7.2: Personal webpage

New Note 6

Ahoy

For this assignment, I decided to go back to a webpage that I once read in great depth a few years ago. It's changed slightly since then, but the webpage is still available and after looking through it a few times, I tried to evaluate it using the Brunswickian Lens Model.

First, I must mention that the site considers the debate between evolutionary theory and Creationism, and how it influences public laws and policies. This is all very interesting, but it says very little about the actual author of the webpage, except that one can find in a few places that he has a degree in Applied Science from the University of Toronto and other minor details. So while the source is accurate (cue validity), it has poor utilizability because it says little about the author's personality outside from the fact that he feels very passionately about evolutionary theory and Creationism in the public sphere.

However, some elements from this section are useful when it comes to describing his personality. After skimming through a few of the articles and reading some of the Hate Mails, it becomes evident that the author of this webpage is not very agreeable. He seems far too principled to be considered agreeable. He is very conscientious however, because he pays extremely close detail to small points in science and logic. He is also considerably extroverted. He is not unwilling to mention his family on the World Wide Web and he also makes some almost embarrassingly honest statements about how much he enjoys pornography. His openness seems quite low because everything on this webpage is quite dry and scientific. For the same reason, his neuroticism is almost impossible to determine.

Then I went to the personal part of his page. Note that although his scientific/sociological articles are located at www.creationtheory.org, but his personal page is at www.stardestroyer.net/Mike. The first paragraph alone speaks volumes about him. He talks about his wife and how they come from different places (more points in the extroversion and agreeableness categories). His conscientiousness seems to disappear (or more accurately, he knows when being conscientious is important and when it isn't). It seems like the author is not very neurotic, because he seems to have interest in many computer-related things, as well as science-fiction and pornography. His interest in science fiction also bolsters his score in openness.

So how does one delineate between the individual and environmental links? Well for one thing, there are almost no self-directed identity claims. Possibly the section that his wife wrote about sex toys could be considered as such, but when one reads other articles (like the rant on pornography), one realizes two things. First, that both the author and his wife are very open to talking about sex, even to complete strangers, and second, that they do not care what others think about it. Therefore, one cannot be sure whether they put it there to influence other people or not, but for sure, it's one of the few possible self-directed identity claims on the website.

Next, there are a lot of other-directed identity claims. For example, since the author goes into such great detail about things like Linux and Star Wars talk, one would assume that he would be happy to receive email about these topics. Therefore, this information is clearly present to influence how others interact with him.

Finally, there is a lot of exterior behavioral residue on his website. There is an entire section devoted entirely to photos of the author and his family on various excursions (ie. things that obviously occured OUT of the web site's realm). However, the interior behavioral residue is a little more slight. The author mentions that his website is developed and maintained using Mandriva Linux and that it conforms to XHTML standards demonstrating that he is well-versed in computer skills and puts a great deal of importance on web standards to improve the internet (otherwise, nobody would need to bother with XHTML).