"We Need to Rewild the Internet" and other small web recommended reading

[matsushima]

If you were born around the 1970s, you probably remember many more dead insects on the windscreen of your parents’ car than on your own. Global land-dwelling insect populations are dropping about 9% a decade. If you’re a geek, you probably programmed your own computer to make basic games. You certainly remember a web with more to read than the same five websites. You may have even written your own blog.

But many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole web) is normal.
We Need to Rewild the Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon

I've been slowly working my way through this article during my lunch breaks at work this week.

I thought of the smallweb community and wondered what other books, articles, etc. you would recommend as a sort of "small web syllabus." (I have tech, digital literacy and social media tags in my bookmarks that others might find interesting to peruse, although the media diary is mostly for my own recordkeeping and, thus, incomplete.)

Comments

[enchantedsleeper]

Oh, I'm going to love going through all of these - thank you for this excellent post!

My own contribution is a New Yorker article from 1995, The Dawn of the Home Page, which a friend who is also interested in small web stuff sent me a few months back. It's a fascinating time capsule from an era when people understood the web through analogies like dorm rooms and communes.

I particularly loved a "cyber-rap" (ignoring the cringe terminology) that the author quotes partway through, which is actually called 'Forging Culture' by Justin Hall, and is archived in full here. Like picori mentions upthread, it's something that is still startlingly applicable to the internet today:

Culture doesn't come from Warner Brothers and Sony. Culture is that woman friend of yours who tells the most outrageous stories.

Culture doesn't cost big bucks, and hang in a gallery of modern art. Culture is your friend who likes to draw...

The web is an opportunity to make good our fifteen megabytes of fame.

...The more widespread and grassroots the Internet, the more difficult it will be to dominate and control it. You can contribute directly to the humanizing of the wires by telling your story, adding your persona to the unaffiliated.

It's a really nice rallying cry for the small web xD