technoculture314-09

In tutorials today I discovered that the concept of a 'personal homepage' is unfamiliar to quite a few people. This isn't really surprising given that few people today invest time in building their own personal website from scratch in order to construct a 'home' for themselves on the internet where they can 'put their stuff' and just 'be' online. For most people it's a bit like building a house of straw when Facebook or MySpace or Blogger will put you up in a fully furnished state-of-the-art apartment. However, in the late 90s many internet service providers offered their customers a little bit of free space on the internet to create a personal homepage and these were typically used to create a space that described the author's likes, dislikes, interests or to demonstrate their creativity. Enter 'personal homepage' into Google and you will see many fine examples of the classic personal homepage still exist.

I think the same desire to have a space of your own on the internet and to display something of yourself persists, but perhaps our new cyberhomes are a little more communal and also a little more commodified.

If you have never seen a late 90s homepage this parody captures the personal homepage aesthetic quite nicely.