I found an interesting scholarly analysis by David Chandler, Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web. This 1998 piece attempts to break down the phenomenon with such subjects as ”Asynchronous Mass Communication” and ”The Buildiing Blocks of Webpage Identity”. Chandler uses the post-modern term Bricolage to refer to the cut and paste assemblage of information and the overwhelming amount of graphical media used in these personal home pages of the mid to late 90s.
Another interesting link I’ve found (only available through the internet wayback machine) was through the references listed for the aforementioned article. This article is dated 1995 and includes a more poppy angle on the phenomena of the personal home page. It includes a link to some token examples of the new phenomena.
Like bizarre, sad, personal ads these pages feature a few ”facts” about their creator (it would be an interesting exercise to count how many of these people are fans of Star Trek who enjoy fractals — by my own estimate it would be roughly all of them) and the ”opportunity” to download a picture of the owner of the page.
