Walled Gardens

[franceslievens]

There is this world on the internet made up of fabric, thread and sewing machines. It lives on blogs, Facebook, Pinterest boards where it's maintained by mostly women who have found joy in things that two generations before them were the norm.
I'm not writing to dismiss their fun or their feeling of community. It's through these various blogs and their showing off I started out in a world of wool, fabric and thread. What struck me most is the language of this world. When I started writing on the living web I did this in English to cater for an international crowd. There was no Dutch speaking world on the internet. Geeks were international and most of all, the act of not using my own language was the first step to a semblance of anonymity.
In the ten years or so that went by, the web grew and changed. People carved gardens and walled them in. The big bad cyberworld suddenly isn't so big, bad and scary anymore. People meet on their blogs, Facebook pages and Pinterest boards the same people they'd meet at their work, on their night out. When I wasn't looking, my girl colleagues took the internet and embraced it. They aren't very tech savvy nor are they fluent in English, but they have the same urge to know, share and talk that drove me here.
There is a difference though: my ten odd years on the open web. I live on walled gardens, but keep my information sharing to a minimum. I prefer my geek pseudonymous world over my real life persona for everyone to see.