What is the process of constructing Me in this blogging/virtual/discursive form?

I've been thinking about this more and more lately, as I firmly decided against using LiveJournal as a means of publishing or communicating and threw my full weight behind my decision to use another, self-hosted publishing system for my purposes. There were obvious reasons like the fact that I had been using Movable Type on this domain for several years; I have flexibility with how I use the system and the confidence that the content was all mine, stored on my server of choice and out of the hands of any third party (remember the LJ outages recently that caused everyone who uses the system to lose their shit?); that I get to dictate the design and make coding changes how I see fit, and that such facts make it so much more configurable than LJ/Blogger et al...

But why does this last point even really matter to me? I'm not especially design savvy beyond the most basic and contrived sense of the word. It's not like I'm a codemonkey who can't sleep at night unless s/he has configured or constructed or tweaked every last element on the site. I am a fusspot so the idea of messing about with lots of bits and pieces is attractive...

But it's occured to me that what I really give a shit about which keeps me away from LJ, Blogger or other systems with in-built templates and inaccessible code is that I'm preoccupied with the idea of leaving clues about myself at every point. Of making sure that I'm present, not just in the form of words appearing on a screen once I hit 'Post', but in images, and nodes, and (sometimes) random objects.

By filling my sidebar with such objects I suppose I'm identifying (constructing?) signifiers for myself that adhere to an online language, where the products we consume and produce construct and become our self. There are obviously elements which appear in this sidebar that are consciously placed there (the notes about reading, albums, blogs) which suggest a deliberate attempt to represent myself to anyone who visits this space, as well as a way of recording and archiving such fancies for myself for the future.

And then there are the semi-random elements such as the Flickr badge which displays any old images which are in my photostream, the Recent Comments which represent the exchange of ideas which take place here and contirbute to the larger text of this blog, the 'on iTunes' section which is generated automatically according to whatever has been playing on my machine...

In these inclusions perhaps I'm attempting to relinquesh some of the constructedness of online subjectivity? Of allowing the sometimes-absent signifiers to make themselves present, if only for a moment, just as they do in life outside the net - the times when our bodies or speech betray us and our conscious attempt to control how we are read.

Or is it something else altogether?

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