Amber Simmons is a writer and web content strategist. See her portfolio and subscribe to her blog. Or, you can just drop her a line.
Sometimes I look around and I hate what the web has become.
Years and years ago when I first came to the web, back in the mid nineties, my favorite website was called “Wisteria”. It was a whimsical, beautiful, personal website that explored mythology, fairytales, kitchen magic (homemade cosmetics and organic cleaning supplies, etc.) gardening, and things that go bump in the night. It was disastrously organized, if it was organized at all. If you were lucky enough to find a useful piece of information during one visit, you had to memorize it or write it down because chances were good you’d never find that information again. Clicking a wrong link during a mosey down one of her recipes for herbal lip balms would land you on a page about her chickens (complete with pictures and a haiku, of course), which would in turn take you to a page about roaming chicken coops and a recipe for a three egg omelet. I could rarely remember where my journey had begun, and it was a hopeless task to go to her site to look for anything in particular, but every visit was such a wonder that I came back eagerly and often to see what she was up to.
She updated her site frequently, though in unexpected places. Some days I was sure the third link in her “Ode to a Lavender Fairy” used to take me to a tutorial on watercolor, only to discover it now took me to her webcam. But every update added a new dimension of whimsy and beauty to the site. The art was carefully chosen, the language delightfully sweet. The photography, while not professional, was worthy of the words that surrounded it—the pictures told as much of a story as anything else.
I didn’t just visit her website. I explored it. I relished its quirks. I looked forward to old paths leading me to new places, and just accepting it when old favorites disappeared to be replaced by her new fancy-of-the-moment.
Wisteria’s site was a treasure hunt, and I miss that about the web. I miss how personal it used to be before it was taken over by bizpeak and advertisers. I miss how free it was, how open to exploration and unfolding. Webapps are great and everything, but as a publishing platform the web used to be—and could be again—so much more. Don’t get me wrong, I recognize the value of a strong architecture, of solid navigation, and of good usability and predictability. But I also understand the value of a website as art, and of art as experience, and what it means to get lost in one’s journey into images, words, ideas. The value of these things might be harder to quantify, and certainly harder to justify to a client or a company, and truthfully, these things that I hold so dear won’t be of value to many people. It will depend on the right situation, the right website, the right visitor. But these people, these instances, should be catered to as well. There’s no reason the web has to be sterile, blue-gray, and plastic.
Damn it all. I’m going to bring Wisteria back.
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I’m going to attempt to argue that we need a broader concept of justice that sees all of us as part of one community (ultimately global), that justice and liberty are universal needs that need universal solutions, and that major changes are needed.
This is adapted from an old essay of mine (not a very good one) on reparations for slavery: http://www.melanconent.com/pub/opin/2001/reparations.html
I think it applies to affirmative action also, although *new* policies to combat discrimination are still needed in banks, apartment and housing markets, and fire departments everywhere, to say nothing of the criminal system ironically labeled justice.
Socioeconomic status affects opportunities. Even without discrimination, the great inequalities of wealth mean that blacks as a group can achieve socioeconomic parity with whites as a group only by having “individual character” far superior to that of whites. These differences in opportunity don’t have anything to do with race in and of itself. As Randall Robinson wrote, “Give a black or white child the tools (nurture, nutrition, material necessities, a home/school milieu of intellectual stimulation, high expectation, pride of self) that a child needs to learn and the child will learn. Race, at least in this regard, is irrelevant.”
[...]
The reasons for reparations are correct. Blacks as a group are not poorer than whites as a group because of any inferiority of any kind, including culture or character. An accurate understanding of the present requires the history that led to it, which (on the economic side alone) includes two and a half centuries of slavery, another century of legal discrimination, continued employment discrimination, widespread exclusion from labor unions during the period that these unions helped create the modern middle class, exclusion from buying suburban homes – from discrimination, not just poverty – just as the house became the primary way in which the middle class held wealth…
But everyone needs economic justice— not just blacks. Poor whites in general are no more poor because of character flaws than blacks are. Blacks and Native Americans, because their poverty was blatantly imposed on them, simply show more clearly the unfairness of basing children’s opportunities so largely on their parents economic situation. America needs to go back and apply “All men are created equal” once again (as we have in limited fashion for poor white men, blacks, and women). We must make opportunities more equal – which in my opinion means less inequality of wealth; Robinson calls for a Marshall plan of educational and other resources – in order to stop the grossly unfair past from being continually passed on to the future.
Benjamin,
I appreciate the essay. Thanks for linking to it.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said here. I agree that everyone should have opportunities for advancement. Politics and policy aren’t really my bag, and I don’t have any ideas on what would be the best way to do that sort of thing. There are so many variables, so many things that prevent social equality, right down to individual prejudices, be it against race, class, gender, whatever.
I’d like to believe there was a way of integrating people and preserving diversity, but I don’t know that there is. People will always identify in smaller communities, and as long as that exists, there will always be insiders and outsiders. I don’t know how a society legislates integration and diversity. I just don’t know.
Please do bring back Wisteria! It sounds wonderful!
That site would probably drive me a little batty, but it sounds like a treasure hunting adventure–the kind that you might never find the treasure, but it wouldn’t matter because you had fun along the way.