Personal Web Pages and the Semiotic Construction of Academic Identities

Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

Personal Web Pages and the Semiotic Construction of Academic Identities

In: The Writer's Craft, the Culture's Technology

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Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 23–46

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401202640_007

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Abstract

In 2002, The University of Birmingham started to standardise staff Web pages. For the institutionalised world of universities, the creativity of the personal should be in principle rejected since the corporate image has to take precedence over the individual. However, what is happening in the virtual world is that the domain of the private, even among members of institutions, is taking over, and personal Web pages, created by individuals from all walks of life, present to the world discourses of the self. New forms of virtual identities are therefore created daily.

In this chapter, I examine the effect of culture and gender on the discursive strategies used by Web page writers to present themselves in terms of:

1. the narrativisation of their lives — what kinds of life events are given prominence;

2. the multimodal choices — what kinds of pictures, colours, spaces, scenarios help to create a particular character.

I also discuss the implications of this kind of one-sided interaction for discourse analysis — the Web page addresser sends a message not to an implied audience but to anybody out there in the world who happens to open her or his page. The strategies used to address an unspecified audience are a question that we need to pursue in the new virtual world of the Internet.

My interest here is in looking specifically at how participants in this new genre recontextualise, in the public sphere, a fictionalised representation of themselves. Through what seems to be a light and inconsequential ‘message in a bottle’ to the world, social activity is presented, evaluated and possibly new norms of behaviour are being created.

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The Writer's Craft, the Culture's Technology

Series: PALA Papers, Volume: 1

E-Book ISBN:: 9789401202640

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 01 Jan 2005

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Personal Web Pages and the Semiotic Construction of Academic Identities

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The Writer's Craft, the Culture's Technology

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