The Home Page Advantage
Many people are taking advantage of the opportunity to create a home page on the Web, and this provides a richer medium for presenting the persona online. People create home pages for quite a variety of reasons, as I learned when I queried dozens of them. Some said they wanted to share pictures and information with friends and family. One new father was adding weekly updates to his baby photo collection so his relatives around the country could see his infant son's progress. A few said they wanted to provide a community service. One man in the Netherlands, for example, put some information on his home page about how to eliminate a particularly aggressive virus that was penetrating computers, mainly in Europe. Those who had been infected quickly found his site through search engines and encouraged him to keep adding to his store of information about how to get rid of viruses. He did, and is very proud that his site has become a solid and useful addition to the Web. A number of people, particularly those in the high-tech fields, are putting their resumes online, along with samples of some of the software and multimedia applications they have worked on. This gives prospective employers an opportunity to see considerably more than just the hard copy version of the individual's work experiences.
Many people are using their 5 or 10 MB of free disk space to promote a cause or voice a personal protest. Gary North, for example, maintains his own Y2K doomsday site with apocalyptic warnings about what is going to happen when the clocks reach midnight, January 1, 2000. He says, "I don't expect you to believe me ... yet. That is why I have created this site."
Other reasons people mentioned for creating a personal Web site: "Everyone else was doing it," "I wanted to let people know about me," and "I had to do something with that free disk space." Unlike the email address, the home page is not primarily aimed at giving our acquaintances an easy way to communicate with us, though most home pages offer the visitor a chance to send the owner an email through a single click. The home page is more like a billboard, or an ad in the yellow pages. It's an inexpensive way to create an impression, polish your online persona, and tell the world something about yourself and your interests. We can create a finely crafted self-presentation for the whole world to see. We can display our ideal selves, complete with retouched photos, creative essays, artwork, poetry, musical creations, and lists of achievements. We can add numerous links to our favorite spots on the Web, showing off our diverse interests and cosmopolitan tastes.
Not everyone uses the free disk space that comes with their Internet account to profile themselves, of course, but the personal home page, the kind that serves as an introduction to who you are, is becoming more common and also much easier to do because of advances in software. With the exception of a few European aristocrats in the first age of self - the Renaissance - people have not had such an opportunity before. Without any of the costs of land, labor, or building materials, we can make our billboards as simple as a brief description with a photo, or as elaborate as a multimedia multipage spread, complete with music, animations, and rich graphics. We can fill them with as much autobiographical detail as we like, either true or reconstructed, and add links to our previously unpublished poetry, novels, and drawings.
The personal home page phenomenon is taking off with incredible momentum, and commercial sites whose revenue comes from advertising rather than end-user fees are offering even more free disk space to patrons. GeoCities, for example, offers free space and many tools for their patrons to engage in homesteading - that is, building their home page. They apparently discovered that people are very intrigued with their new billboards and will spend considerable time on them; advertisers will pay for access to these people. This aspect of the personal home page craze bears some resemblance to those Who's Who books that profit chiefly from copies sold to the people - and their proud parents - whose names and brief bios are listed.
Eleanor Wynn, of the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, and James E. Katz of Bellcore, reviewed many such home pages and found that most of the creators were not trying to create an alternate identity that differed dramatically from their own selves: "A key feature is that they move in the opposite direction of what cyberspace postmodernists claim; rather than fragmenting the self, personal home pages are attempts to integrate the individual, make a personal statement of identity, and show in a stable, replicable way what the individual stands for and what is deemed important." The creators often blend aspects of their public and private lives in surprising ways, partly because the audience for their creation is not well understood. While the audience for a professional resume provides a social context that constrains the contents, the audience for the home page is, quite literally, anyone on the planet with Internet access. Friends and family might drop by, but so might coworkers, employers, or strangers from another part of the world. Thus, many people aim for an integrated and holistic self-presentation.
A typical home page, a conglomerate of hundreds I have seen, looks like John Q. Citizen's:
This simple and easy-to-create example contains many of the elements that appear on personal Web pages all over the Internet, including links to a brief autobiography, a professional resume, some personal poetry, and links to hobby sites and friends' home pages. With his text, category selections and clip art choices, the creator seems eager to craft an integrated and well-rounded self, and feature his work life along with his humor, warmth, and close relationships.
On the positive side, home pages allow us to experiment with our online self-presentations, share information about our lives with significant others, and get feedback from people who find our Web site. One potentially negative feature of the proliferation of home-grown home pages is that they seem to be contributing quite a lot of chaff to the Internet. The net is, arguably, the world's largest, cheapest vanity press with distribution channels that far exceed anything even the megapub-lishers can imagine. It also has virtually unlimited shelf space, but the cataloging process is not very well-developed yet. Search engines often bring up dozens of irrelevant personal home pages when you enter keywords that happen to appear on them, creating quite a lot of clutter and distraction when you are searching for information.
