You know that we all, from time to time, voice our strong opinions about a certain subject. We know deep in our hearts that we are right, because our logic, life, and experiences have told us so. But every so often that opinion may shift and change a little or even a whole lot. Now in my case, I know that I am always right, no matter what. Actually, that is a lie--a big one. You see, I have taken a class this semester about the rhetoric of the Internet. I have formed my opinions and voiced my thoughts through papers and assignments. And as I become more and more learned in the art of the Internet, I am starting to come to some different conclusions about what I think happens in the magical world of the Net. My biggest paradigm shift happens in the realm of identity. Through discussion and study, I now look at identity on the Internet in a new way. I still hold on to some of my basic ideas, but overall, I see things differently.

Before I begin to tell you what I think, let me explain how I came to this change. It started a couple years ago when I first made my opinion through my personal experiences on the Net. I can remember the first time I stepped into a chat room. It was a very confusing and frustrating experience. I though, ok, there is fifty people in this room talking about fifty different things. I am more of a one-on-one guy anyway, so chat rooms didnt cut it for me, and properly never will. The strange thing was that I actually like to chat if it is one-on-one. I though some sort of technophobia (the fear of new technologies) would have the best of me, but I used the Net in this way on more occasions than I thought I would. Its free, so that is a plus and has brought me to that type of communication rather than the phone several times. So then as the years passed, I grew in my thoughts that people just are stupid on the Net---I actually remember thinking that. But in the back of my mind I still thought I was not stupid like them when I talked with a friend using instant messenger. Then my rhetoric of cyberspace class came about where we studied how people represent themselves on the Internet. This word stupid was my way of saying people did not act themselves online. I voiced my opinion of identity on the Net as this----people lie and misrepresent themselves in such a way that it is impossible to find authenticity on the Net. There is no true identityeveryone is no one. There is not one real person. Now that the semester is over, I have come to some new conclusions. These new conclusions have come about by three things: discussions in the classroom, viewing the web projects (websites) of my other classmates, and most importantly my own experience in building my own web page.

I know what you are thinking. I should move on to my point. Well, here I go. My point is this----

I have discovered that although identity is hard to distinguish as truthful and authentic, the way in which we present ourselves on the Net is a facet of who we are and does represent a significant part of our identity. The most obvious way of recognizing this is homepages. And even more importantly is my experience of creating my own webpage. Homepages give a place to be creative and a place to reveal whatever we chose about ourselves. We put what we hold important on a page. We represent whatever we deem to be of value in our person. In other words, the content of our homepages reflect parts of who we are simply by construction.

The content of personal home pages can be recognized as drawing on a palette of conventional paradigmatic elements, most notably: personal statistics or biographical details; interests, likes and dislikes; ideas, values, beliefs and causes; and friends, acquaintances and personal icons.
-Daniel Chandler. Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web.


Now the representation of the self is no simple issue. Many people throughout the ages have studied what makes us act the react the way we do in given situations. No one can deny that we all play different roles. I play a different role as a student, an employee, a musician, a son, a friend, a roommates, a boyfriend, a leader, etc. I represent my self in many different fashions dependant on the situation at hand. The key is not to have a displacement of self (where you are totally different persons to changing situations), but rather a common foundation of self, which shifts for the circumstances. When you apply this to the Net, it is clear that people represent themselves differently than they would in a real interaction, but what they do reveal about themselves online shows another side of their self. What people reveal on homepages can be explicit or ambiguous. And I tend to believe those things ambiguous show more than one would expect. In other words, things left out or unknown on a homepage can reveal so much about a person and the way they want to be known on the Net.
We studied the idea of the ecstasy of communication. This idea is defined as such: new media brings an abundance of information that is called obscene because we are gaining knowledge of intimate details.

In "The Ecstasy of Communication" Baudrillard describes the media as instruments of obscenity, transparency, and ecstasy -- in special sense of these terms.[10] He claims that in the postmodern mediascape, the domestic scene -- or the private sphere per se -- with its rules, rituals, and privacy is exteriorized, or made explicit and transparent, "in a sort of obscenity where the most intimate processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media (the Loud family in the United States, the innumerable slices of peasant or patriarchal life on French television). Inversely, the entire universe comes to unfold arbitrarily on your domestic screen (all the useless information that comes to you from the entire world, like a microscopic pornography of the universe, useless, excessive, just like the sexual close-up in a porno film): all this explodes the scene formerly preserved by the minimal separation of public and private, the scene that was played out in a restricted space"
-- Douglas Kellner. Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?
Homepages can definitely fall into this idea. I have seen my share of homepages about some things that I wish I never knew. But the fact is that those things, which are so intimate, is crucial to those who reveal them. And that constructs their identity---what seems obscene to us is of high value to those who choose to reveal them. News media and the like are a different story, but when it comes to personal homepages, that is where the ecstasy of communication finds importance. This obscenity is in the eye of the beholder in the realm of homepages.

So now that I look back on the way that I have constructed my homepage, I can see that what I thought was nothing, shows everything. All that I decided to add was my attempt not only to be funny, but unknowingly to show a specific trait of my self. This is the self that I am on the Net. If I like it or not, this is what I chose to reveal about myself. Some may say it is obscene to talk about my intimate relationship with God, but I revealed that because it is of great value to me. I have constructed myself. There is no way around that fact---I chose how to construct myself in a specific way designated specifically for the Net. My Tony Danza page is specifically to make fun of what some people put on the net. But this is ironic that I have adopted this information about an actor, who I actually am not particularly fond of. I also provide links to places that are irrelevant. I pretend in my mind that I am better than those who make personal homepages for fun. In truth, I am the same. That is the irony of my webpage.

The Internet is full of ironists, or at least, it is full of irony. Some of the hyperlinks on our home pages are designed to direct the visitor to other websites that we seriously believe are important and worthy. But some are "ironic links," links to places which let us feel superior, links that we "know" are "bad."
-- Steven Rubio. Home Page

So in this experience of creating my homepage, I have come to the fact that the self is represented is many different ways. And the Internet is especially a place for people to discover a part of themselves as they reveal and not reveal personal information. This is the construction of another self. A self specific for the depths of the Internet.