As someone who has been researching the Web since the mid-1990's, I confess that my own contribution to the new medium is rather inconspicuous: functional but formulaic Web sites for all my courses and my embarrassingly modest CV page. I am certainly not alone in my on-line coyness, even among other researchers of computer-mediated communication, some of whom themselves maintain little or no Web presence.

But as a professional writing professor with an intellectual home within the composition-rhetoric community, I remain dissatisfied that the new medium--promising, in principle, a new civic agora--has not produced the full democratic flowering of discourse that compositionists might have hoped for. A careful study by John Buten (1996) found that only 6% of those who had the technical access to post a homepage had bothered to do so (cf. Sugimoto & Levin, 2000, p.148). Of those who had bothered, Buten found that their motives were oriented not just to the new medium's rhetorical opportunities but frequently to the new medium's instrumental functions; for many, constructing a homepage was a means of learning HTML, and the resulting homepage was a convenient repository for favourite hyperlinks.

Exploring the nature of both our rhetorical presence on and absence from the Web is among the aims of my research. Based on my survey of 106 personal homepage publishers and my analysis of their personal homepages, I have observed a tentativeness in our Web presence, a condition I nickname the Cheshire Cat Phenomenon: even those who make some presence for themselves in the new wonderland stop well short of a full presence. I'd like to single out two related deterrents to a more substantial Web presence: a legitimate canniness about exposing ourselves in public, and the illegitimacy of taking our self-exposure too seriously.

Personal Security

First, the common preoccupation with the mechanical hurdle of constructing a personal homepage overshadows the more exhilarating but disconcerting social hurdle of exhibiting oneself, at least in one's imagination, in front of an international population of strangers, a hurdle not always easily overcome. Perhaps as a consequence, personal homepage publishers, despite the label "personal homepages," do not regularly display much of their personhood. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, has expressed disappointment in how personal homepages have diverged from his earlier, idealistic vision of the Web's potential for personal and family domains:

[T]he personal home page is not a private expression; it's a public billboard. . . . It's openness, and it's great in a way, it's people letting the community into their homes. But it's not really home. They may call it a home page, but it's more like the gnome in somebody's front yard than the home itself. ("The interview," 1996)

Understandably, displaying the gnome reduces the possibility of being unmasked in "real life" outside of the security of the Web. For instance, close to 45% of my sample of personal homepages did not make readily accessible even such basic personal information as their author's full name. Yet many of those authors nevertheless conspicuously displayed their first name or went through the trouble of inventing an alias, suggesting a paradoxical desire for both anonymity and personability.

On the Web, as in real life, privacy and security are especially concerns for women. One participant, a woman in her early twenties, explained how she took precautions on her site: "I tried not to reveal too much info about myself because I don't want an internet stalker." She is one of among 16 participants whose sites identified themselves primarily with an alias. Another female participant, whose resume page revealed not only her name but also other identifying information, related that she had received an "obscene e-mail" one night. She said, . . . I got nervous that it revealed a little too much information about me." She went on to explain that, as a precaution, she took her resume off-line.

Personal Legitimacy

Others, of course, much less circumspect, unabashedly publish what one of my survey respondents calls "vanity pages." But to the degree that such sites are literally personal homepages, consisting of what another respondent characterizes as "ego enhancing fluff," they also attract some derision for their egocentric preoccupations and thereby bear the stigma of illegitimacy.

Much of what I observed in my study seemed to be a reaction against discourses of media legitimacy, those voices -- of the ecom's, .org's, .gov's, and .edu's -- that are perceived to have both things to say and the warrant to say them. In response, participants' sites emulate organizational and media discourses, or mock such discourses, or go out of their way to flagrantly reject such discourses. Regardless, the subtext of Web legitimation remains: the prestige of those -- primarily organizations -- who have it versus the discursive awkwardness of those -- primarily individuals -- who don't.

Among the strongest independent claims of legitimacy come from authors who can justify their Web publishing as a contribution not to themselves but to the medium and its users. For instance, one participant's narrative of how she came to publish a site about hosting cocktail parties characterizes the aspirations of several participants for being helpful by occupying an unoccupied niche: "I turned to the Web to gather information on throwing a cocktail party but came up short. After having figured out how to throw one I put the information on the Web so like-minded people would have a page on which to find the necessary information." Would she have done so had there already been sites about cocktail parties? Individuals like her recognize the Web to be a marketplace of information and join it only after waiting for a niche they can exploit with marketable offerings. Personal information, however -- and her site carries little -- is not perceived to be as marketable.

Alice Online

Neither of these Web problems -- personal security and personal legitimacy -- are, strictly speaking, the traditional focus of composition teachers, but as both may stifle our students, a response to both may inevitably become a necessary part of composition pedagogy. Regularly since 1996, I have had students research and construct Web sites. The more plausible the assignment, the more estranged my students' work seems to become from their own lives. My little success in having students develop sites speaking meaningfully on their own behalf as citizens increasingly confirms my suspicions that Web writing may ultimately be limited largely to the professional writing canon, not something that we will do regularly as citizen-rhetors.

Nevertheless, with the Web, we have only just been newly admitted to the mass media and so are still only starting to figure out what we can do there. Like a herd of Cheshire Cats, we now pose inscrutably but offer little behind our beaming Web facades. Our coyness is not, I suspect, a personal but a social issue. Perhaps most needed for our future presence in the mass media is not technical help but role models, credible models of how to become purposeful virtual citizens, perhaps a bit more like Alice.?

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

Sugimoto, Taku & Levin, James A. (2000). Multiple literacies and multimedia: a comparison of Japanese and American uses of the Internet. In Gail E. Hawisher & Cynthia L. Selfe (Eds.), Global Literacies and the World-Wide Web (pp. 133-153). New York: Routledge.

The interview: Tim Berners-Lee. (1996, Summer). World Wide Web Journal, 1 (3). [On-line]. Available: <http://www.ora.com/www/info/wj/issue3/tbl-int.html> [1997 August 14].