What your homepage says about you

I am of the opinion that you can tell a person’s character by the default homepage they keep. As your web browser increasingly assumes the role of a Third Eye, a bright, clear window that opens both into and out of your mind/soul, the opening landscape it captures both defines and shapes your persona.

There are some out there — and I too have on occasion been there — who occupy the ultimate digital wasteland of a blank default homepage. It’s an extraordinary choice in a web of knowledge so vast, so deep, so rich. Such solitary, bleak whiteness and emptiness of character would be hard to find.

There are those who choose as their default homepage their own Facebook or MySpace pages, irrefutable evidence of a cyberme-me-me narcissism that puts them (they would like to believe) at the very centre of the universe. It’s one of the web’s great failings; that such childish egoism should be elevated to acceptable adult behaviour. It’s akin to that appallingly infantile trend of owning personalised number plates.

And what about those who couldn’t be bothered to change their homepage, happy to allow their default world-view to be shaped by Microsoft or Mozilla or their ISP? I only went as far as psychology II at university (abandoning the course after my own Skinner rat died a slow and miserable death by starvation while I partied the April holidays away on the Wild Coast), so my labelling of personality disorders is pretty rusty, but how about compulsive-digidiot as a useful descriptor for such people?

And those who choose the Google homepage as their default? One might argue these are the get-up-and-goers, the Fast Company crowd who want their homepage lean, mean and primed for action. I think that’s being generous. More likely they are cyber-porn addicts who use the Google site as a smokescreen to hide their real smutty, intentions. Devious wankers.

I started thinking about this whole home page thing when I discovered the other day what I believe is the finest homepage on the web. It’s a page that I have now embraced as my own — and I am willing to accept whatever character flaws it may imply. It’s a page that embodies the very essence of all that is good, all that is wide and wonderful and worldly about the web.

That page is www.aldaily.com

Arts and Letters Daily is like a slow-moving conveyer belt of ideas and essays, reviews and opinions from great media across the web. Its owners, Britain’s Chronicle of Higher Education, put an unashamedly high-brow spin on their selection, but what impeccable taste. I now find myself taking long detours away from the task at hand because an item on aldaily has grabbed my attention and launched me on a fresh voyage of discovery.

The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss coined the term bricolage to describe the ideal form education: playful, non-linear and diverse; Arts and Letters Daily is the very embodiment of this idea.

On aldaily.com right now:

From American Prospect Magazine: The economic downturn is a profound threat to the autocratic regimes of the world, from China and Russia to Venezuela and the Persian Gulf states …

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Marx was wrong. The opiate of the masses isn’t religion, but spectator sports.

From the LA Times: Did Werner Heisenberg really want to build a bomb for Hitler, or did he secretly, intentionally sabotage the effort?

From New Scientist: Is religion innate: Would children raised in isolation spontaneously create their own religious beliefs?

From New Criterion: Stalin would kill not just you for the wrong thoughts: he would kill your family, down to the last child. Not even the Czar at his worst did that …

From The Telegraph: Salvador Dalí seemed a mad genius and cheerful fraud. The real Dalí was pitiable, a prisoner of his greed and pathologies …

What kind of character would make aldaily.com her homepage? You be the judge.