Who is a website and what do they do?

[Melooon]

Iv decided to start a little hypothetical debate with this thread 

Imagine a simple question; who is a website? Not what is a website, but who. Im asking this to suggest that a website is an entity of its own; with its own right to exist, its own idea of self-expression and its own moods, likes and dislikes.

When I ask myself that, it leads me to some additions questions and answers:
1. Q: Who is a website made for? A: No one; no one is made for anyone.
2. Q: Who owns a website? A: The website owns itself; it does not have financial value.
3. Q: Why is a website made? A: A website makes itself however it likes (with some help)

All that is to say; we are made by what is around us, and likewise we make what is around us. We are websites and websites are people; we can destroy each other, oppress each other, love each other for fair or false reasons, ask each other to politely behave in ways that we understand etc. Ultimately though, we have to balance trust and uncertainty, and unknowability of each other and the lifeforms around us in order to get along!

So the discussion is this:
Imagine a web that is not human centric. Where gifs have the same rights as people, where money (a human idea) is as important as dust or files in the recycling bin, and where homepages are equal to mountains or galaxies; where everything, both digital and physical is a blur.

What are the implications of this web? What can we find in it that can change how we think about the web; and what if anything could we bring back from it into our daily web crafting lives?? 

[Kallistero]

If the Web site is a person, we are still their parents. 

Albeit, the concept you're proposing is less that the site is a person, but more that the site is a world you're creating. The homepages are analogous to "mountains or galaxies" rather than being analogous to people's greetings. That's... sort of already how I think of it now, more of a "WHERE" is a website. The site is a place that you create, and its character is informed by its creator. There are lots of things that are fair for a creator to want out of their creation, but if we take the concept to a further extreme, the implications for creating the site are probably going to be derived from the implications for EXPERIENCING the site. I'll explain.

If you go to any site, you can linger & enjoy the scenery, you might be able to do something there, you might read into what it's about, or you might just be passing through, just like you can do for any place in real life!    Parts of the world are made for human consumption, and other parts of the world are not. Every little inch of the world is packed with SO MUCH information, and while you can dive into it whenever you're feeling curious, you can also go right past it and still have an appreciation for that world as a place that you passed by. Some places are plain, some places are entertaining, some places are unnatural or beautiful or ugly or complicated. Some places just lift your mood, some places are nostalgic, and some places have only seldom been seen by human eyes. That's how the world is, on and offline, whether those places are human-centric or not. THAT's where we can get to the implications for the Website creation process.

Most of the universe is not designed to be experienced by humans. Much of the universe simply exists. Yet, people still enjoy it anyway! And you can think of your site as part of the universe, too!    Any part of your design is entirely an optional choice to be informed by your own set of values. You can be as arbitrary as nature itself and still make a piece that slots right into the rest of the world. That's probably one of the more productive conclusions you can draw from this.



I have some other thoughts about like non-human-centric Web design, but I think this is a good place to stop. 

[Melooon]

proposing is not that the site is a person, but rather that the site is a world you're creating. The homepages are analogous to "mountains or galaxies"

I actually meant it as an expanding comment! "Gifs are people" "homepages are mountains" - e.g. mountains are people too and so are all the rocks and plants on mountains!

I suppose what Im really trying to imagine is an animistic web; in the same way as in Japan, Mt Fuji is called Mr Fuji - the mountain is a person with an identity.

So you're right we are their parents, but we are also their children!

[loren]

the way you think about websites is so refreshing, @Melooon !

i often run into people with the idea of a personal website as a garden, which has really inspired my own journey in webcrafting. i already see my site as something that lives and needs to be cared for, but your question pushes this a bit further! not only can a website live, but it has autonomy!

if the question is not "what" but "who", i hope that a website can be a friend. you can hang out with a website: they can make you laugh, teach you things, make you annoyed, play music for you, build memories with you. with this in mind, you can think of webcrafting as a conversation. i tell my website things i think are interesting and try not to spend too much time being negative. sometimes there's conflict but i work to resolve it. i respect my site and try to never belittle it. i feel sad when i come across a site that has something like "sorry my site sucks so much!!" written on the home page. you wouldn't say that about a friend!

P.S. as i wrote this, i realized this mostly applies to personal homepages to me! there are many sites i would not consider friends... maybe sites can be enemies too.

P.P.S. also i think i might have described a web that is even more human centric by treating sites as people instead of magnificent forces of nature. 

[Kallistero]

I actually meant it as an expanding comment! "Gifs are people" "homepages are mountains" - e.g. mountains are people too and so are all the rocks and plants on mountains!

I suppose what Im really trying to imagine is an animistic web; in the same way as in Japan, Mt Fuji is called Mr Fuji - the mountain is a person with an identity.

So you're right we are their parents, but we are also their children!

That's actually where I was gonna go at first! The site is your child, and you are raised by the village!

So now, again, there are lots of things that are fair for a creator to want out of their creation, as a parent might want out of their child. That creation might have their own interests, values, and aspirations, but all of that is informed by what you make available to them. I want my child to have the world available to them, but I wouldn't want my child to add something ugly to the world, so there are parts that they should be prepared for before it's available to them. Therefore, in spite of the question of their rights as a sentient being, the site's creation would still be informed by your own vision for them.

Making direct changes to the site would become a more interactive act. Would my site want this? If I was to have my site say this or wear that, would that be disrespectful to them? Is this the type of attention my site would want? Does my site feel that they're meaningful, or are they even concerned about that at all? Do they want to make others laugh, do they want to be part of a subculture, do they want others to be intrigued, are they trying to provide for others, and how do I help them to achieve those goals? A lot of this is still analogous to creating a site as it is now, as a work of art both representative of and separate from yourself, but with an added respect for the will of the creation. Certain things like replacing all of a site's files with different files or creating a "better" copy of the individual site would become moral questions, but the process of iteratively writing to a site for its development would largely just stay intact.

Also, if a site has a will, it would be almost mandatory to make the site able to do things themselves & exercise their own rights, lest they wind up in a type of "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" situation. It would probably be much less horrific for a Web site that doesn't know any better, though, like a baby that's still in the womb. Maybe that's the wrong level of analysis, but in thinking that a site has a will, it seems fair that they should also eventually have a way. If we REALLY take it in the Japanese Shinto sense, the site already has a way and contains its own resident divine spirit. It would be its own sort of Shinto shrine, with the goshintai being anything representative of the site or even the site itself. You have the young deity Ozwomp, along with his goshintai, the melon slice.      



Now, to dig a little deeper into design philosophy of it, then the Web, unlike most of the universe, was made to be experienced by humans. When creating a site, the consideration for the HUMAN (or at least the anthropomorphized) experience is more than a belief; it's an unconscious axiom by which a person creates, as it also is with any other medium for art. Even if you make your site entirely based on things not crafted by human hands, if it's based on nature, then it's still born out of your own desire to experience that nature (or to offer that experience to others), which is, again, something made to be experienced by humans. It's similar to the dilemma from Eastern thought, of how wanting to be free of desire is itself a desire. A Web that isn't made to be experienced by humans is either a site generated from an emergent process abstracted from its creator, or it's a site that's made to be experienced by something else.   

Now, as fun as it sounds to have a Web site made for dogs or rocks (which I think might've been partly the intended direction here), the concept of having a site made without human considerations has, nested within it, the concepts for entirely different design methodologies. Alternative design plans can involve the many things one can randomly generate about a Web page, or a person might create a process that "grows" a web page from a set of underlying rules (which technically includes AI, but AI in itself can be made very differently from the established rules for it), or a page can come from the GAPS in one's knowledge where you're moving code around and then take a look & think "oh, this turned out interesting" only to publish the page on a whim. I did the third thing for this page just because it looked sort of ominous, without me actually being sure how it would've looked before I rendered it. There's a sort of alien nature that can come from not knowing what you'll get out of your creation, a thing whose design becomes disconnected from its experience. It's a spirit that also exists outside the creation that it was intended to inhabit, and it helps drive home the idea of the site having at least a little bit of a life of its own.