[Preliminary Note: In the title of our session, I�m responsible for the three words �Web page motives.� My original presentation title, as listed in the conference guide, is �To write, intransitively . . . but with an indirect object.� This title, which alludes to Roland Barthes, is now somewhat defunct since, to limit this talk to 20 minutes, I�ve excised Barthes. What�s left of this presentation reports on an empirical study that�s occupied my life for the past two years, an empirical study involving

• a survey of 110 homepage authors,
• an analysis of their Web sites.]

Three years ago, John Buten (1996), in a careful and exhaustive study of personal homepages, estimated that 6% of American Internet users had posted personal homepages. Given recent estimates of over 70 million American Internet users (�Study�), we can estimate that over 4 million Americans have posted personal homepages.

Yet given the time and labour required to develop a Web site, and the apparent lack of material reward accruing from having one, it is a puzzle that personal homepages have emerged at all. As we all know, inducing people to compose anything without the carrot and stick of a paycheck or a grade can be a challenge. Yet on the Web it is happening, unmanaged, uncoerced. . . . If we could only bottle this. . . , our proselytizing as composition missionaries would gain more believers. So the question this presentation poses is, What is motivating these people?

According to this same study by John Buten (1996), instrumental objectives dominate the motives of Web authors. Buten reports that between a quarter and a half of the homepage authors selected each of the following reasons from a list of reasons for constructing a homepage:

Reasons for constructing a personal Web page	%
means of self expression	49
to learn / practice HTML	48
to distribute information to friends / people I know / people I meet	43
to distribute information to people I don�t know with similar interests	34
to make it easier to get to places I want to go on the Web	32
to distribute information about myself to professional contacts or potential employers	24

With the single exception of the most popular option, self-expression, all of these reasons seem oriented quite transparently to the Web�s instrumental function, its utilitarian value. These Web composers are, in most cases, writing information, and the writing in some of these cases (such as #2 and #5) serves only the crudest of instrumental functions, more akin to programming.

Now Buten himself selected these options to present to survey participants, and his list presumes a traditional notion of a fully secure subject with pragmatic intentions. In my own research, I used open-ended questions and came up with a somewhat different emphasis. I will argue that with the more contemporary assumption of a continuously formative subjecthood, we can locate the motives of personal Web publishing not in the referential business of language, the information it names, but in the subject positions of being in the agora, being a rhetor in the public forum of discourse.

According to social psychologist Rom Harr�, �finding a place for oneself in the world involves two projects [of subjecthood]. One must find a social identity [and] also . . . a personal identity� [quoted from Murray�s description of Harr�s project, p.180].

In my study, I found evidence of both of these orientations:

• a social project
• a personal project

• Social Project: to belong amongst others on the Web.
• Personal Project: to become by expressing oneself.

Kenneth Burke observes how an activity can come to symbolize a status for its performer by virtue of its social orbit: �[A] specialized activity makes one a participant in some social or economic class. �Belonging� in this sense is rhetorical� (1950/1969, p.28). One becomes �consubstantial� with a new group or development by engaging in some defining activity--some shared substance or experience or status--that is exclusive to that group. The public gesture of having constructed and posted a Web site can thus be seen as the symbolic action by which to join a new world-wide community, to stake one�s claim to its membership.

In their survey responses, several participants described their motivations and the purposes of their Web pages along such lines, as means by which to embody their membership with a new phenomenon much larger than themselves. Some participants wrote--and here I�ll quote selectively from their surveys--of wanting to be �part� of the Internet or of a �growing group of Web page owners�, of wanting �to be involved in the [I]nternet�, �to get in on the action�, to make their �mark�, and to �stake out [their] place�. Similarly, other participants indicated they were inspired by their already-established lines of solidarity:

• �Everyone else was doing it�
• �Friends were doing it.�
• �Everyone else I worked with had one. . . .�

The degree to which a personal Web site is not so much about an information message as about a membership is revealed in participants� explanations of how they decided that their site was ready to be posted. At least one-third of the sample suggested that their site was on-line from very early in its drafting stage. Several reported that they had essentially composed their site on-line, since its initial conception. Again, they seem to have been inspired by the rush not to communicate something, some information, but to achieve the position of Web communicator, Webmaster, citizen of the world-wide community:

• �I placed it on the internet [sic] as soon as I could. Just wanted to get out there, be a part of it.�
• �As soon as I had a few links and information I placed it online so I could �stake-out� my place on the Interent [sic]�
• �I put it up as soon as I had just my name on [it]. Didn�t wait for any epiphany or perfection�

Let me turn now to the personal project. As I mentioned earlier, Buten (1996) reports that self-expression was the most frequently chosen reason for constructing a homepage, an option selected by roughly half of his survey respondents. In this regard, my findings echo his.

Now, self-expression is a contentious issue. Rhetorical and critical theory has had much to say about selfhoods not so much being expressed as being constructed. Interestingly, social psychologists make comparable observations, but from a different perspective. Let me then, for the sake of some novelty, draw on the social science perspective on such issues.

Social psychologist Kevin Murray (1989) recognizes self-expression as fundamental to what he describes as a subject�s �personal identity project,� but that project, rather than being introspective, is instead rhetorically contingent upon securing a supportive social environment: �[T]he expression of individuality is something for which there is a certain time and place. Finding the right time and place remains a necessary part of the personal identity project. . . .� (p.196). The identity project is, in a sense, contingent upon kairos, its fitness for the occasion. Many occasions are provided by social and cultural practices, including those of popular culture, practices which Pierre Bourdieu recognizes as �opportunities to experience or assert one�s position in social space . . .� (1984, p.57). Social and cultural practices, such as Web publishing, may thus feasibly be read by the occasion they furnish for individuals to achieve recognition of their subjecthood.

Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer observes that since a recognition by others is crucial in the formation of one�s own identity, subjects� self-development is necessarily a social enterprise (1986, p.144, 146). In effect, we may conceive of selfhood as addressed, selfhood as an outcome to an orientation to an audience.

Peter Gollwitzer goes on to reason that since individuals need witnesses to consummate what he calls their �self-symbolizing� (their acquisition of the symbols that represent certain identities), their identity-forming behaviour will be geared to securing an audience:

Since self-symbolizing that is noticed by others appears to be more effective in providing a sense of possessing the intended identity than self-symbolizing that remains unnoticed by others, individuals oriented toward achieving a particular identity should be especially concerned with finding an audience for their identity-related striving. (1986, p.147)

Evidence of this presents itself in the high frequency of Web counters on personal homepages, appearing on about 60% of the sites in my sample. Some participants expressed, both in their surveys and on their sites, their pleasure in tracking the increase in their counter number. One participant described how it was this index of contact she observed on a roommate�s homepage that first lead her to construct a site of her own: �[M]y roommate . . . was getting so many hits a day from it I thought it would be great to hear from so many people.� Another participant described that the purpose of his site was �the pursuit of hits which make me feel cool.�

Curiously, the actions of expressing oneself can be accomplished without necessarily implicating one�s real-life identity. In only slightly more than half of the sites (59) in the sample is the site author�s full name made readily accessible to surfers. In the remaining 45% of the sites, participants maintain varying degrees of anonymity, masking themselves behind a first name alone, an alias, or no name at all.

As well, in their survey responses, several participants suggested that what might otherwise be characterised as a Webmaster�s invention process is in part a censorship process. On their sites, participants did not necessarily report on themselves but rather seemed to conceive of their off-line selves and their on-line selves as quite distinguishable. They wrote of deciding on, as one participant put it, �the person I wanted to be reflected as.�

Hence, in many cases, it is not a matter of the individual citizen presenting an individual identity, but of the vicarious experience of occupying an identity and receiving acknowledgement for that identity. Why bother with this effort? In a sense, the self-symbolizing representation refurbishes, reifies, the self that makes it.

Moreover, if we accept Roy Baumeister�s conclusion that individuals are more oriented to communicating information (about themselves) than to seeking information (1982, p.22), then the phenomenal growth of the so-called Information Superhighway may be significantly motivated by individuals� desire (and perhaps even institutions� desire) to be witnessed; information becomes just the agency, the pretext--the means, not the end--the means with which to entice recognition and acknowledgment from others.

To sum up, I would suggest that a preoccupation with the informative and utilitarian functions of personal Web pages would overlook their role as by-products of individuals� efforts to construct and position themselves with the act of writing. Homepage composers may write instead to belong and to become.

• Their social project is to belong to something bigger than themselves, something �hot,� a new movement.
• Their personal project is to become, with writing mediating between themselves and their vicarious experience of an audience.

• can�t prescribe belonging or becoming projects
• both projects can only have success with a great leeway of student freedom
• belonging: student choice on what group to belong to (i.e., positive freedom; freedom to choose).
• becoming: requires anonymity (negative freedom; freedom from identity).

Baumeister, R.F. (1982). A self-presentational view of social phenomena. Psychological Bulletin, 91 (1), 3-26.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. (R. Nice,Trans.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Burke, K. (1969). A rhetoric of motives. California Edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. (Original work published 1950).

Buten, J. (1996). The first World Wide Web personal homepage survey. [On-line]. Available: http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/sbuten/phpi.htm. Cited 1998 June 17.

Gollwitzer, P.M. (1986). Striving for specific identities: the social reality of self-symbolizing. In R.F. Baumeister (ed.), Public self and private self. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Murray, K. (1989). The construction of identity in the narratives of romance and comedy. In J. Shotter and K.J. Gergen (eds.), Texts of identity. London: Sage Publications.

Study says 70 million American adult use the Internet. (1998, August 26). New York Times. [On-line]. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/08/biztech/articles/26traffic-side.html. Cited 1998 Sept. 2.