Killoran, John B.2006-07-282006-07-2819991999http://hdl.handle.net/10012/383Drawing on a survey of 110 Web homepage authors and an analysis of their personal homepages, this study explores how individuals make a place for themselves as producers on the World Wide Web. The study is informed by theoretical perspectives that conceive of discourse as a function of its social context: Pierre Bourdieu's socio-economic framework of language usage, Norman Fairclough's critical language study, and Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress's social semiotics. These perspectives urge us to recognize that, in the social context of the Web, not all potential producers have equal power, resources, or legitimacy. The study finds that both the emergence of such a novelty as personal homepages and much of what actually appears on these homepages can be explained by individuals' invisibility at the peripheries of the established mass media, their conventional roles as receivers, not producers, of media communications. Their varied responses as new producers in the new medium are contingent upon the resources they can marshal to reposition themselves. For instance, as a result of their well-entrenched marginalization, some participants did not even attempt to meet the expectations of a public position in the media, instead reconceiving the Web, on a more familiar scale, as a localized social space. Others, however, overcame their relative powerlessness by leveraging themselves on the basis of the Web's high appraisal of information; they largely effaced themselves and instead used an offering of specialized information to occupy a Web niche. Emerging as novices in contemporary media, many participants followed the precedents set by well-established media producers: institutions. To claim some of the legitimacy according to institutional status, some participants strove to adopt the discursive trappings of such status through a process of synthetic institutionalization, constructing an artificial hybrid of individual and institutional stances. Others, however, in particular younger participants, less likely to be in solidarity with the institutional dispensation of their world, singled out such institutional discourses for parody. The study concludes by exploring how individuals' unprecedented productive capacity in the new mass medium might elicit responses in society, in discourse theory, and in writing pedagogy.application/pdf22343900 bytesapplication/pdfenCopyright: 1999, Killoran, John B.. All rights reserved.Harvested from Collections CanadaDoctoral Thesis