring their identity and expressing their interests beyond the norms & limitations of offline society – and on top of that, connecting with other strange humans around the world who they would never otherwise never meet. For someone who has always been a social outsider, this felt especially revolutionary. (View Highlight)
New highlights added January 30, 2023 at 9:06 AM
- Now on to the “gardening” aspect. Gardening is an activity which begins with a recognition of what is currently growing or not growing in a particular environment, and a consideration of how that ecosystem might be changed ‘for the better’ based upon a certain values framework. Notice that I used the terms “environment” and “ecosystem” here, which I’ve noticed being increasingly incorporated into discussions of web platforms/experiences in recent years (this is probably a good sign). In the same way that a community is not just a network of people, neither is the web just a network of wires & signals which link people together. It is a space within which there are varying ‘ecological’ conditions and propensities. Some communities will thrive in one landscape and wither in another, and some landscapes are more open to ‘biodiversity’ than others. (View Highlight)
- Taken together, my sense is that these actions inevitably lead us away from passive acceptance of flattening hegemony as the default mode of being on the web and toward an active process which enriches the landscape with a wider array of community gardens. This, in turn, empowers us to take better care of our ‘personal gardening’ needs as well.
In short, for me, community gardening highlights the intrinsic symbiosis between resilient social networks and the environments within which they thrive as a means of developing practices, spaces, & tools that nurture autonomy & sustainability. (View Highlight)
title: “Chat With Seán”
author: “community”
url: ”https://write.as/community/chat-with-sean”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
Chat With Seán
Metadata
Highlights
- Getting back to your questions: there are certain online spaces which make me feel like a guinea pig running on a wheel and others where I feel like a human being making meaningful decisions. The former type of experience encloses me in a state of aimless, desperate compulsion, whereas the latter empowers me to preserve my rights & values and to live with mindful intention. When considering these experiences, I keep coming back to a root question underlying this distinction: in which direction are the incentives aligned? Towards power or empowerment? My sense is that chipping away at an answer to this question requires some measure of both romanticism and futurism. (View Highlight)
- My entry point for this way of being online was really just the general excitement which I originally felt about the web as a realm of discovery, creativity, and connection. I remember how magical web spaces felt during my earliest days online, and how empowering it was to learn that anyone could create or enter digital spaces freely as a means of exploring their identity and expressing their interests beyond the norms & limitations of offline society – and on top of that, connecting with other strange humans around the world who they would never otherwise never meet. For someone who has always been a social outsider, this felt especially revolutionary. (View Highlight)
- Now on to the “gardening” aspect. Gardening is an activity which begins with a recognition of what is currently growing or not growing in a particular environment, and a consideration of how that ecosystem might be changed ‘for the better’ based upon a certain values framework. Notice that I used the terms “environment” and “ecosystem” here, which I’ve noticed being increasingly incorporated into discussions of web platforms/experiences in recent years (this is probably a good sign). In the same way that a community is not just a network of people, neither is the web just a network of wires & signals which link people together. It is a space within which there are varying ‘ecological’ conditions and propensities. Some communities will thrive in one landscape and wither in another, and some landscapes are more open to ‘biodiversity’ than others. (View Highlight)
- Taken together, my sense is that these actions inevitably lead us away from passive acceptance of flattening hegemony as the default mode of being on the web and toward an active process which enriches the landscape with a wider array of community gardens. This, in turn, empowers us to take better care of our ‘personal gardening’ needs as well.
In short, for me, community gardening highlights the intrinsic symbiosis between resilient social networks and the environments within which they thrive as a means of developing practices, spaces, & tools that nurture autonomy & sustainability. (View Highlight)