Apology of homepage

By Mirza Babayev

It is a common attitude amongst online media professionals and other “serious people” to display contempt for the ordinary users’ personal homepages. Self-expression online is considered for some reason as something disgraceful or even harmful. It is almost like masturbation – it has no social significance and no children are born, there is only a waste of energy and the dubious satisfaction of the “originator”. The result of this activity judged as “progressive littering of the net spaces with low-quality, not authentic, and useless information” naturally irritates the adherents of clarity and order.

A certain Dr Eco Lem, in whose name science fiction and semiotics are happily combined, went so far in his hatred of “irrelevant information” that he declared a crusade against personal homepages. In 1995, he founded The Institute for Relevant Information Studies (IRIS) one of whose aims was “purification of the Internet” from personal homepages that did not comply with the criteria of usefulness and meaningfulness he had advanced.

His Anti-Personal Home Page FAQ (Lem 1996), which is presently unavailable but can be found via archive.org, run as follows:

There are already too many personal home pages cluttering up the Internet with information about people we know and care nothing about. Although our friends and family may get a big kick out of them, they are nonetheless filling up cyberspace with an inordinate amount of irrelevant information. In lieu of a home page of my own, I've posted this FAQ in hopes of dissuading people from uploading yet another "vanity" page to their Internet Service Provider. <…> Whether we realize it or not, our society has become addicted to the creation and consumption of irrelevant information.

Doctor Lem believed that the multiplication of homepages is one of the symptoms of this disease and proposed a whole series of measures for its treatment. They included establishing hypermedia linking guidelines and standards that will enhance one's understanding of the non-linear organization of information in cyberspace; creating official WWW topic pages with the links lists of relevant resources maintained by appointed non-profit groups; development of software agents that would assist in finding relevant information; and complete elimination of personal homepages.

Although it turned out soon that Dr Eco Lem who claimed to be “a winner of the 1990 Linguistics Nobel Prize for his Theory of Special Relativity” was actually a virtual personality and that his project was a joke about the pretensions of “the scientific approach to the Internet”, the immense popularity of this mocking attack on personal homepages (testified by its high quotation index on the Internet) seems quite symptomatic.

However, the respectable Dr Lem, as well as other, less radical, critics of homepages seems to miss the fact that these “silly pages” are the foundation of the Internet, its semantic body without which even the most wise head can only sit on a plate and senselessly goggle its eyes. Just as family is a social unit so the homepage is a unit of World Wide Web, the salt of cybersoil, alpha and omega of cyberspace.

I shall try to substantiate this thesis.

Definitions

Homepage (or Home Page) has several meaning in English language. ‘Originally, the web page that your browser is set to use when it starts up. The more common meaning refers to the main web page for a business, organization, person or simply the main page out of a collection of web pages, e.g. "Check out so-and-so's new Home Page"’ (Enzer 1994-2003). In accordance with the specific aim of the present work and the initial (literal) meaning of the word, in what follows, I shall use the term homepage in more narrow meaning of “personal homepage”. This is applied to WWW resources created by private persons for themselves or by themselves, without being paid for it and without any obligations to any organizations.

Transparent walls

For the inhabitants of cyberspace, personal homepages are in some regards what homes are for people in ordinary three-dimensional space. These are private spaces they can design and use as they like, in contrast to public spaces that are socially shared with other people, such as an office, supermarket or nightclub. My house is my castle and my own Rome; here I do what I will, I decide myself where to hang the picture and where to put my socks. My home cannot be separated from me since it is me, or more exactly, one of my objectifications.

However, there are some important differences between the virtual home and the real one. First, the virtual home is immaterial. There are no walls, tables or chairs here; there are only texts, pictures, and sounds – information, which cannot be touched, but can only be perceived and experienced. The second difference is its penetrability: everyone can be my guest here, not only those who were invited. If this house still has the walls that separate it from the rest of the world, they are transparent, permeable to everyone’s view, like the walls in a crystal palace.

Eroding the borders

The content of homepages can be very different. There are no limitations here; any professional of semi-professional interests, ideological and aesthetic beliefs, psychological inclinations, hobbies, phobias and passions can find shelter and expression on personal homepages. As somebody of authority once said, ‘the Internet belongs to the category of things that can give you a vivid idea of infinity’.

If, however, we shall try to classify somehow this Solaris of information, then two principal types of information or activity, which results in homepage creation, can be discerned. The first type is based on collecting and organizing information that has already existed. In this way electronic libraries and archives, collections of pictures, jokes, Japanese hentai mangas, serial numbers and cracks have emerged. This type includes creation of thematic collections of any kind of information (such as railway timetables, cactuses, Linda Lovelace, kayaks, etc.) as well as meta-information (bookmarks or link lists that can develop, under favourable conditions, into subject directories).

The second type deals with creation of new information. A mere translation of something into electronic form or recombination of ready elements can hardly be referred to this type. Rather it includes what can be called authorship and creativity. On this pole, personal literary and art projects, online diaries, opinion columns and so forth can be found.

These two types can be rarely found in their pure forms; usually they are combined in the framework of any personal homepage, though one of them can be dominant. Moreover, they are not only combined but they also transform one into another. The creative production of meanings can be viewed as collection, ordering and manifestation of what is implicit and ulterior; and the collection of “the things of others” turns out to be a deeply creative act in which the essential characteristics of the personality are revealed. Collection and cultivation are, therefore, the two views of the same gesture. The distinction between gatherers and cultivators is just a convention (although the useful one); both of them work actually with the same medium, be it the soil or the worldwide information network. Moreover, in the process of this work (as opposed to the consumption of the ready product), the border between personal and impersonal, one’s own and what belongs to others, direct and indirect (self-)expression tend to dissolve.

Useless things are sometimes more needful than useful ones

I am well aware that to speak about such things as self-expression, creativity, the search for meaning and truth has became unfashionable, especially in the context of galloping commercialization and politicization of the Internet. However, I would like to emphasize the significance of the non-utilitarian nature of most personal homepages. The fact that the creators of homepages produce a significant part of the network content seems evident. Although the statistical data are not available, I think that information produced by private persons motivated by sheer enthusiasm might surpass in its volume that for production of which people are paid. The issue of the quality of this information and the extent to which it is useful must be considered in more detail.

The critics of personal homepages who are usually businesspeople but sometimes can be intellectuals exemplified by Dr Lem in the beginning of this chapter, argue that homepages are useless garbage. Information that they deliver contains a great amount of “noise”; it is chaotic, heterogeneous, often biased, inadequate or deliberately distorted. Given the huge amount, this led to the situation that the Net, instead of being the effective instrument of knowledge and commerce, has turned out to be a Punch-and-Judy show or a bazaar governed by confusion and chaos. “Serious people” who are maddened by this lack of seriousness try either to ignore this motley herd of homemade goods producers building up their own informational supermarkets and crystal palaces or (most often simultaneously doing both) to use this herd by selling to it or selling it. Since their aim is to derive profit or to gain power, the population of the Net presents for them purely instrumental interest – either as customers paying money for information and material goods, or as an object as marketing and other types of manipulation. From this perspective, the content produced by the individual users on their homepages has no value indeed, and sometimes, as in the case of hacker or “extremist” web sites, it can be in fact harmful to their business or manipulative endeavours.

I argue that the basic ideology of personal homepage is cardinally different from the ideology of the corporate (in an extended sense) web site. If the goal of the latter is to derive benefit and profit, then the goal of personal homepage is usually the homepage itself. It aims at self-presentation and not at profit. The principal functions of personal homepage are expression and communication rather than information and persuasion. Therefore, it is fallacious to apply to homepages the same criteria of evaluation as to the resources of an academic, political or commercial nature. Usefulness is the merit rather than fault of homepage. Not everything in this world can be measured by profit. It seems noteworthy that what resists quantitative analysis and seems senseless to the utilitarian approach has the ultimate value. For example, such immaterial and non-utilitarian acts as love, creativity, and consciousness. If one aims at meaning, than it is just the “useful” information that turn out to be ultimately useless and senseless.

Of course, the creators of personal homepages are often influenced by the spirit of pragmatism that penetrates modern society. Symptom of this are obsession by advertising banners, which are thematically alien to the content of the web site and only deface its design, copyright warnings and so forth. However, these superficial similarities with corporative information production are not very significant; they rather emerge from the lack of comprehension of intrinsic interests than by virtue of the actual kinship with the object of imitation.

Homepage as the assemblage point

Thus, any personal homepage is first of all self-expression of personality, its self-creation in the realm of meaning. Everyone who builds up a homepage collects together themselves – their personal history, attractions and stresses, valences of their fate. As the material, you can use both texts created by yourself (which are alienated from the self in the process of objectification of meanings) and the texts created by others (which, on the contrary, are captured and appropriated). It is well known that the work with the symbols of the psyche, which is the basis of every creative act, including the creation of personal homepage, is the most effective means of self-knowledge. The social significance of such a work is externally not evident; hence, frequent accusations of narcissism and the widespread belief that such work is needless.

Yet man is not only the individual being with his personal history, memories, complexes, problems, fears and hopes. One is always more than one seems to be. The individually significant meanings (“that which is interesting”) serve as an orifice, window or tunnel leading to the corresponding structures of the world’s meanings, which are potentially significant for any of us. Consequently, the realization of a personal interest ultimately leads to the creation of a work that is valuable for many or even, as in the case of geniuses, may acquire the universal significance.

As a rule, personal web pages are created in spare time away from one’s work. However, sometimes the borders become obliterated – people live at work or work at home. In both cases, something intermediate between an ordinary home page and a “project” comes into existence. What a person creates “for himself” merges with what he makes “for others”. Sometimes people become paid for the maintenance of their personal homepages and they cease to be home pages in the narrow meaning of the word. In such a way many popular online projects have appeared. Yahoo!, Internet Movie Database, Anecdotes from Russia, and Moshkov’s Library have started prescisly as personal homepages – their creators were simply interested in doing what they did (though some of them could, of course, have had commercial intention from the very beginning).

Conclusion

Like is attracted to like. This principle operates on the Net with a special power and vividness. Since information here is open (I abstract myself from the commercial recourses), and the distance and borders mean almost nothing, the process of integration and linkage is much easier here than in the three-dimensional world. Personal homepages, in particular, emerge as small islands in the ocean of information, but then they become affected by the force of attraction between similar meanings; the separate resources form more and more complicated configurations; the consolidation of individual efforts, their focusing and mutual intensification occur.

The means of linking homepages are various – from the simple link exchange to creation of web-rings, guilds, parties, formal or informal communities. In this context of ceaseless communication and interaction, the person participating in these processes gains an opportunity to exceed constantly its own limits. As for the Net itself, this is its mode of existence and a form of its self-knowledge.

In conclusion, it seems appropriate to remember that, in spite of all the advantages of homepage, it is only a means, not the aim. As a proverb invented long before the invention of the Internet says, “The weak beast gets entangled in the web and dies; the strong one tears it open and quits.”

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