The Construction of Identity in the
Personal Homepages of Adolescents

Following previous studies of the personal homepages of adults (Chandler 1998a, 1998b), we decided to study the homepages of young people in Wales. We chose to focus on young people because we are based in a university department of Education and are interested both in how young people learn to use new media and in the broad issue of the formation of personal and socio-cultural identities. Wales was selected not only because this is where we live and work, but also because it raises issues of language and identity (discussed elsewhere by Roberts-Young). This definition of the intended coverage of the current study seemed likely to make a focused yet broad survey a manageable task.

The initial intention was to identify as many as possible of those personal homepages which were by young people resident in Wales who were up to seventeen-years-old and not at a university (the latter consideration being influenced by the existence of parallel and on-going studies of the homepages of university students by Chandler). Roberts-Young undertook a search for homepages which involved contacting many of the schools in Wales, web searches using search engines, e-mail circulars to contacts in the field of information technology in education and related topic areas within Wales and the pursuit of links from pages already identified as those of young people in Wales. To our surprise, despite repeated trawls, only twenty-five websites had been identified by mid-1998. There are surely many more of such pages, but they are clearly not prominently listed (as being authored by young people in Wales) in the search engines. It seems unlikely that other researchers would have discovered many more which met our demographic criteria at the time. There are inherent difficulties with such a task in this medium. Identifying people online who are from a small country such as Wales is problematic. It is seldom clear ‘where we are’ when we visit a webpage: such pages reside on computers called ‘servers’ which obviously do have a geographical location but the ‘address’ of a webpage often does not indicate in which country this is, nor need a webpage author live in the same country. Furthermore, webpage authors do not necessarily mention on their pages where they reside or how old they are. The methods used to find the pages may have tended to skew our non-probabilistic sample towards those which referred explicitly to Wales and towards those which were hypertextually linked to others which we had already identified but it is difficult to imagine how this could have been avoided.

The webpages which were finally identified in our search were those of young people from seven- to eighteen-years-old. Around half of these were in the age-range of sixteen- to seventeen-years-old; there was also one eighteen-year-old. Our search turned up two children aged seven- and eight-years-old but we chose to focus on those of adolescents. The inclusion of university students within Wales in our sample would have massively increased the number of webpages to be considered (since webspace is freely available to university students here) but this would have skewed upwards the age-range represented in our sample. Our webpage authors consisted of nineteen males and seven females– two of the latter having shared pages.

Since all of these pages included e-mail addresses, the authors were contacted by e-mail– a medium which was then used as a basis for interviews which were conducted in Welsh and English (as appropriate) by Roberts-Young. Most of those contacted did respond and participate in these interviews; clearly the few who did not respond also represent an important group of webpage authors, making our interview data representative only of those who were prepared to discuss their pages. Webpage authors were asked a series of preformulated but open-ended questions about their own pages, based on issues identified in earlier studies by Chandler. Both the content and the forms of the pages themselves also provided relevant data. Given the restricted number of identifiable webpages and our concern to protect the anonymity of webpage authors in this paper we have tried to avoid the provision of details which might help to identify individuals. This might seem paradoxical since webpages are publicly accessible but as the current paper suggests, the definition of ‘public’ and ‘private’ is subjective and we particularly wish to protect minors from over self-disclosure (see Waskul 1996).

What is a personal homepage?

A personal homepage is a new multi-media online genre on that part of the Internet known as the World-Wide Web. Such pages can be recognised by both their content and their forms. Not all ‘homepages’ are personal homepages: the broader term includes the pages of institutions as well as of named individuals. A personal homepage is one which has been created by the individual to whom it refers. Many are explicitly labelled, e.g. as ‘David’s home page’. Almost all of the webpages in our sample were those of individuals, but in one case the same pages belonged jointly to two seventeen-year-old girls and at least eight of the others were identifiable as forming part of shared webspace which belonged to particular families. In the case of the webpages of the two seven- and eight-year-olds (one male, one female) the pages were ‘co-authored’ by parents.

A genre is often identified in terms of the purposes which it serves (Chandler 1997).The contents of the genre of the personal homepage reflect a range of purposes (Miller 1995, Buten 1996, Erickson 1996, Walters 1996), but a unifying purpose is broadly that of self-presentation. Indeed, webpages for which the primary or secondary purpose is not seen by their authors and/or their readers as involving self-presentation do not, for us, constitute ‘personal’ homepages. Self-presentation (also called personal portrayal or impression-management) is an important feature of everyday behaviour, especially for adolescents (Goffman 1969). In daily life this is of course noticeable in the individual’s clothing, hairstyles, interactional styles, attitudes, ‘tastes’, lifestyle and so on. Whilst it seems useful in some ways to compare the genre of the personal homepage with conventional written genres, the nearest real-world analogy for the personal homepages of teenagers is probably the environmental space of teenagers’ own bedrooms in their real-life homes. ‘Home’ for most teenagers consists of their own personal domestic spaces. The importance of teenagers’ home spaces for their identity practices has recently been explored by researchers (Brown et al. 1994, Salinger 1995). The comparison with personal homepages is striking because of the frequent presence in both of such features as publicity images of idols from the worlds of music and sport, personal memorabilia (such as photographs of friends and family members and scrapbook snippets), the playing of personal selections of music and so on. Subject to adequate affluence and creativity a room and its contents can exceed the multi-media capacity of a conventional personal website (not least because it can itself contain any medium, including access to the internet). However, bedrooms lack the potentially global bandwidth of homepages on the Web. Only your family and your closest friends get to see ‘your room’ in RL (Real Life). The Web offers a new medium for self-presentation with a considerably larger potential audience than traditional modes.

Homepages are ‘assembled’ rather than simply ‘written’. Claude Lévi-Strauss spoke of a ‘dialogue with the materials and means of execution’ (Lévi-Strauss 1974, 29). His notion of the bricoleur who appropriates the materials which are ready-to-hand is widely employed in relation to cultural practices in youth subcultures. The appropriation of popular cultural imagery for personal purposes has been described by various commentators (Hebdige 1979, Jenkins 1992), and the value of this practice for young people has been noted by Paul Willis:

Making (not receiving) messages and meanings in your own context and from materials you have appropriated is, in essence, a form of education in the broadest sense. It is the specifically developmental part of symbolic work and creativity, an education about the ‘self’ and its relation to the world and others in it. Where everyday symbolic work differs from what is normally thought of as ‘education’ is that it ‘culturally produces’ from its own chosen symbolic resources. (Willis 1990, 136)

Teenagers draw selectively and creatively on cultural materials and imagery from consumer culture, popular music and the mass media since these provide a shared and easily available source of cultural options (ibid.). This need not mean simply adopting readymade commercial material wholesale: one of our webpage authors– a fifteen-year-old boy– appropriated and recontextualized the Smurf cartoon characters in a simple animated spoof of his own which he titled Smurfs and Away– ‘a protest against all soaps’.

Constructing a homepage involves bricolage. The key features of the practice of bricolage in any medium may be specified as follows:

• the inclusion of particular elements;
• indirect allusion to others;
• the omission
  
  • of what ‘goes without saying’ or
  • of what ‘is noticeable by its absence’;
• the adaptation of ‘borrowings’ by
  • addition;
  • deletion;
  • substitution; or
  • transposition; and finally
• arrangement: overall organization, sequencing and emphasis.

In the creation of personal homepages, graphics, sounds, text and the code used to generate a particular format are often copied from other people’s pages (sometimes with some editing). The adoption of existing materials is much easier in virtual reality than in material reality, since virtual bricolage allows appropriation without either purchase or theft. Most of our young webpage authors alluded to this practice. A sixteen-year-old girl referred to ‘picking up backgrounds, animations and things from other pages’. A thirteen-year-old boy said: ‘I had the ideas for creating the pages by looking at other people’s pages and stealing some icons!’ Another told us that she got her ideas in the same way, and ‘by playing around with pictures etc.’ This is very much ‘a dialogue with the materials’.

As Lévi-Strauss noted, bricolage involves more than simply the appropriation of materials: it also involves the construction of the bricoleur’s identity (Jenkins 1992). It is easy to see this dialogue with other people’s materials as supporting ‘the relational self’ of which we have been made aware by Kenneth Gergen (1972, 1995). In bricolage performances of identity are reflected in semiotic markers of similarity to and difference from others. The clearest example of this is in networks of hypertext links to the webpages of other people, but it is no less true of other aspects of both form and content. The values of the bricoleur are reflected in the assumptions which underlie specific inclusions, allusions, omissions, adaptations and arrangements. As one seventeen-year-old girl told us about the webpages which she co-authored: ‘You can… tell a lot about us from our links page,’ adding: we only put links to pages that we like and we use’. And at the entrance to their website lay a quotation from the Welsh band, The 60ft Dolls: ‘We never felt Welshness, just Non-Englishness’. Such alignment by selective quotation is common in personal homepages.

The phenomenology of engagement with the medium and the genre

The medium of the Web and the genre of the personal home page have certain features which may play a part in phenomenological shifts in the sense of self.

Personal homepages support the existence of ‘virtual selves’ which people can encounter without ever meeting you. As a feature of webpages there is nothing new about this: virtual selves have existed ever since people began to publish their writing (Goffman 1981, 173). Plato noted this feature of the technology of writing in the Phaedrus (circa 370 BC) and later in the Seventh Letter (Hamilton 1971). Virtual selves are a feature of all publishing and broadcasting: people frequently refer to ‘knowing’ writers and broadcasters whom they have never met, which can be a source of frustration in particular for those who publish in the durable medium of print, which preserves and disseminates a particular identity for the writer long after they may feel that they have outgrown it. Now many more people can experience being ‘known’ by strangers in this way, but the medium of the Web allows them to ‘rewrite themselves’.

Unlike printed and broadcast media, webpages are not only published (on a grand scale) but are also easily revisable. This important feature of online text was anticipated by Isaac Asimov in his story ‘The Fun They Had’ (1951) in which children of the far future discovered a printed book and were amazed that ‘when they turned back to the page before, it had the same words on it that it had when they read it the first time’. In face-to-face interaction we say ‘Take that back!’ in vain. And this applies no less to printed and broadcast media. But on the Web we may forever engage in ‘taking back’ and reversioning our published ‘positions’. The revisability of online materials facilitates a sense of personal webpages being ‘part of’ the author in a way which is comparable to the provisional and dynamic function of unpublished notes for many writers (see Chandler 1992, 1993, 1994b, 1995). The relative attachment of the homepage can thus make it seem like a dynamic extension of the self.

If we ‘map’ the dimension of ‘public’ and ‘personal’ against that of ‘statis’ and ‘change’, the sense of self as ‘internal’ is obviously distanced from the ‘public’ pole. It is also highly fluid and subject to constant change quite unlike writing which is published in print (see Figure 2).

That which is printed in conventional form is released and unrecallable. The diaries or journals of ordinary people have not traditionally been released for public consumption and tend to be more ‘personal’, but we tend not to revise them. Personal homepages are much more changeable than anything else which we both write and publish. An eight-year-old homepage author told us that she kept ‘adding things when I think of them’. Homepages are unlikely to be updated as often as we ‘update’ our internal conceptions of ourselves– in fact, this is an incentive to revise them. But they have the potential to be closer to the fluid self than any other textual form whilst also being very public.

Like writing with a word processor, writing on a web page is experienced by some as like an itch demanding to be scratched. Several of the young authors whom we interviewed noted that their sites ‘could do with a bit of updating’. A thirteen-year-old boy noted the dynamic nature of his purposes. His pages had originally been created simply to serve the technical purpose of learning HTML code but the purpose of his page had ‘changed considerably since then’. It is as if, having created what you believe to be a fair reflection of your interests and concerns, they undergo a shift. ‘I was happy with it when I first developed the site. but I would like to change it so that the pages are not so "young"’, one sixteen-year-old webpage author told us. Teenagers, of course, tend to be very conscious of presenting an image of themselves which is both sufficiently mature and in keeping with current fashions amongst their peers. At the very least, any indication of one’s age on the page needs updating after every birthday. But surveys suggest that young people’s homepages are changed far more often than this. A US survey in 1996 found that 63% of personal webpage authors reported updating their pages at least once a month, and 25% at least once a week (Buten 1996). And this was likely to be an underestimate. An English homepage which one of the authors encountered bore the title ‘He changes his webpages more often than his underpants’– ironically, it wasn’t there when checked a second time.

Where webpages are experienced as being emotionally close to their authors as well as physically detached from them, this can facilitate a sense of dialogue with oneself. Many writers have referred to writing as enabling them to argue with what they have written (Chandler 1995, 26, 56, 72, 190, 192). They are able to use writing as a mode of internal dialogue within themselves. The passage of time can assist in this process. After a text has been published it ‘takes on its own identity’ (we certainly don’t always recognize what we have written from the reports of readers!). Deborah Cameron, a linguist, noted that revising a book which has already been published allows you to engage in a ‘dialogue with your (former) self’ (Cameron 1992, ix). This applies no less to revising a personal web page. The act of revision confronts you with a representation of a former self, enabling you to define a new one in relation to this discarded self.

In this sense, having a homepage may help to undermine the modernist notion of the self as a stable entity in favour of the postmodernist notion of its fluidity. As we reversion our homepages we seamlessly overwrite the selves which we have shed in a manner similar to face-to-face interaction. Such changes over time in people’s homepages call for longtitudinal research which has not yet been undertaken.

Shifting boundaries of ‘public’ and ‘private’

The polarised labels of ‘public’ versus ‘private’ seem to be very deeply embedded within the dominant interpretative frameworks of contemporary Western culture. Particular activities, settings and modes of discourse shift over time in their assignment by various groups to points on an imaginary spectrum in which these ‘ideal types’ represent the poles. In his book No Sense of Place, Joshua Meyrowitz argues that electronic media blur the boundaries between public and private. Without adopting the perspective of technological determinism we may acknowledge that the mass media do bring public issues into the domestic setting of the home, and (as is highlighted by President Clinton’s current affairs and by confessional talk shows) such media also frequently make public issues which might previously have been regarded as private. Meanwhile, the Internet– a many-to-many medium– offers users the possibility of making their own personal concerns very public indeed. A home page makes ‘some of your personal space available to other people’ (Seabrook 1997, 15). Just as a basic difference between speaking and writing is that writing is automatically recorded, so the basic difference between writing with traditional media and writing on the Web is that such online writing is automatically published. Webpage authors are often conscious of this: one seventeen-year-old told us: ‘I wanna be known on the Net’. However, the idea of writing being automatically published for all-and-sundry to access is unfamiliar, and some users seem blissfully unaware that they audiences for their texts may be far wider than they may be conscious of. One boy told us: ‘I suppose I tried to aim the homepage at children of my age (13) but that wasn’t actually in my mind at the time’. A fifteen-year-old boy told us that his page was not only for other people but ‘for myself’. Some writers are clearly using this very public medium to write not only about themselves but also in part for themselves (see also Chandler 1998b). It is interesting to recall that the irony of this occurred to Montaigne over 500 years ago in his use of the public medium of print for the reflective genre of the personal essay: ‘Many things that I would not confess to any one in particular, I deliver to the publick; and send my best friends to a bookseller’s shop, there to inform themselves concerning my most secret thoughts’. On the Web, the personal function of ‘discovering’ (or at least clarifying) one’s thoughts, feelings and identity (Chandler 1992, 1993, 1995) is fused with the public function of publishing these to what is potentially a far larger audience than traditional media have ever offered.

Various commentators have noted the surprising degree of personal revelation encountered in personal homepages. The diaries of individuals who are prominent figures in the public sphere (particularly in politics and entertainment) have of course sometimes been formally published in print. Indeed, many diaries published as books were also written with a wide public readership in mind rather than as purely personal reflections. In contrast, the personal diaries of ‘private citizens’ have rarely appeared in printed form during their authors’ lifetimes, no doubt in part because few publishers would regard many of these diaries as particularly marketable. However, it is not uncommon to find some people’s personal diaries, journals and other ‘personal’ forms of writing openly available for inspection on their websites. Some of these include intimate revelations and frank references to personal relationships which their authors would surely be unlikely to volunteer in casual conversation with passing strangers. Our own small sample did not include many dramatic examples of this, but we were struck by one case of a sixteen-year-old girl, whose pages resembled a personal scrapbook, describing her online friendship with, amongst others, a man of twenty-eight (whose photograph was included). This same author referred to having been pestered over a period of months by a ‘creepy’ man who sent her e-mails saying that he ‘wanted me to be his special friend’, so making personal information so publicly available can have its downside. This was, however, the only case in our sample which referred to the author having had such negative experiences and we would not wish to contribute to a moral panic about this issue.

The adolescent webpage authors we interviewed on this occasion were no older than seventeen-years-old and they were not studying away from home in universities. Most of these young authors saw their primary audience as their existing friends in RL; at this age some were prepared to admit their families into their readership but several were insistent that they did not wish this readership to extend to their schools, as in the case of this sixteen-year-old girl:

I didn’t want the school to know about the site and X [a teacher at the school] found it a few months or so back by using a search engine! The main reason for my secrecy was that people who are not familiar with the internet do not understand why my homepage is up, they do not know about irc [Internet Relay Chat], and to me it would be quite embarrassing for people in school to read the page and the ins and outs of my life! :) [‘smiley’ emoticon] I tend to see the internet as something that people only understand if they actually use it, and personal homepages like mine may seem strange to them, you know, why would I put a page up on the Internet about my life?– they don’t realise who it is for.

However, it is a key characteristic of the genre of the personal home page that authors cannot (without elaborate technical security measures) control the readership of their pages. Such pages are thus in this respect more like ‘broadcasts’ than are conventional forms of communication such as letters. This presents considerable rhetorical problems for authors who are conscious of such unknown audiences (Chandler 1998a). We can be more in control of the image we present on a personal home page than in day-to-day life but as with a printed publication (and unlike face-to-face modes of self-presentation), a home page cannot adapt itself to changing audiences and contexts.

Older adolescents sometimes remark that their parents will not read their homepages (Chandler 1998b), neglecting the possibility that their parents may get to hear of the contents from friends or relatives who may be more conversant with the medium. Several possible explanations for this blindness to readership come to mind. As Waskul points out, those who use the medium have their own implicit experiential definitions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ (Waskul 1996). Typing one’s online texts whilst alone in one’s own home may contribute towards the development of a ‘perceived sense of privacy’ about such material. However, whilst one may have a private conversation in a public park without expecting all and sundry to feel free to eavesdrop, you would not expect to restrict access to your diary to a few close friends if you chained it to a noticeboard in the park. It seems reasonable to assume that everyone who uses the Web does know that the material which they publish on their homepages is open to anyone and that the inclusion of material which they would prefer to regard as private is not obligatory. Perhaps the sense of a self-created space in a home page is so strong that access to it is somehow assumed to be as controllable as access to one’s physical home space (which, of course, it is not). Perhaps the sense of one’s homepages as being part of onself leads some authors to slip into feeling that it is a purely private dream space. No doubt in some cases people hope that by ‘opening themselves up’ (and making themselves vulnerable) they may discover sympathic audiences or like-minded spirits; perhaps they choose to imagine that their audience is solely composed of such people. Whatever the reason, revelatory authors seem either to forget that their texts may reach audiences which they had not anticipated or alternatively they simply don’t care who reads their pages. Despite revelatory examples, most home page authors are fairly selective about what they choose to reveal about themselves. It is indeed a presentational genre which facilitates such selectivity (Chandler 1998a).

Teenagers make limited use of writing for self-presentation. Whilst personal diaries are used by many in the exploration of their evolving thoughts and feelings, and some write letters which involve the creation of written personae, more public media are necessarily employed in self-presentation, particularly for one’s peers. These are not primarily textual media, though, given the prominence accorded to writing by schools, a few remarks about ‘public writing’ may be appropriate here. Conventional print publication is not an option open to most people. Writing in the years of compulsory schooling invariably involves writing for an audience of one– the teacher of the class– whose only interest in the texts so produced is to ‘assess’ it against formal criteria rather than to read it with genuine interest. Sometimes, it is true, such writing is ritualistically ‘published’ on classroom walls. It is a marvel that teachers can ever motivate children to write at all under such conditions. Why would one want to write anything for people in the same room? In any case, such writing rarely relates to the genuine interests of young writers. Even in the universities the situation is little different. Educators in tertiary education are more accustomed to publishing their own writing, but publishing one’s ideas has traditionally been reserved for the élite of which academics (but not their students) were a part. For educators at all levels it is difficult to realize how liberating it can be for young people to write for ‘a real audience’. A small minority of teachers who have realized the importance of this experience– mostly teachers of foreign languages– have in recent years sought to exploit the potential of electronic mail for getting teenagers to write for each other (Tella 1991).

The personal home page goes further. Whereas e-mail is restricted to the written word, multi-media webpages open up far greater expressive possibilities than are available in a purely textual medium. And whilst e-mail is largely a one-to-one form of interpersonal communication, webpages constitute a one-to-many publishing medium. The Web is a self-publishing medium in both senses of the term: being able to produce webpages is like owning your own printing press, which is a potentially empowering function for young people. As a one-to-many medium, webpages also support the development of virtual communities (Rheingold 1995). Identities forged through the medium of web pages seldom seem directly related to the traditional demographic markers of class, age, gender and ethnicity. Web page identities arise from, or seek to engender, virtual communities which are primarily epistemic: based on shared interests and tastes (see also Willis 1990, 141ff). A fifteen-year-old told us that his page was for ‘other people interested in the same things as me’ and a younger author wrote that he wanted to communicate with people of a like mind’.

Lest we create a misleading impression of the universal centrality of webpages in the development of their authors’ identities, we should note that a few of the personal homepages in our sample did not appear particularly significant in their authors’ repertoires of identity practices. Indeed, for whatever reason, one or two appeared to have been abandoned. However, most had ‘a character’ of their own, and a few were obviously labours of love. Most of the pages whose authors we interviewed were important to their authors. A thirteen-year-old boy observed: ‘I have a homepage because I feel that people should be able to know what other people think about life. Also because the internet is vast and I would like to be a part of it’. Who could argue with the poignancy and idealism of such youthful declarations?

2nd November 1998

References

• Brown, Jane D., Carol Reese Dykers, Jeanne Rogge Steele & Anne Barton White (1994): ‘Teenage Room Culture: Where Media and Identities Intersect’, Communication Research 21(6): 813-27
• Buten, John (1996): ‘Personal Homepage Survey’ [WWW document] URL http://www.asc.upenn.edu/USR/sbuten/pageproj.htm
• Cameron, Deborah (1992): Feminism and Linguistic Theory. London: Macmillan
• Chandler, Daniel (1992): ‘The Phenomenology of Writing by Hand’, Intelligent Tutoring Media 3(2/3): 65-74; [WWW document] URL http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/phenom.html
• Chandler, Daniel (1993): ‘Writing Strategies and Writing Tools’, English Today 9(2): 32-8
• Chandler, Daniel (1994a): ‘Who Needs Suspended Inscription’, Computers and Composition 11: 191-201
• Chandler, Daniel (1994b): ‘Biases of the Ear and Eye: "Great Divide" Theories, Phonocentrism, Graphocentrism & Logocentrism’. [WWW document] URL http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/litoral/litoral.html
• Chandler, Daniel (1995): The Act of Writing: A Media Theory Approach. Aberystwyth: University of Wales Aberystwyth; [WWW document] URL http://www.aber.ac.uk/~ednwww/Daniel/act-of-writing.doc
• Chandler, Daniel (1997): ‘An Introduction to Genre Theory’. [WWW document] URL http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/intgenre.html
• Chandler, Daniel (1998a): ‘Writing Oneself in Cyberspace’. In Rosemary Lonsdale (Ed.): Writing in Higher Education: Perspectives in Theory and Practice (Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Writing Development in Higher Education, Aberystwyth, 8-9 April 1997). Aberystwyth: University of Wales, pp. 11-19; [WWW document] URL http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/homepgid.html
• Chandler, Daniel (1998b): ‘Personal Homepages and the Construction of Identities on the Web’. Paper presented at Aberystwyth Post-International Group Conference on Linking Theory and Practice: Issues in the Politics of Identity, 9-11 September 1998, University of Wales, Aberystwyth; [WWW document] URL http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/webident.html
• Erickson, Erik (1968): Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: Norton
• Erickson, Thomas (1996): ‘The World Wide Web as Social Hypertext’ [WWW document] URL http://www.pliant.org/personal/Tom_Erickson/SocialHypertext.html
• Gergen, Kenneth J ([1972] 1982): ‘The Healthy, Happy Human Being Wears Many Masks’. In Dennis Krebs (Ed.) Readings in Social Psychology: Contemporary Perspectives (2nd Edn.). New York: Harper & Row, pp. 244-8. Originally published in Psychology Today.
• Gergen, Kenneth J (1995): ‘Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics’ [WWW document] URL http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/kgergen1/text8.html
• Goffman, Erving (1969): The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin
• Goffman, Erving (1981): Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell
• Hamilton, Walter (trans.) (1971): Plato: Phaedrus & Letters VII and VIII. Harmondsworth: Penguin
• Hebdige, Dick (1979): Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen
• Jenkins, Henry (1992): Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1974): The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Meyrowitz, Joshua (1985): No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press
• Miller, Hugh (1995): ‘The Presentation of Self in Electronic Life: Goffman on the Internet’ [WWW document] URL http://www.ntu.ac.uk/soc/psych/miller/goffman.htm (paper presented at Embodied Knowledge and Virtual Space conference, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, June 1995)
• Rheingold, Howard (1995): The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized World. London: Minerva
• Salinger, Adrienne (1995): In My Home: Teenagers in their Bedrooms. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books
• Seabrook, John (1997): Deeper: A Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace. London: Faber
• Snyder, Ilana (1996): Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth. Victoria: Melbourne University Press
• Tella, Seppo (1991): Introducing International Communications Networks and Electronic Mail into Foreign Language Classrooms: A Case Study in Finnish Senior Secondary Schools. Helsinki: Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki
• Walters, Alison (1996): ‘An Analysis of Purposes and Forms of Personal Homepages on the World-Wide Web’ [WWW document] URL http://tranquility.mit.edu/alison/thesis.html
• Waskul, Dennis (1996): ‘Ethics of Online Research: Considerations for the Study of Computer Mediated Forms of Interaction’ [WWW document] URL http://www.venus.soci.niu.edu/~jthomas/ethics/tis/go.dennis; published in a different form as Dennis Waskul & Mark Douglass (1996): ‘Considering the Electronic Participant: Some Polemical Observations on the Ethics of On-Line Research’, The Information Society 12(2): 129-39
• Willis, Paul (with Simon Jones, Joyce Canaan & Geoff Hurd) (1990): Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young. Milton Keynes: Open University Press

Notes

1. This paper is based on a presentation at the In-Tele Conference ’98 on Educational Uses of the Internet and European Identity Construction, 24-26 September 1998 in Strasbourg, France. An abridged version of the paper is due to appear in May 1999 in:
   • Marquet, Pascal, Alain Jaillet, Stéphanie Mathey & Elke Nissen (Eds.) (1999): Proceedings of IN-TELE 98 - European Conference on Educational Uses of the Internet and European Identity Construction [Provisional title]. Berne: Peter Lang Publishers
     

2. Some of the online documents cited here had become defunct by the time of writing (Chandler has printouts made at the time of access).
3. The authors explicitly reserve the right to publish on-line versions of this paper.

   

   [keywords: internet, webpages, homepages, identity, adolescence, teenagers, youth, self-presentation, impression management, Wales]

   The preferred form of citation for the online draft version of this paper is as follows:

   • Chandler, Daniel and Dilwyn Roberts-Young (1998): 'The Construction of Identity in the Personal Homepages of Adolescents' [WWW document] URL http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/strasbourg.html [Date of Visit]
     

   

   This page has been accessed times since 2nd November 1998.