4. Identity, self-presentation [2], discourse and homepages
4. Identity, self-presentation [2], discourse and homepages"All homepages reveal identity, whether or not that is the intention of their authors" (Walker (2000, p.99)). This statement leads to the question: how do people communicate identity via the personal homepage? One answer would be that the overall design (the impression the homepage sends out) and the lay-out (e.g. the colours and the various fonts used) offer possible ways of presenting the identity of the homepage author (Chandler (1998)). This is of course true to a certain extent, but the information content of a homepage also needs to be carefully considered to determine the messages the homepage author communicates through the written word.
Cheung (2000, p.45) argues that, "regardless of their content, and the motivation behind their production, all personal homepages inevitably involve self-presentation". However, the degree to which people choose to reveal themselves and take social risks varies (Bates and Lu (1997)), since creating a homepage is entirely voluntary. Creating a homepage can both reveal and hide the person behind it. The author of the homepage has the power of deciding just how much or little he or she wants to reveal of themselves. As Steven Rubio (1996, p.1) describes it: "When you visit my homepage, you don't get to know me, but only my presentation of myself". One of the ways in which it is possible to measure the degree of self-presentation in homepages is through Content Analysis of the provided information.
Dillon and Gushrowski (2000) found that the core elements a good homepage cannot do without were: e-mail links, external links, welcome message, 1-4 graphics, brief biography. Bates and Lu (1997) found that the ten most popular items (in descending order) in a personal homepage were: e-mail address, name, favourite websites, gender, photo, current work, educational background, hobbies or interests, mailing address, and previous work experience. They also found that the main purpose of a personal homepage was to present professional capability and experience. Dominick (1999) also carried out a Content Analysis of his data and found that of the content variables, feedback mechanisms (e.g. e-mail address, a visitor counter, a guest book etc.) ranked at the top of a scoring list closely followed by links to other sites. Photographs were also a common feature of most pages. On the whole, however, "it appears that relatively little personal information is contained in personal pages" (p.651), and Dominick thus concludes that the information on the homepages was not very effective in letting the reader get to know the author of the page. Cheung (2000, p.45), however, argues that even though these types of features of the personal homepage give little information of the author, the language, design and content of a homepage still provide indirect evidence for what the author may be like.
The information in a homepage is highly related to the purpose of the homepage. Consequently, personal homepages can be divided into sub-types based on the information content and the purpose of the homepage. The work of Bates and Lu shows that nearly 45% of their data were homepages with the purpose of presenting the author's professional capability and experience and close to 29% were homepages categorized as "play with system capabilities", which were homepages that appeared to have been created mainly for the fun of it [3]. Walker (2000) classifies her data of personal homepages into two main categories, extrinsic pages and intrinsic pages, based on the reasons people gave for creating them. The authors of the extrinsic pages used their pages to sustain interaction with people they already knew, whereas the intrinsic pages were created to establish contact with users of the Internet. Döring (2002) also uses the dichotomy of extrinsic (extrinsically motivated homepages) versus intrinsic pages (intrinsically motivated homepages) in her neat taxonomy of homepage categorisation. She labels personal homepages in which the author makes his/her own person the topic expressive homepages which are further classified as either extrinsic or intrinsic depending on their purpose. Döring finds that only 42% of her data are expressive homepages expressing self-presentation. The rest of the homepages fall into other categories not relevant for identity construction and self-presentation as is the case with the expressive pages.
The above studies are important Content Analysis studies of both the information in the homepages and the purpose of the homepages, which have contributed to our understanding of this new phenomenon. However, the way in which language is used in homepages is one of the most disclosing characteristics of a personal homepage (Chandler (1998)). This is why textual analyses of the homepage discourse need to be undertaken to get an overall and more complete view of this new genre.
Ivanic (1998, p.40) discusses the discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. She argues that social identity has three dimensions corresponding directly to Halliday's three metafunctions, the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions [4]. Ivanic further suggests that all people have a set of values, knowledge and beliefs and that these will affect the ideational meaning which is expressed through language. Furthermore, all people have a sense of their status in relation to other people with whom they are communicating, which will affect the interpersonal meaning of language. Finally, social identity also consists of a person's orientation towards language use and this will affect the construction of the message. If we choose to look at the macrostructures of language in this way, it could be argued that the identities of the discourse participants are constructed through language. Writing is then not only about form and content but also about the representation of self, which makes writing an act of identity and therefore highly interesting to analyse in homepage texts.
