‘Home’

These days, we arrive at ‘home’pages, borrowing from existing terms that belong to a different idiom and lexicon.

Rumored to be about two decades old, the ‘home’page suggests a diagnosis of our age more than it directs us to something.  It belongs to the new media, the age which continues search for home, unique to a place that was founded on migration.  Etymology tells us ‘home’ is relatively recent, specific to the Western world.  There was the homestead, the home stretch and the homeland.  Now it is as if we experience a loss of something which we resurrect in language of the new media.

In a world that is marked by migration and immigration, shifting and erasing identities and formations of new alliances, ‘home’page may be an attempt to claim something that is slipping. It is illusive and elusive, but characteristically for this age, ubiquitous.  At once, it claims a home while none exists, invites us in only to redirect us to something else.

‘Home’pages are gestures to establish an identity. Underscoring a need to have one, ‘home’pages on web sites leap out for a sense of self, perhaps because it is threatened by forces and possibly because it addresses an invitation to vanity.

Ironically perhaps, the attempts to establish ‘home’pages indicate the desires to write one’s own epitaphs. In an age of talking tombstones and cravings to defy time that may well be a valid reading. For the moment at least, ‘home’pages may become spaces for reflection.