With the wild west, a personal party, and thoughts on the web as a woman’s medium.
Women’s work, I’ve been told by more than a few wise souls, includes knitting, sewing, weaving and all mediums related to textiles… and baskets. That the practical arts of making, covering, connecting, and repairing fall within the domain of ladies.
It seems self-evident that in oppressed cultures (and enlightened ones), women have held dominion in this realm as long as we’ve collectively lived in civilized societies.
Weaving on the Web or Alien Life Form?
Around 1997, I chose a new medium to practice a creative craft: one made of pixels and code, hyperlinks, embeds, and integrations, cross-pollinated relationships, and written stories. I hoped to do two things: to make beautiful and helpful things in a digital space and shorten my work time on the phone. Making websites for pay in the days when everyone wanted to “know a guy” to help them, meant fewer shifts waiting tables for me and a profession that grows in a thousand directions at once.
The digital space was vast, multi-dimensional, and felt alive. And it was shaped daily by human attention, the searching for things, and makers like me.
I had worked in food service and hospitality, so creating such spaces online came naturally, as did intuitive customer service. What’s not to love about easing into a profession that feels made for you?
Most of the things I’ve put out there look quite straight-forward, and all are meant to be basic, beautiful and/or useful: usually to the owners and the ‘perfect’ public for them1. This means my web works were constructed in alignment with human-centric relationships, modulated for tone and direction, worked within practical tech considerations and with tools that I valued. I also sought to keep a low price point, while remaining “hyper friendly” to search engines, and playing nice with big vendors and their endless shared servers, code updates, and platform-centric shortcomings.
The main connection through all my portfolio was a maker who loves what she does.
David Bowie said of the web in 1999 (in retort to an interviewer saying “the internet is merely a tool”), that the Internet was actually “an alien life form.” He added, “it is going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.“
Bowie was often prescient, and as we stand at the start of AI shifting the underlying mesh of our current digital sphere, there could be another crushing of ideas afoot. Or, if the artists and humanists are in charge, there’s a potential elevation and more beauty and true usefulness ahead.
A Personal Party
Because when you close up one shop (my digital marketing business EMWeb is going through a major restructuring), it’s nice to throw yourself a “what I learned,” and “victory lap” blog post. Please skip to next section if you don’t want to read my closure spiel below:
It’s been gift to start building on this medium when it was still affordable, free, and open for anyone to forge new paths. I used to call it the “Wild Wild West” and saw myself as a knowing guide, helping people set up safe homesteads and protect them there too.
I was so lucky to make up new ways to do things based on gut instinct, common sense, integrity, and aesthetic beauty, and my desire to help others do things better, more enjoyably, was at the fore.
How blessed I’ve been to continue to make good web things connect with other good web things. Wow.
And how amusing its been to see some of “my” practices copied by huge companies, then glossed up with slick sites, tech bros, and monetization only to be pushed back down the pipeline as “the latest, greatest way.”
And how odd to be told by newbies to follow the followers.
Yeah, that’s leveling up, I guess: when your own internally-derived decision-making gets thrown back to you as the standard to measure yourself against.
Web is for Women
And the web is a women’s space as much as any venture capitalist’s or genius tech bro’s. By maneuvering pixels, messages, visuals, codes and connections the web allows one to make beautiful and wholesome things happen for others, for oneself, and for the good of all too. I say wholesome because that is often a part of women’s work in a historical sense: relational work, family work, and keeping communities.
And I sincerely hope I’ve helped people do what THEY wanted to do, in the way they wanted to do it. But sometimes that changes. Like when folks awaken to the deeper meanings of things, and start to sew together what’s to come next.
And I’m lucky I got to practice not to be “perfect,” but to be real. nMy clients have often been small state, generous gems and showed up as such. As did I. And I’m sure in the long-term, the real will always win over churned out AI derivation and manipulative monetization practices.2
That substance will be preferred over speed. That equality and grace will win over power and greed.
Realms & Levels: AI Shaping of the Web
The web is a world not only of horizontal connections (between websites), there are also vertical levels of connections: sometimes within shared content management systems (like WordPress), sometimes by shared hosting companies (like my favorite Viridio.net), and sometimes by overt cross-connections (like visible collaborations on social media and shout outs with links to sponsors). And sometimes the connections happen under the radar, such as from cross-pollinating leads3, or shaping/prompting better questions and answers across the web in general.
The next generation of vertical connections will likely happen inside search and/or be shaped rapidly by algorithm and AI interfacing with a public who need to remember HOW to ask great questions. How we prompt and question for search moving forward, and the questions we ask of the web may strengthen and loosen threads of how we see real information.
Perhaps this is as it should be: what we seek is what we’ll find? If we search for feelings and speedy replies, we get them? But the monetization of emotion has issues. I pose that the AI-informed search will likely control the shape of what questions we even ask, and how we think in relation to these cultured inquiries.
It’s our job to remain aware of how this is happening, as it is happening, and continue to ask those really great questions while we carry on in whatever realm we work in.
Series of the 6 Senses with Unicorns: a Tapestry from Middle Ages
This little (related) art history moment is going to be too long to insert into this post. So I’ll leave you with a teaser before I write more later. SIGN UP for my weekly email newsletter to get it.
This series of 6 tapestries are generally considered a meditation on earthly pleasures and courtly culture, depicted through an allegory of the senses. The senses are Touch, Taste, Smell, Hearing, Sight and a sixth sense that touches on perhaps love, compassion, or I’d like to suggest, the sense of Empathy.
Thank you for being here. – Elizabeth
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT 😉
“The Mystery Behind The Tapestries” by Liliana Wrobel and Carla Mitrani. Full Article
“Visiting the Lady and the Unicorn” by Rebecca Mezoff. Full Article.
The Lady and the Unicorn by Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye. Book.
Music Radar Piece about David Bowie on the Internet by Andy Price. Full Article.
- An Aligned Web Interface has consistency between Owners + Staff + Public. When done well, it is what makes a web product good. It’s a three-way connection not two. ↩︎
- By the time standard practices in web marketing have been codified, they are already near obsolete. That’s because the medium’s underpinnings changes so fast, as soon as a staff is trained to teach something, it is already “old.” ↩︎
- I don’t cross-pollinate leads as a matter of business ethics. However, I’ve noticed many more companies crossing data using ‘tools’ like META ads to do just that. The result is more spam, even if it is “targeted” spam. ↩︎