[Air-l] Hello and is there a definition of 'personal home pages'?

[Lee Salter]

Hi there David - long time no see!

I think what you have here is not a problem with home pages as such
but, as with most things to do with the Internet, a more general problem
that is being investigated via the Internet. The question of "what
constitutes a personal home page" must first ask "what constitutes
'personal'". Of course this term is historically contingent. The OED    
describes it as "Of, pertaining to, concerning, or affecting the
individual person or self (as opposed, variously, to other persons, the
general community, etc., or to one's office, rank, or other attributes);
individual; private; one's own". You may see here that the term is
loaded with liberal-capitalist (in the European sense) ideology - for
example, liberal modernity asks us to separate ourselves into
compartments (see Alisdair MacIntyre's criticisms of
"compartmentalisation") so that we separate, for instance, politics from
entertainment or our "working lives" from our "private" lives (and
consequently may do things in the former, such as killing people, that
we wouldn't do in the latter). It is for this reason that the Vicar
looks odd for s/he tends not to be compartmentalised - a Vicar is
following a holistic calling (before the development of capitalism
people were there work). To be sure, "personal" and "public" fit almost
as badly as "personal" and "commmodity"; as Rheingold said, 'it is an
unusual business where your customers also create the value you sell
them'. The problem is with "personal" rather than "web site".



Lee Salter
Lecturer in Media, Communications & Journalism
Edge Hill College,
St Helen's Road 
Ormskirk,
Lancashire
L39 4QP
Email: salterl at edgehill.ac.uk
Tel: 01695 584374

>>> david.brake at cfrq.net 09/09/2004 16:47:27 >>>
I've been lurking on the list a while but have come forward because I
am
finding it difficult to do something which seemed at first relatively
un-problematic - determining what counts as a personal home page.
Wherever
I draw the line there seem to be sites that fall just outside it that
might fit. Is there a commonly-understood definition?

I drafted an email with all of my theoretical musings laid out in it
but
it went on for quite a few lines so rather than clogging all your
inboxes
I invite people who are interested to come and have a look at my
posting
about it on my weblog instead http://blog.org/archives/001228.html and
contribute either there or here.

I hope to meet some of you at the conference incidentally, and if you
are
interested in knowing more about my project and my thoughts check out
my
home page and weblog below (especially
http://blog.org/archives/cat_academia.html). Thanks for your attention
and
I hope you are all having good summers!

-- 
David Brake, PhD researcher in Media and Communications, London School
of
Economics & Political Science
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm>
Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page) and http://blog.org/
(weblog)
Author of Dealing With E-Mail -
<http://davidbrake.org/dealingwithemail/>
gives ordering info

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