Illusion of Home — Mumu Li (n3xta)

Reading response to Olia Lialina, A Vernacular Web, Part II

When I first read Olia Lialina’s Vernacular Web 2, I was instantly reminded of the tension between “the future medium” and those who inhabit it. As the title suggests it continues a conversation begun by her earlier essay, but now we see how the landscape has evolved: the personal “Home Pages” that once defined the 90s have given way to profiles, accounts, and channels, while new services subtly nudge us to “feel at home” on pages that we don’t really own.

ps. For this essay (which feels more structual and organized) I have to frequently jumped out of the page, go to google and did more research than the earlier essay.

In 2005, Lialina wrote about under construction signs and MIDI files, symbols that were ridiculed by professional designers but cherished by the earliest amateurs. By 2007, those same amateurs had migrated to platforms like MySpace and YouTube, or to the newly emerging Facebook. Meanwhile, the idea of a “Home Page” as your personal web presence became increasingly outdated and uncool. The question is: Why? According to Lialina, professional designers and services effectively reshaped the web’s culture. She recalls Tim Berners-Lee’s comment comparing early personal sites to “the gnome in somebody’s front yard”. The mainstream creative scene dismissed these folksy, user-driven aesthetics really really quickly (Just been two years.)

We can see the shift in attitude clearly:

Mid-90s: If you wanted to show off your interests or photos, you made an HTML page yourself.
Late-90s and early-2000s: Designers and techies declared that personal “Home Pages” were amateurish. Web rings, starry wallpapers, and wild background images became punchlines.
Mid-2000s: Platforms like MySpace or LiveJournal took over. Instead of self-hosting an HTML page, you signed up for an account or profile. The new user experience was much more “structured,” yet the aesthetics often retained that do-it-yourself flair—only now, ironically, it happened inside a giant, centralized system.

And as Lialina said, the old generation, the “Web 1.0 amateurs,” ended up moving to these platforms too, whether reluctantly or not, because personal sites had become social backwaters.

Responses Chapter by Chapter

Garden Gnomes

Garden Gnomes is an metaphor for how these user-profiles are both displayed and trivialized. Lialina describes a scenario wherein platforms like iGoogle offered decorative personalization, cute background themes and silly gadgets, so the user can “feel at home.” But as she notes:

They mean home as opposed to work. What they’re saying is, “Relax, have fun. Play around while we work. We are professionals; you are amateurs.”

It’s a subtle shift in power (in Web 2.0). Even while amateurs get more “toys” (glitter text generators, custom cursors, translucent backgrounds) it’s the platform that controls the underlying architecture. They host your content, manage your access, and harvest your data. Meanwhile, you’re free to deck out your “yard” with garden gnomes, but you don’t really own the yard. This dynamic is reminiscent of Sherry Turkle’s observation about “transparency”: the more user-friendly and “transparent” the system becomes, the less users understand how it works at a deeper level.

Translucency

MySpace started letting users set blocks of text and images to 50% or 10% opacity—features that are strikingly reminiscent of the older days when people jammed starry backgrounds behind their frames, yet now it’s a distinctly Web 2.0 phenomenon.

An effect that takes minutes to achieve with Adobe products can be achieved on the Web in milliseconds. At the expense of usability, pages acquire a haunted, immaterial look.

It’s easy to conjure up translucent overlays and embed videos from other sites, but no single user is truly in command of the entire design or infrastructure. It also ties back to the professional “glossy, round-edged” style mimicking Apple’s shiny gadgets that has become ubiquitous in commercial web design. Lialina suggests that the professional look draws on gadget design, while “amateur” profiles hold to the building-block logic of HTML. But ironically, they share a quality: both harness translucency to seem futuristic, weightless, and ultramodern.

Glitter

Rich User Experience for the poor

And she notes that, more than any other emblem, glitter has become the hallmark of amateur aesthetics in the mid-to-late 2000s.

On one level, glitter is the new starry background—tiny flickers of color, only now they signal everyday routine rather than “the web of the future.”
On another level, it’s reminiscent of pimp culture in hip-hop or the glitzy lure of Las Vegas. Danah Boyd’s observations (quoted in the text) also indicate that these “gaudy” aesthetics often map onto class and cultural divides. “Clean” pages signify a certain privileged minimalism, while “flashy” pages resonate with subcultures that embrace “bling.”

At the same time, no matter how sparkly your generated GIF is, it’s still created within a heavily prepackaged system. The user’s creative freedom becomes a matter of selecting from a library of glitter styles rather than building something from scratch.

Other Snippets of Thoughts

Lialina briefly mentions that she’s skipping some big topics: cats (the rise of LOLCats and meme culture), animated cursors, and the phenomenon of “life visualization” (pregnancy counters, daily baby trackers, etc.). She suggests they all point to a more disciplined and “formatted” era of the web. Every interest, from playful cat pictures to serious relationship trackers, seems to have a specialized service or widget that ties the user’s personal life into a structured digital narrative. The old chaotic personal homepage might have thrown everything (cats, MIDI, poetry, daily logs) onto one raw HTML canvas. Now, these slices of life are neatly slotted into platform specific frames and data fields.

I wrote a blog post about

When My Way of Thinking Got Formatted by Code

In my creative computing class.

“What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as ‘glitzy’ or ‘bling’ … The more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year.”

In other words, MySpace where you can plaster backgrounds and drop glitter text everywhere speaks to a different cultural aesthetic than the “clean,” minimal approach of Facebook, reminiscent of “West Elm or Pottery Barn.” this might not last forever, given that Facebook eventually allowed third-party apps like Blingee to add sparkly overlays to photos. Platforms that start off neat and organized may eventually yield to user demands for self-expression no matter how gaudy or chaotic it might look.

Also I get the sense that the once-exciting space of the web, which triggered love, hate, and drama in the 90s, has become so entrenched in our daily lives that it’s almost invisible. The user’s relationship with the medium shifted from “wide-eyed wonder” to casual indifference. That doesn’t mean the web lost its capacity for creativity or cultural production (quite the opposite) but the tension and curiosity about the medium itself has softened. Today’s amateurs often don’t care how the site works; they just want it to work. Services thrive on this, offering them easy ways to post photos and text, bedazzle them with glitter, and move on.