This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
Arola, "The Design of Web 2.0: The Rise of the Template, The Fall of Design"
Discipline/Field: Rhetoric, Writing Studies, Computers & Writing, Digital Humanities
Year: 2010
Main Arguments & Concepts
This article focuses on the way the interaction with text is done at the platform/template level, rather than at the code level. This limits the way that users can author design, and Kristin worries that this will limit a rhetorical consciousness of web-based texts.Quotes
“I am still troubled by Web 2.0's tendency to render form standardized and invisible. It is my intention, then, to encourage those of us using and teaching in the spaces of Web 2.0 to rethink the ways in which we might bring design to a discursive level, for while we might be losing the means of production, this should not keep us from questioning and embracing design's potential.”“We are certainly posting information, but this information has become ‘content’ placed in a ‘form’ beyond the user's control. I worry that unless we, along with our students, engage in analysis and discussions of online design, in the absence of creating designs—our alienation from “form” or “presentation”—we will further render the template invisible.”
Notes
In my DTC 206 class, I asked my students why they thought that the internet is associated with “weightlessness” or ephemerality. One student suggested that social media platforms help create that narrative, because of the way that you can seemingly add and delete content without much tactile effort. The student’s remarks echo Arola’s argument, and makes me wonder if working in code could help people see the tangibility of the internet/disrupt the “cloud” narrative.I think this could be really important if I end up doing some sort of meta-analysis of my use of Scalar for this project. I’m still playing around with the tool (so this very well may be more related to my ignorance than a problem on Scalar’s part), but I actually have found it a lot harder to get into the code on Scalar than on Wordpress. I’m curious -- why is Scalar so template focused?
In the quote above, Arola says that Web 2.0 maks the “means of production,” which is an interesting connection to Jameson, who argues that part of the postmodern aesthetic is “concealing the means of production” (##)
Related
Arola, “Composing as Culturing”McPherson, Feminist in a Software Lab
