Questions of online identity used to be the questions that interested me. They still are. I know that they used to interest other people as well, though at this point I'm not sure if they really still do. In that fourth edition I referred to Daniel Chandler who was clearly one of the earlier academics examining personal web sites. On Chandler's present website his article Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web is dated from 1998. That obviously presents a problem for my referring to it in a column from 1996, but things aren't as complicated as they may seem. In April of 2000 I again referred to Chandler's article, noting not only that in the 1998 version I earned one of my very few footnotes, but also that the article had been updated since my previous visits. Perhaps more than the pride of the footnote, I was able to take a certain recursive pleasure in the fact that the footnote that referred to me appeared in the same article that I had referred to a couple of years earlier. That's not the easiest trick to pull off.

But it seems that Chandler's 1998 version was his last. Twenty years have gone by since then, and although countless other aspects of internet life and culture have been examined, presentation of self, or the construction of identity, or the inevitable tension between our public and private selves (if that really is a tension) seem to have taken a back seat to other issues. I doubt that that's because the topic isn't interesting. It is. But the strangeness of establishing a public self simply wore off.