Why a Personal Website?
Or, Why humanismus.com and Me?
“About Me”... A simple statement, really, but in the context of a Website navigation bar the phrase becomes a radically new and revolutionary idea. Just as with the photograph above, context is everything, and the Web navigation bar’s ”About Me“ radically changes the meaning--and the power--of those two words from only a few years ago. For the first time in history countless millions--potentially billions--of people around the planet can with simple computer skills publish anything about themselves, from a simple descriptive paragraph to a complete autobiography. This “About Me” is then instantaneously accessible to a world-wide audience. Nothing like this has been possible befo
re, certainly the print-publishing industry has never approached this potential. Other forms of media possess the capability of wide and immediate distribution, such as television, but until the Internet all forms of publishing or broadcasting have been under the strict purview of a small controlling elite. In terms of publishing, the World Wide Web has become the great democratizer.
This ”About Me“ potential can be used by an entrepreneur for marketing products, it can be used by creative artists to present their work, and it can, to give another example, be employed by scholars or academics in disseminating their research. Most intriguingly, these various purposes can be used by individuals in addition to sharing biographical material. One’s work, after all, is biographical, and the artist’s work or a scholar’s research can now be presented within the context of one’s biography.
Selling art, marketing products or presenting research would have required significant discretionary funds as well as effort only a few years ago, but with the Web it is now possible to quickly design and build sophisticated Websites that can be “published“ with the click of a button. The printed book as we know it is an expensive and labor-intensive means of sharing information and ideas. As such, it is a tightly delineated and structured container with well-defined features: cover, title-page, preliminaries, preface, introduction, index, etc. These elements provide the reader with a familiar orientation to a narrative, but they are also highly confining. Over the past couple of decades authors have narratively loosened up the strictures of the book as a medium for expression--novelists such as John Fowles and Kurt Vonnegut introduced a creative playfulness in the book novel form, for example--but the relatively high production and distribution costs kept such creativity to a minimum. The World Wide Web has radically changed all this.
The Potential of the Web as a Publishing Medium: A Personal Experience
Personal publishing at first developed gradually on the Internet, in fact in the early days it was not even considered publishing. It began in the 1980s in academic circles, with scholars disseminating their research via listservs or Gopher, an Internet-based predecessor to the Web. Over the course of the 1990s the powerful potential of the Internet for scholarly communication became increasingly apparent. As a tenure-track librarian at Penn State, in 1993-94 I submitted a manuscript to a professional print journal for publication. After going through peer-review and being enthusiastically accepted for publication, I was at first flattered, and then flabbergasted, to learn that my article would be “fast-tracked” to appear in print in 18 months, rather than the usual two years. Since my research was on a hotly discussed topic at the time, I was naturally disappointed to learn it would take so long to be published. Aware of the potential of the Internet, I requested and received permission from the publisher to make my article available as a digital preprint. A formal announcement was sent out to several listservs reaching a potential audience of several thousand professionals, announcing the availability of the article via a campus ftp server. Within 24 hours of the announcement the article had been downloaded over 700 times from users around the world.
Shortly after this the first graphics-enabled browsers for the World Wide Web appeared (Cello, Mosaic, and then Netscape). As an experiment, I proposed to the professional journal in which my article was eventually published that I develop a Website for the journal. It took some explaining and cajoling with the publisher, but my offer was accepted and the Website went online in 1995, quite possibly the first such Website for a professional journal. As a research librarian with a focus on the emerging concept of the digital library, I continued to develop ideas using the Web as a platform for disseminating ideas and for publishing. Shortly after the journal Website appeared, I developed and brought up one of the earliest examples of a subject-based gateway (for German cultural studies) on the Web. Unlike the subject-based gateways that existed earlier as Gopher resources, the Web permitted much more sophisticated formatting, design, and, most importantly, graphics. With the Web developing a “page” became much more like that of the printed page, with a greater desktop publishing-like structure. Within a couple of years after the introduction of Netscape, all of the key elements for digital publishing in its truest sense were in place and ready to be used.
Though Web-publishing was rapidly maturing, a significant amount of technical expertise was still necessary to design, publish, and maintain Websites. Web authoring tools like Dreamweaver required--and still require--a solid working knowledge of program-level coding and an understanding of Web architecture. For this reason, as the Internet entered the new millennium “blogging” was introduced and quickly grew in popularity.
”About Me”, the Web and Publishing
The deceptive simplicity of an About Me statement, combined with the potential power of disseminating it around the world with the click of a button, is an essential element of what we now call Web 2.0. What would About Me have meant to people 15 years ago? The question would have been asked in a small group of friends perhaps, or we may have been asked to write something about ourselves in a 
company or organizational newsletter, and we most likely would recounted simple stories about ourselves to highlight aspects of our character. The unpretentious, light-hearted photograph at the left of a scene from my high school in 1970s Southern California speaks volumes about my youth, for example. Regardless of the situation, the circumstances would have almost always been informal, and we would have approached such a description of ourselves in a correspondingly impromptu manner.
This is the idea behind social networking on the World Wide Web, and it is best known through the services MySpace and Facebook. These sites offer users an account that gives them a specially configured Web space, a virtual presence that allows them to produce a description, a personal story or narrative, even a memoir about themselves. The predominant idea is simplicity, both in the ease of presenting information about oneself, and in the intuitive way it is possible to create, upload, and publish material about our lives and interests. On the one hand, MySpace and Facebook are designed to act like that informal social group mentioned above, while on the other functioning as embellished versions of ”About Me”.
This is where the serious--and potentially destructive--situations arise with social networking sites and the world of Web 2.0, and it is where human behavior must catch up with a powerful new technology that has outstripped more traditional social norms. While young people are lured into writing impromptu or informal narratives about themselves on sites like MySpace and Facebook, or in uploading ‘fun’ videos or podcasts, they only vaguely understand that doing so is in every way equivalent to publishing something about themselves much like they would in a book or a magazine. In their own minds they think they are “only having fun”, just as when they are with their circle of trusted friends. With the World Wide Web, however, that circle of trusted friends becomes the Global Village in a much more expansive and unpredictable way than what one intended.
With the circle of friends in a real social group a level of trust and understanding develops that allow us to judge the nuances of meaning in our messages and how they are interpreted by our friends, but this is not the case in the virtual world of the Web. The Web is much more an equivalent to publishing than it is to creating a virtual social group, regardless of the circumstances. Even in situations where one can control the makeup of the social group through software settings, as soon as one creates a narrative or other form of communication--as a text, a video, or an audio file--it is possible for it to be reproduced and sent to others outside the intended circle. It is, in a word, a publication, and one should regard it as such.
Is the response to these potential dangers and pitfalls a simple “Just don’t”, that we should avoid using the Web altogether for such biographical purposes? As we know, since at least the days of Gutenberg the potential of disseminating information through wide-scale publishing is very powerful, and there is little question that ”About Me“ on the Web has much to say for it. We are still in the very early stages of discovering the potential of non-mediated personal publishing, and there will be much experimenting with novel ideas in presenting one’s ideas, values, products, or services. This corresponds to the early days of printing when, for example, the use of single-page broadsides proliferated when it was discovered that several hundred copies could be rapidly printed and disseminated widely around a town or a region by posting in public places. 
This became a very potent means of influencing public opinion or in making announcements, and it was possible to do this only through the relatively inexpensive and effective means of making copies through the printing press. Over the next decades a distinctive ‘broadside culture’ developed throughout Europe, and it played an important role in the course of European history. The American Declaration of Independence, for example, was first disseminated as a published broadside.
As something radically new and transformational, the potential of the Web’s ”About Me“ is also in its early stages of development. Social groups that have relied on some form of 
personal statement or biography for their careers have been the first to make productive use of the social networking, or Web 2.0, capabilities of the Web, in particular creative professionals such as fine or commercial artists, photographers, writers, musicians or actors. These professionals can reach out to their respective admirers, fans or constituencies in ‘connecting’ with them and in presenting their creative products, both for enjoyment and for income. More than other groups the work of creative professionals requires an active reaching out in developing recognition for one’s work. The networking potential of the Web has acted as a catalyst in developing their careers and their base of admirers. For these creative professionals the Web has had a profoundly liberating effect on their work, in particular when considering the often stifling control that production and distribution channels (such as the music industry) has exerted on artistic expression in the past.
In addition to creative professionals, prominent media personalities, politicians, and specific management or business groups are also increasing their use of the social networking potential of the Web to build constituencies. Howard Dean, the Democratic candidate for president in 2004, was perhaps the first politician to make serious and dramatically effective use of the Web in his campaign, so much so that his opponents, both Democratic and Republican, were clearly unprepared to address this new and unfamiliar challenge. Four years later, the Web has become an essential component to both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns, and Barack Obama made decisive use of the Internet in reaching out to potential constituencies, and in spreading and controlling his message.
In all of these cases, people are learning to use the Web to connect with others, and those that are most successful are doing so with the full recognition of the power of the Web as a publishing medium. This connecting represents an essentially social function of the Web, a social function that fosters some level of biographical interactivity. But unlike the traditionally informal nature of social groups, the medium here is the Web itself which, as noted, is equivalent to publishing. The novelty is learning to understand the interrelationship between social networking, biography, and publishing. The Web is not the place to engage in biographical networking in the same way as an informal newsletter or a trusted circle of friends, one needs to recognize that any Web presentation of the self in a biographical manner is carried out in a much more expansive, anonymous context of humanity.
We are in the very earliest stages of self-presentation and publishing on the Web, and a distinctive culture with its own standards and etiquette still needs to develop in guiding individuals as they explore this new medium’s possibilities.
The humanismus.com Website is an opportunity for me to explore creative self-expression on the Web. It attempts to do this not through the narrow framework of MySpace, Facebook, a blog, or a podcast, but rather through an individual Website. MySpace and Facebook employ relatively primitive Web technologies, and the possibilities for creative expression very limited. They do facilitate the development of virtual communities through various features, certainly more so than the Web itself. Far more powerful is the use of one’s own Website, or homepage. Until recently, possessing and creating a Website required a high level of computing expertise, and was generally reserved for the work of experienced Web designers or companies. As with so many other areas in computing, however, Apple has developed a means, as an integrated part of its Macintosh computer, that makes creating and developing a Website as easy as word processing. Within an Apple Macintosh environment, a MobileMe account and the Macintosh’s built-in iLife suite of applications provide a user with a powerful means of creative expression on the Web, one that gives one an extensive range of possibilities for digital communication through text, audio, and visual representations. A Macintosh computer and MobileMe combine the creative power of digital expression and one-button ease of publishing to the Web.
This Website was created and is being developed using Apple iWeb software and a MobileMe account.
No, the above photograph is not of me, but it does say something about me, since I’m the one taking the picture! About Me can be viewed from many perspectives, and taking a picture from 12,000 feet in a small glass cockpit, soaring using only the power of the wind, does reflect on the photographer. As a visual narrative, the interest here is not only within the frame of the photo. Rather, the person behind the camera is of necessity fully immersed within the context of the photograph. In this case the subject says as much about the photographer as what is being photographed, which is the case with any creative artist. Context is everything.
