Introduction

Every once in a while we are reminded of the ever-increasing popularity of the Internet and the addiction of the young to it. The Asian Internet growth rate is found to be very high (Mitra & Schwartz 2001). The rapid growth of the Internet is increasingly international, with young people being the early adopters in most countries (Skinner, Biscope & Poland 2003). Witnessed in our own lives, for many of us, the first thing to do in the morning is to check our mailboxes – the virtual ones. In addition to the use of e-mail and instant messengers, constructing and maintaining personal websites has become one of the most popular online activities.

In an online survey conducted by a non-government youth service organization, Breakthrough (2005) suggests that 75.5 per cent of respondents from the age of 10 to 29 have been writing online diaries. According to Miller and Arnold (2001), the real space of cyberspace is (perhaps) on the bodily, non-virtual side of the screen, and the webpage presence can be a means by which people can increasingly find ways (in their own voices) to tell their stories. We observe that, by regularly updating their websites, young webmasters establish and maintain a virtual connection with other webmasters, thereby expanding their personal networks and social spaces.

One of the popular assumptions about cyberspace is that it allows individual users to express and actualize themselves. The survey conducted by Breakthrough also supports this idea and suggests that most young people writing online diaries aim at expressing their own emotions and points of view. But when we take a close look at the survey, it is quite surprising to find that the research method painstakingly generalizes the respondents without paying much attention to their gender difference. In the following sections, we will show that gender implication is often overlooked by researchers who analyze the socio-cultural influences of emerging digital media (e.g. online diary and personal website).

Our investigation must not only involve issues of self, but also gender. As Youngs (2002) notes, ‘Technology is not a neutral realm […] in broad terms, there are historically entrenched differences between men's and women's socially constructed relationships to the broad realm of technology and the innovation associated with it’ (http://www.bci.org/abw/papers/pap/int.htm, retrieved 12 October 2004).