Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web

Abstract

The ‘personal home page’ is a new genre brought into existence by that branch of the Internet which is known as the World-Wide Web. Personal home pages are online multi-media texts which address the question, ‘Who Am I?’. Since the Web is, amongst other things, a global publishing system, such pages make public the personal. At the same time they can be seen as making personal the public, since home page authors engage in bricolage, adopting and adapting borrowed material from the public domain of the Web in the process of fashioning personal and public identities. In such sites, what are visibly ‘under construction’ are not only the pages but the authors themselves. This may have particular value for some marginalized groups.