ABBY PAIGE

Wired Magazine recently published a cover story called The Web Is Dead. The premise is that, over the past few years, we’ve begun to favor “semiclosed platforms” over the “wide-open Web,” that virtual space we were all going to democratize through the magic of HTML. The internet still seems like such a new technology, it’s sort of strange to wax nostalgic about its good old days, but lately I have been contemplating the creative possibilities we cut ourselves off from as we adopt more apps and platforms “that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.”

An interesting counterpoint to the Wired article is the new on-line poetry journal, Spiral Orb. Now in its second issue, the project seems like an optimistic throw-back to the early days of hypertext. In lieu of a table of contents, each issue opens with a poem made up of “composted” lines from the poems included in that issue, from which the reader can navigate to the contributors’ poems. Those are, in turn, linked to one another. It reminds me of what we thought the Web would be: a creative, chaotic space where new voices emerge and startling connections are made between disparate ideas. Maybe the Web is still alive and kicking?

Can you find the poem of mine included in their current issue?