What Is a Website Good For?

I plop down on my couch in the early evening and turn on my TV. I scroll through the show selections on one of the streaming channels. I wish I could say I spend minutes going through listings, reading descriptions, and watching trailers, but I spend seconds and do none of the above. I already know what show I will watch. It’s the same one I’ve watched for years, over and over. 

This quality of mine perplexes my friends as it did my ex, who had a front-row seat to my viewing patterns. I was in turn perplexed by the fact that he rarely watched movies or read fiction books. I never asked him why, but for the both of us, I think our habits have something to do with the mediums themselves — their qualities, affordances, and limitations. 

A movie requires more of you upfront but a new TV show requires more of you indefinitely. Quality: Life span. Quality: Duration. A fiction book allows immersion in an imagined world and non-fiction grounds you in a real one, past or present. Affordance: Escapism. While we may not think about it in these terms, we are always encountering mediums and holding them up against our wants and needs. 

Ross Gay describes something similar in his essay “Writing by Hand.” His medium is language/prose, and he writes about how the tools he uses affect the ways in which he explores that medium. He talks about the distinction between writing on a computer and writing by pen in his notebook, how his prose in a Google doc makes itself tidy, “correct,” “maybe, dull” while his prose in a notebook more accurately represents the winding, perhaps tortuous and mistakeful process of thinking.  

In the same way that we decide whether to write in a notebook or a Google doc, we choose which mediums to engage with based on how they interact with the nature of our lives. If we are trying to get to something legible and extensive, we may write in a Google doc and we may write non-fiction. If we’re just trying to get our feelings out, we may pick up a notebook and write a poem. 

**

I stopped writing poetry for years while I was in college because I picked up the shiny new medium of websites and Twitter bots and browser extensions. At the time they appealed to me. They were interactive. They said the thing without directly saying the thing. They occupied the same space we all did (the internet), which at the time felt welcoming and rich. People were building things that were funny and useless and critical. Websites were accessible, easy to reach. All I had to do was publish it on Glitch and Tweet about it and suddenly people were interacting with my work.

Then a romantic relationship started, got rocky, ended. The pandemic came, my dad died. My awareness of all the wrong in the world continued to expand. I could no longer make websites. Or, I could not make them with the same level of conviction I had before. What could a website do in a pandemic? What could a website do when another Black person was gunned down by the police? What could a website do when my father died? What could a website do in a genocide? What could a website do?

In lieu of making websites, I picked up poetry again after a 7-year hiatus. I’ve always written poetry when I couldn’t do much else. I had never consciously considered why, but when I finally did ask myself that question the answers came easily. Its affordances and potential were already defined in my head. Writing poetry is low effort. It doesn’t take long. It doesn’t require tidiness or clarity or refinement. It does what it is supposed to do: it gets the feelings somewhere other than in. 

My embrace of poetry and disembrace of the web had everything to do with their qualities, their nature, their affordances, and what I thought were their limits. Making a website was fun for me but not bereft of frustration. It was time consuming and involved, whether I chose to do it by hand or through one of the many web frameworks. The material of it (HTML) was far distanced from the idea I was trying to represent. As opposed to a poem, where the idea would come together in real time right there on the page, I had to serve the website to see an idea come to life. In other words, I was beginning to feel like it took more for me (and maybe also for the user) to distill meaning from a website.

With the time and effort it took to build, I really wanted a website to do something: change a mind, raise some money. For me, poetry is a medium that successfully evades any expectation of spurring action. You post a poem and expect people to ooh or ahh and feel with you. You post a link to a website and expect people to click, scroll, fill, sign up. While others may ascribe revolutionary potential to poetry, I don’t. I write a poem and don’t imagine it’ll do anything.

That sentiment felt freeing to me, so I continued to write poems. And when my ideas expanded beyond what a poem could do, I started writing fiction and non-fiction. Two years after I picked up poetry again, I wrote a 21 page short story. But I still couldn’t make a website. I was scared of failing, I hadn’t done it in so long. There was that. But there was also the baggage that came along with making something for the internet. 

In a class I taught at School for Poetic Computation, I described a framework for critiquing new media art:

We start out thinking about the qualities and characteristics of the object, what it evokes. Then we consider its container, its interface, then everything outside the interface — our society, our cultures, etc. 

When I apply this framework to websites, I find that they are inextricable from their context and the military origins of the internet.  As Chia Amisola says in her essay “On Domain Naming”: “All sites on the internet are tinged with a sharpness and an ever-pervasive question of who serves who.” A poem, by virtue of being written or read out loud, is not automatically in conversation with everything ever written on paper. But the internet is a network, and so a website — like a house built in a neighborhood – becomes part of this  larger thing. The act of making a website public admits it into the internet — the same internet that continues to be the subject of discussions on surveillance, centralization, and abuse. 

Partially because of this growing baggage, the novelty of making something and within minutes it being accessible to people all over the world had worn off. But I still found myself interested in the materiality of the web, what it affords, and what it doesn’t. I made an Are.na channel and I tried to articulate for myself what a website was doing, what unique aspect of the medium it was taking advantage of. I started to ask myself again what the medium of the web had to offer. 

Eventually I realized that what I thought was an escape from the medium of websites (writing poetry) turned out to be an invitation. A poem I was writing was asking for something more. It was breaking out of its assigned medium. 

**

This poem I was writing existed in my head under a theme but on my phone as about twenty separate notes.

at the us open 

on the c train

during my morning walk.

I was collecting places where I had encountered my grief. I knew this list was trying to be a poem but something stopped me from combining all the separate notes into a single document. What was it?

Putting it in a single document would impose an order, even though, to me, the order didn’t really matter. What I wanted to convey was not that grief found me here (number 1) and then it found me there (number 2). I wanted to convey how random it was. How scattered. How permissionless. 

If I turned it into a traditional poem, lines would follow one after another written on a page. A reader would read it the same way every time. The order would be important, because that’s one of the limits and affordances of a poem. 

This poem needed a medium that afforded randomness. 

Websites and other interactive media allow for interaction — a user can come by and do whatever they want, within the bounds of the creator’s playground. This in turn allows for disorder, for creating a world and letting something go wild in it. Which is how grief felt to me: like something had been let loose to rampage in the room that is my life.

The first thing I did was display the places grief had found me as folders on an emulated desktop. There’s an expansiveness to what the elements of a website can represent. With my website-poem, I wanted a visual that felt personal to me, so I made the website look like a desktop system. The folders on the desktop would hold my memories, and clicking on the folders would open them. The idea was that a user could go through the folders and create a record of my grieving. A click was grief finding me yet again.

This quality of websites — the ability to give an “intangible thing physical controls” — is one that thrills me the most when surfing the web. Anything can await you behind a click or a scroll. On a website, a click can open a window, or transport you to a different location. A scroll can take you on a walk or control the direction of the “wind.” There’s an expansiveness to what an input (like a gestural action) can output or control.

And if the creator wants it, the input can be limitless. In my digital poem, the user can traverse through the folders as many times as they want, meaning that much like in real life, the grief could go on forever. Websites, although bound to a screen, are boundless in terms of pixels. A text can always grow, there is always room to scroll. On a website you can depict subjects of great magnitude. On a website, like and unlike other mediums, an “unrepresentable phenomenon,” things that “cannot be brought before our eyes,” as Jacques Rancière describes in his essay “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” may “be given a specific conceptual shape.” Like the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire, or the limits of a humanitarian zone. 

I still don’t have answers to what websites can do. But I have answers to what they might be good for, why we might reach for them. My list of answers hasn't made me into a believer again, not in the way I was before — wide-eyed and delirious with the possibilities behind depiction on the web. I have other mediums now: poetry for illuminating those infrequent bursts of emotion, and fiction for dramatizing my life experiences, twisting them and making them unrecognizable. But rather than turning away from any and all opportunities to open up my code editor, I ponder each idea for a website, swirl it around like a sip of a wine, see how it holds up against what a website has to offer, if it really needs the medium.