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 Analytical
Essay:
A Manifesto for Reading a Web Site
Write a
six-to-eight-page essay that presents a manifesto that charts a new
approach to conceiving, designing and interpreting Web sites. Throughout
your manifesto, use the specific example of a Web site to illustrate
your new method and its value.
Use Gregory Ulmer's theory
of the manifesto as a template for your essay, following the
steps that Ulmer says manifesto writers throughout history have used
to structure manifestos in politics,
the arts and society.
As part of employing Ulmer's
structure, you'll do the following
- Though you'll divide the parts of your essay according
to Ulmer's "CATTt" steps, give these parts subtitles
that reflect the content of what you're arguing in each section,
not Ulmer's steps or some generic description of the part. For example,
in the sample project I propose on the Ulmer page,
I would title my first section something like, "What's Wrong with
Being Useful?" rather than "Contrast" or "Introduction."
- Illustrate and amplify the essay with very specific details
and observations drawn from the sample Web site you choose.
(use MLA
citation and documentation format in the text and in a Works
Cited section at the end).
- Support these observations
with "screen shots" from the Web page/site,
focusing on and illustrating the key details you're discussing.
See the note below about producing screen
shots.
- Quote and cite
a writer or theorist in the opposing camp, or what Ulmer
calls the "undesirable example or prototype" in his "Contrast" step.
(Use MLA
citation and documentation format for these quotations).
- Quote and cite
a theorist in Trend (or from our non-Nielsen
readings on the Web) to detail and develop the principle
or issue you're highlighting in the essay (also use MLA
citation and documentation format for these quotations).
By definition,
a manifesto can't support the dominant, standard, conventional,
or common-sense approach to doing something. Your essay should champion
an approach that is new, alternative, emergent, unconventional, contrarian,
or (apparently) eccentric. Don't write a manifesto simply
arguing for the status quo, but also realize that the definition of
the status quo is, to a degree, a matter interpretation and argument
as well.
Note:
you can capture screen shots on PCs by viewing the page with your
Web browser, hitting the "Prt Scr" button (Print Screen)
on your keyboard, and then pasting the captured image into a new
Photoshop document (control+n, control+v).
Use Photoshop to
crop and scale your images to focus on the key details you're discussing
in your text, and insert the images into the appropriate portions
of your text using Word (Insert > Picture > From File). Also,
please save and keep in your "Web Design" folder (non-www)
the Photoshop files of your screen-shot images to make Web-ready
versions later.
1. A Rationale for Splash Screens. Critique Nielsen's
commandment that "splash screens must die" and develop
a rationale for judging wise and unwise uses of splash screens.
As a positive example, look at the site Design
for Marketing that uses a splash screen that effectively
speaks to the tastes and culture of its audience, and creates an
idea of itself.
Use Heim's notion of "eros" as a way of theorizing and
explaining the success of this splash screen, and Design
for Marketing's way of conceiving of its audience--as
opposed to Nielsen's notion of the user who is motivated by by
strictly practical needs for "information."
2. The Future of Web Politics. Cite and quote
a newspaper article from the last presidential election, which
assumes (wrongly, you think) that the Web will be a boon to the
political parties in organizing and fund raising.
Argue instead that the old mode of politics represented by the
parties is organized by geography (on concentric precinct, district,
state and national levels), and that digitally mediated culture
will supercede the
political parties organized in such hierarchies, just as in Pierre
Levy's "Collective
Intelligence," "territorial" and "commodity" spaces
are superceded by "knowledge space" (256-57).
Illustrate this
emergent political force by looking at Michael
Moore's site as an example of how these new modes of political
organization will be organized around a combination of celebrity
and populism, and how this new politics will depend on "glocal" identities
rather than physical locales, economic classes, or professional
affiliations.
3. Amazon's World of Mirrors.
Look at Amazon.com's
practice of customizing its home page according to the individual
user's previous purchases, searches and wish lists. This was described
in recent news accounts, and you can see the result if you visit
and use Amazon's site regularly with the same computer.
While this kind of customizing makes perfect sense from a marketing
point of view, argue in your manifesto that this represents a culturally
unhealthy trend on the Web, realizing Heim's/Leibniz's vision of
the "monad": "For monads," observes Heim, "there
is no outer world to access, no larger, broader vision. What the
monad sees are the projections of their own appetites and their
own ideas" (79). In essence, such customization is the cultural,
digital equivalent to heavy industry pumping pollutants into the
air: it may be advantageous for the company in the short run, but
the public has a right to oppose that practice and bring pressure
to bear on the company, if it's not healthy for the society as
a whole.
Describe your model of an alternative book
site (a new form of commercial site) that nurtures not Amazon's
commodified sense of self-focused "culture," but a more
open, social and dynamic "community" (83). |
