The new issue of Nevoazul is a time-machine to the good web. The five essays selected to be featured here were written in different years of the Gregorian calendar and Internet ages. Walking between past and future, we reflect on today’s web as a space for knowledge, empathy and even memory with texts that explore how a website can be thought of as a puddle, how the lack of emojis affects conversations and how connecting pieces of information through linking can expand the human mind. This may seem unrealistically optimistic, as we are dealing with a growing polarisation and division online, encouraged by capitalist whims and political influences. Yet this collective disillusionment is also the root of new ways to experience the web.
Reading through these essays, we are forced to recognise that the web can be a force of good for society. As it can be a space of respect, civility, care and learning if we know when it is time to leave the information highway and walk along the alleyways of the web.
Within the magazine, among essays, to beprecise, it is possible to come across visual representations of websites whose purpose it is to pave the way for a more thoughtful web and to expand the frontiers of our online geographies. A collection you can also browse online, as it should be, in Nevoazul’s first digital project The Internet Index. To illustrate the essays, we got a little help from the artificial intelligence program Midjourney to create images from textual quotes that made us wonder about the semiotics of illustration.
This issue is dedicated to “A more gentle Internet” with contributions from Andres Colmenares, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Clo S., Everest Pipkin, Kristoffer Tjalve, Laurel Schwulst and Lucy Black Swan.
Happy reading!
Inês 💫