"You are quite right - the purpose of any website (or those that anyone can access - and if not accessible why have one?) is to “make public”..."
And the [historical] purpose of a painting is to be looked at not looked through.
Notes generally are made to oneself or to a limited number of others, as an abbreviated form of communication, reminders or prompts; when looking at them the people for whom the notes are meant will already have enough information to make sense of the content.
Sometimes notes, sketches, diaries and drafts are published ‘posthumously’ or at least at a distance to the publication/exhibition/examination/discovery to which they refer.
But who collects these things into boxes and puts them out there for ideas/objects declared never to be complete? And what is our ongoing attraction to these notes in boxes? Is it because we all keep boxes and drawers, piles or bags, trunks and suitcases, Inboxes and Sent folders, all filled with cryptic scribbles that have meaning to only one and hopefully, at least, one other?
Lots of people make pictures for no one other than themselves; hanging them on the wall of their own private space or stowing them in the back of a closet.
How many people make websites with an underlying intent of the content being for no one other than themselves? It sort of undermines the whole idea of the world wide web by creating the connection and then denying the opportunity to connect, no? Or does it reveal the reality of the medium? There is no connection and the opportunity to connect is only a figment of our imagination. A desire for connection that will remain only that?
If identity is formed by the connections made between fragments then what is left of identity when the ability to connect is denied?
Fragments.
And the space between; where the connections could be but are not?
Undefined.
Filled with potential.
To be looked at and to be looked through.
A two-way mirror, enabling the formation of a multiplicity of identities around free and unconnected fragments.