Abstract

The Web is often misleading defined in terms of being a global source of "information". Exploring the subject of personal home pages helps to undermine such characterization. In this essay the author argues that personal home pages and the World Wide Web are not only used to publish information. They are being used to construct social networks - useful information being just a side effect. They seem to play a positive role in maintaining both strong ties with family and friends and weak ties with persons at a distance, making it easier to mark a presence without engaging in a deeper interaction for which the emotional energy is not available every day. In short, personal home pages are better understood as pieces of personal networks of sociability to which many people living in a network society belong. These networks of sociability are with variable geometry and changing composition, according to the evolving interests of social actors and to the shape of the network itself.