The Construction of Identity
in Personal Home Pages on the World-Wide Web
Daniel Chandler
Do you feel that constructing your own Home Pages enables you to shape your
identity? In what ways? This is an invitation for anyone interested in this
topic to
contact me with any observations on this theme. I will be happy to
check out your Home Page(s) if you would like me to do so.
I am interested in exploring the issue of how the
building of such pages may contribute to the construction
of identity with regard to aspects of both form and content. For instance,
including links to other Home Pages on your own webpage may be used to
demonstrate allegiances to particular social groups, whilst page design may
serve as a marker of personal style. I adopt a phenomenological approach and I'm aiming only to
identify some of the ways in which people frame their social and personal
identities on the Web. I am not seeking to map such frameworks onto some
notion of 'objective' reality (asking, for instance, 'But what are these
page-makers "really" like?'). I would like to trace any
recurrent patterns and to develop a useful framework for further
interpretation of such pages.
Here is my first paper on this theme.
