Self-Representations:

An electronic encounter with Web author Elizabeth Reid first piqued my interest in authorial-self representation in electronic journals. I cited Reid's article "Are MUDs Banned in Australia?" on a webliography I made for a class on MOOing. Reid's bio appears at the end of the article and reads much like one in a print journal: it states her name, her rank, and some of her recent works, and provides a link to these works which I followed. This leads to Reid's page entitled Internet Culture Research, which lists links to her honours thesis, masters thesis and electronic articles. At the bottom of this page, one finds a link to Reid's home page, on which I clicked. Soon I was greeted with a picture of a smiling red-haired young woman and a list of her education and publications, with appropriate links. The bottom of this page gave me the option to learn about Reid -- or at this point, Elizabeth -- "on a more personal note," which I accepted. In a few moments, I beheld in front of me a page entitled "Gratuitous personal details about Elizabeth." This page furnishes links to several items of interest for the author, among which are pictures of her fiance, a photo of her future in-laws, and Reid's self-proclaimed "really pretentious poetry."

Reid's method of self-presentation is significant in its attempt to nest the personal page within several layers of information, most of which is more professionally-oriented. The effort, I think, is a throwback to the professional-personal hierarchy that Tompkins identifies as having dominated scholarship for so long. It is impossible to link directly from her article in CMC to her "gratuitous personal details"; one must travel through two pages of professional achievements and interests. She may provide us with an abundance of personal informaton, but it is safely located within a larger system of professional identity.

This said, one must note that this nesting only works successfully the first time one visits Reid's "personal details" page. Once it's reached, one can travel freely between her personal page and her article. In addition, a web search on the author's last name can take one directly to the home page, bypassing her professional work. And if a Web user knows the URL to Reid's home page, of course, he can bypass the professional work to go straight to the personal statement. The Web will not allow the professional to reign over the personal as print does. To think that a personal page can be properly nested within layers of professional work is a fallacy.

Nevertheless, anxieties about separating the professional from the personal spill into Web authors' modes of self-presentation. For example, I discerned a similar attempt to distinguish personal from professional by another CMC author, Mindy McAdams. Her article, entitled "Gender Without Bodies," features a conventional author bio that appears at the bottom of the first page. McAdams links her name to a resume page, which in turn branches into six areas of professional achievements: consulting services, work experience, computer expertise, publications, teaching, and education. Each of these pages features a link to McAdams's home page, a lavender page that opens with the preface, "This is a personal home page that's not associated with any commercial concern. I hope you like it." Though the page may be linked to other pages of her design that display decidedly commercial interests, McAdams wishes to distinguish this one, betraying her anxiety about the commingling of personal and professional information that the Web by nature promotes.

Also noteworthy is Lester Faigley's self-representation on the Web. After reading his most recent book, Fragments of Rationality, I conducted a Web search on the author. The first result of the search led me to a photo of Faigley posing with a lifesize blowup doll of Munch's "The Scream" character. (The caption reminds us that Faigley, "a prominent professor," is "the one on the right.") Other links furnished by the search result included one to his home page, one to his course syllabus, one to his students' profiles, one to a review of Fragments, and one to a transcript of his address to the Conference on College Composition and Communication last March. What the search produced was not simply a list of Faigley's appearances on the Web; it was a scheme of a variety of involvements that appeared in an unprivileged array. Unlike a bio in, say, a book of bibliographies of prominent academics' works, in which Faigley's book publications would be valued more than his course syllabi, the Web search results provide a mixture of interests ranging from teaching to publishing to conferencing to Munch, with the latter happening to appear at the top of the list.

Furthermore, Faigley's example is significant in its manifestation of how the electronic trend toward embodying authors can impact pedagogy. Scholars and students who respect Faigley's print publications now have the opportunity to glimpse another aspect of Faigley: his course syllabi. By including these syllabi, the web enables users to see how Faigley puts his ideas to use in the classroom. Print environments, by contrast, publish scholarly articles but rarely include course syllabi. The web, then, narrows the gap between theory and practice, at least pedagogically speaking, by making accessible not only scholarly articles but course syllabi as well. On the web, we can see Faigley the researcher and Faigley the teacher. In addition, one can access Faigley's speech at a recent composition conference, a text that provides insight into other aspects of Faigley. These glimpses of Faigley's various professional commitments -- Faigley in print, Faigley in the classroom, Faigley on the conference circuit -- work collectively to embellish his identity and presence in a way that print environments do not. They are valuable in reducing the gap in academia that tends to divorce teaching from research as though the two are unrelated.

Similarly, one encounters a variety of aspects of John Perry Barlow's identity when visiting his web site. Barlow's "library" consists of a list of writings that reader/users can select. In my journey through Barlow's library, I first selected lyrics that he wrote for Grateful Dead (one of his first jobs), then read Barlow's eulogy for his fiancee who passed away unexpectedly, then linked to his "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." I experienced Barlow as I chose to, by deciding where and when I wanted to click the mouse button. These encounters -- first with his lyricism, then with his mourning, then with his rantings -- gave me glimpses of various aspects of Barlow that constructed authorial presence and identity. A photograph of Barlow, too, contributed to the sense of authorial embodiment I had after sampling several links.

An important aspect of authorial self-representation in electronic journals is the lack of agreement among authors about how to identify themselves. Usually one finds a similar type of bio in each article of each edition, and authors can decide from there what they want to link to their names. In the case of Postmodern Culture, three of the four editors' names listed on the masthead are linked to electronic mail accounts. The fourth editor, John Unsworth, has linked his name to his home page, a site that contains a wealth of information about his career, his interests, his background, his family, and other areas. Before clicking on each editor's name, though, one cannot discern where the link will lead.

The diversity among the PMCeditors's self-presentations is reflected among Web authors generally. Authors represent themselves with varying combinations of personal and professional information. For instance, Leslie Regan Shade, whose reviews of several books appeared in the March 1996 volume of CMC, links her article to a home page that shares professional information beyond the scope of print resumes. The inclusion of this extensive professional information does indeed embody Shade, despite the relative lack of personal information, for it elaborates on her authorial identity beyond what a conventional print bio offers. Other authors refrain from linking their own pages to their articles. In the first volume of Cultronix, for instance, I found author bios that might as well have appeared in print articles. "Jody Baker is a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh," informs the first bio; the second lists the author's name, department and university; the third supplies name and university only; and the fourth gives only the author's name. None of the bios provides links to other sites. One might dismiss this trend as being indicative of the initial anxieties that authors experienced in publishing in the first volume of an electronic journal -- anxieties that inhibit them from seizing an opportunity to present themselves in new and different ways. Or, one might argue that these authors had no interest in linking other forms of self-representation to their scholarly work. Either contention is valid. What matters most is that electronic journals make available to authors the opportunity to represent themselves in innovative ways, thereby permitting a fluidity between professional and personal concerns.


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