Express Yourself! Personal Web Pages

Abstract

EXPRESS YOURSELF! PERSONAL WEBPAGES Between technopolitical legitimization of expressive individualism and peertopeer reflexive authenticity The personal webpages of ordinary users who seek to express their interests, passions and hobbies on the Internet will be treated in this article as so many instances of an experimental culture of the self that is made to measure and is linked to the expressive individualism characterizing late modernity. Looking more closely at the inter-subjective modes of validation and recognition of these singular forms of self-expression, the authors draw on the work of Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Alessandro Ferrara to develop an expressivist interpretation of digital culture that is critical of both post-modernist theories of identity and neoconservative theories of the public sphere. Contrasting the attempts of the cultural industry to publicize and commercialize personal webpages with the inter-subjective validation that the makers of webpages seek, they show that the intersubjective validation of webpages can be analysed as a form of peer-to-peer recognition and interpreted in terms of research on reflexive authenticity.

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