9. Conclusion

This study suggests that narrative is used as a resource for creating and maintaining personal identity in homepage discourse, and that such narrative is structured in significant part through choice of clause Theme. The data shows that the doctoral students are creating their academic identity by giving an account of their academic career pointing out their skills and academic achievements. The Themes, both the unmarked and the marked, support their accounts. The frequency of the pronoun I indicates that the messages, the meanings of the clauses, and the topic entity of the writers are the doctoral students. The adverbials of time in Theme position show that the past, present and future are of importance since they set the context for the rest of the message of the texts. The adverbials thus create texture and form a time-line through the texts that creates coherence for the readers of the homepage.

Furthermore, this study also shows that there are two main types of Themes in the homepage texts. Following Berry's (1995, p.55-84) division of Themes into 'informational' Themes and 'interactional' Themes, Themes that are concerned with the students' doctoral research and the temporal sequence of their careers along with Themes which function as the writer's topic entity (e.g. the initial pronoun I) are categorized as informational Themes, providing the reader(s) with information that has been given prominence in the homepage texts. However, the initial pronoun I may also be interpreted as interactional Theme, since the writer takes on the role of the informer, telling the reader about his/her academic life. Further interactional Themes are the Themes found in the interrogative, imperative and minor clauses. Themes in all these clauses show a high degree of writer involvement in the reader. The writer welcomes the reader to his/her own little home in cyberspace and at the same time tries to create a harmonious and pleasant stay for the visitor. The reader is guided within the homepage while surfing the site through the writer's use of interactional Themes.

Most studies on personal homepages and self-presentation (cf. Cheung (2000), Dominick (1999), Miller (1998) point to the same thing: the personal homepage is a communicative device used by people to express themselves in various ways. Through detailed textual analyses this study has shed some light on how texts in personal homepages are used by people to tell the world who they are.