Daniel Chandler – Personal home pages and the construction of identities on the web

Asynchronous mass communication
The web is unlike any previous modes of presenting yourself in everyday life. You are able to mass communicate in an environment that is more accessible than the print publishing and conventional mass media. They are asynchronous communication unlike modes of telephone and face to face interaction that requires real time. This asynchronous nature makes them comparable to textual forms such as diaries however they have a potential mass audience that makes them different from any other forms. Owning a web page is almost like owning your own printing press, however they are audio-visual texts and more dynamic. The re writing of pages make it easy to change previous identities and edit them so previous ones are unrecognisable.

Bricolage

Bricolage is the creation of the web page and the information about you that comes with it aside from the pictures and the text. This information is easy for people to copy from each other which lead to notable academic paranoia about student plagiarism. These backgrounds, layouts etc are a way for people to differentiate each other. Bricolage can help represent a persons values.

The building blocks of webpage identity

Creating a personal homepage can be seen as building a virtual identity as it flags up many parts of your personality. Links between a person and his friend can be seen as a creation of a ‘virtual community’. The question people ask of themselves in these pages is ‘who am i?’ and the people realise that publishing this is available to much larger audience than just immediate friends. The web allows substantial amounts of people to publish their ideas. However many home pages are badly executed and bizarre and many are generated to satisfy objectives of employers or educators. Many of these pages are practically useless to anyone apart from their owners. Web pages have several features that make them different from printed media. When pages are grammatically correct, they are more pleasing and stand out more to the literate reader.

Constructing identities
The structure of web page can sometimes say as much about their authors as does the content. Some people even feel that they are their own audience for their web page, posting their feelings helps to validate them. The web seems to be leading to people posting information that previously, they would have kept private. The appeal of a pages content can lead to it having a global audience. Some critics are anxious that the web has allowed people to manipulate their identities too much, however these pages do often contain many ties to a persons real life such as photographs of themselves and real addresses etc. We are more in control of the image we present on a personal home page than in day-to-day life. Basically, the ability to mask or change certain details about yourself can be seen as a positive or negative thing. It means people can choose what they reveal to people on the internet, which means they can hide or change things that could have an influence on whether you would associate with that person or not. People worry that the younger generation will increasingly socialise online and less face-to-face, although this has been argued as a positive trend as it makes things like working through problems easier. ‘The label ‘home page’ itself ought to remind us, one supremely disadvantaged social group amongst those without home pages is that of the literally, physically homeless in the cold reality of everyday life, who could be forgiven for regarding this textual genre as an irrelevance. Virtual homes provide no shelter for anyone’.