courses :: mas 963   the virtual society :: judith donath   think about the metaphor of the "home" page in the context of csikszentmihalyi's description of the meaning of objects in a home. what are some of the items you observe that are peculiar to the virtual world. do they have particular connotations(that you are able to comprehend)? what is your hypothesis of how they acquired this meaning? Csikszentmihal examines the objects found in a typical American home using a dual system of categorization. His study produces a list of objects and a list of meanings associated with those objects. In the former, we encounter furniture, photographs, television, plants, plates and visual art amongst others, whilst the latter produces categories of meaning such as Self, Immediate Family, Kin, Memories, Associations, Experiences, Style, Utilatarian and Personal Values. Csikszentmihal highlights the personal significance of most of the objects found in people's homes. The vast majority of those surveyed selected the category of Self or Enjoyment to describe the type of meaning that they attached to certain objects. From this, he reasons that the "main single reason for having objects is one that might be seen as egocentric and hedonistic." The other dominating theme to emerge from his study is Kinship - certain objects were considered special as they reminded people of family and loved ones. The generation of a vast multitude of meanings attached to objects and the major differences in meanings assigned to identical objects are some of the interesting observations Csikszentmihal draws from his research. His description of what comprises a "home" in the physical world, also resonates in our consideration of what constitutes a personal homepage on the Web. He describes how "the home becomes the most powerful sign of the self of the inhabitant who dwells within." The objects that people choose to place in their homes have a deep communicative value, a fact that carries over into the virtual world where the constituents of a homepage(text, images, sounds, links, banners, awards, counters, guestbooks etc.) are all carefully chosen to reflect the personality/ambitions/desires/affiliations/tradition of the owner. Personal homepages extend upon, and indeed, deviate away from received notions of what a 'home' is in the physical sense. John Seabrook draws attention to how the boundary between public and private is blurred when we consider personal homepages:"a home in the real world is, among other things, a way of keeping the world out.. An on-line home, on the other hand, is a little hole you drill in the wall of your real home to let the world in." The objects in your physical home are primarily for your own use and enjoyment and for that of invited guests. On the web, the objects that make up your homepage are primarily created for the enjoyment of others, the vast majority of whom have not been invited, in the conventional sense, into your 'home'. Daniel Chandler associates Levi-Strauss' notion of bricolage with the construction of homepages, where the inclusion, omission, adaptation and arrangement of element/objects lead not only to the construction of a website, but also to the construction of the bricoleur's identity. Xoom, Angelfire, Geocities are some of the larger hosts of free personal webpages. They tend to categorize homepages into various 'neighbourhoods' or 'communities' depending on their content - career, entertainment, women's issues, education, family, government, teen etc. Each of these communities have their own subcategories as well, such as fanzines, faq, personal journal, lonely hearts etc. The dominant theme of almost all personal homepages is generally ME - who am I, what are my interests and hobbies, what are my accomplishments, what do I like/hate, what do I believe in and who are my friends. The degree to which personal information is revealed often depends on the context. If a webpage is published within an institution or place of work, personal information is often kept to a minimum or completely omitted, whilst accomplishments(publications, awards, promotions, research initiatives) are given center stage. It is not uncommon to see a link off this "official" front page to the owner's really personal homepage where he/she exposes their previously unknown interest in death metal music/feather fetishes/really bad poetry. There are several objects peculiar to homepages in the virtual world which do not necessarily have a direct correlation in the physical world. Self promotion and self aggrandizement reach new heights within the medium of the webpage. Littering your page with iconic "awards", images denoting webring membership, and counters depicting how many visitors have stumbled across your page all feature prominently on many personal homepages. I have yet to come across a house in the real world that has a "Best Wallpaper in Living Room" award or a blinking counter telling you that you are the 59th visitor to the house. (however, appropriating such a device might be useful in a 'house of disrepute' as a way of advertising popularity and quality of service by association...hmm...new market opportunity...) Because the medium is a one-to-many form of communication that does not necessarily involve any communication whatsoever between the producer/owner of the webpage and the consumer/audience, numerous iconic conversation abbreviations are used to denote membership or affiliation. The presence of a blue ribbon icon on my site or a rainbow image or a cute bunny rabbit holding hands with another cute bunny rabbit functions as shorthand for the fact that I am an anti-censorship, freespeech advocating liberal or I am gay or I am terminally and pathetically sad. As Csikszentmihal pointed out, some of these objects will only function in a meaningful way within a particular culture or subculture that understand the significance of what it been shown within a certain context(the proliferation and diversity of web ribbons is one such example). think about fashion(mccracken and davis) in an information world McCracken's model is a useful one for examining the complex and transient nature of meaning manufacture and fashion in the real world. However, I think the rather linear model of meaning transfer he suggests(culturally constituted world - consumer goods - individual consumer) is too rigid a structure to use in describing fashion on the web. Just as the boundary between public and private has become blurred, the development of the web has also greatly reduced the chasm between producer and consumer. The largely unmediated nature of online publication has fostered a somewhat self-regulating community who realize when the blink tag has outworn its novelty status and that menu bars don't always have to be on the left side of the screen. This same community also realizes that when a very postmodern and media-savvy band such as Radiohead use the blink tag on their site, it is being done in an ironical and self-referential manner, that is then noddingly approved of as opposed to being ridiculed and disparaged at length. Unlike fashion editors and style pundits writing in magazines, these online critics are also actual producers of the very "item" that they are critiquing. This lends itself to a more fluid model of meaning manufacture than that proposed by McCracken. The consumer has a lot more input into the decision making process as to what is cool or painfully unfashionable or "so two weeks ago." -- today's web pages are quite static, do you think this is likely to change significantly? why? how? I'm not so sure what is meant by static here. In comparison to a physical home, I think a homepage could be seen as very dynamic. It is quite an undertaking to completely remodel your home, and it is only the very wealthy who can afford to make drastic changes on a whim. However, a homepage can be regularly updated, changed and modified, both in terms of overall design and content so perhaps in this way it could be considered a dynamic medium for expression. However, if we consider the actual content itself through the lens of stasis, webpages could indeed be considered quite sedentary. I think this will undoubtedly gradually change, as has been the case with any new medium of communication previously introduced into society. The printing press did not immediately produce the book as we know it today. The idea of using pagination, indexes and bibliographies only emerged as a result of the increasing number of different books being published and placed in libraries where they were difficult to find or cross-reference if they were being used in academic study. The web has not yet been in existence for a full decade and people are still grappling with many of the technological issues involved in producing a homepage. As more sophisticated tools become available that easily facilitate a more dynamic approach to web construction(e.g. Flash, DHTML), I believe we will see a movement towards more active and interactive homepages being published. From what I have seen on Geocities and the like, much of what is being published is banal and of use or interest only to the person publishing and perhaps the persons referenced in the site. The information is often copied from other sources, particularly from the printed press, or from other sites with scant regard for copyright regulations. For many people it is the simple thrill of constructing yourself and presenting yourself online that is of primary importance. If your intended 'audience' is just your pals, then the incentive to delve into DHTML and create something amazing mightn't necessarily be there, but if you have a message that you want to get out to the larger world, then I think people will put time and effort into creating something a little different, something above and beyond a short biog, a few photos and a list of links. readings: davis, f. fashion, culture and identity, chapter 1. csikszentmihaly, m. and rochberg-halton, e. the meaning of things, chapters 3 and 5. mccracken, g. culture and consumption, chapter 5.   back