"The Web We Have to Save"

"More or less, all theorists have thought of gaze in relation to power, and mostly in a negative sense: the gazer strips the gazed and turns her into a powerless object, devoid of intelligence or agency. But in the world of webpages, gaze functions differently: It is more empowering. When a powerful website — say Google or Facebook — gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it — it brings it into existence; gives it life. Metaphorically, without this empowering gaze, your web page doesn’t breathe. No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind; and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page.

On the other hand, the most powerful web pages are those that have many eyes upon them. Just like celebrities who draw a kind of power from the millions of human eyes gazing at them any given time, web pages can capture and distribute their power through hyperlinks.

But apps like Instagram are blind — or almost blind. Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying."
https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426

I'm thinking back to the pre-FB internet, or before facebook was kinda my homepage/when I still had a homepage... (was it google? probably?). And ya, I remember browsing as a real thing and having bookmarked pages I would cycle through. And sharing websites with friends instead of just webpages.

Reading this, and thinking about how over-saturated we are with social networks, I think it's very possible that we will get back to the website world. Or some version of it; but a version where we can still relate socially somehow; send a signal to say 'I am here on this website! Come join me!'

(honestly, though, I think that a lot of the changes he is so concerned about are because a lot more people have joined the internet since he was on it last, it's become a general past time for everyone and it takes a lot less effort to own a little piece of it; you don' thave to be a blogger or looking to find an esoteric community or building a tool - you can just be)