For my rhetorical analysis, I’ve chosen to build a product website for Publishr, a hypothetical blogging service targeted at designers. For the past week or so, I’ve been in an accelerated version of the “product development” phase, where I’m actually planning and designing the Publishr service as if it were going to be an actual product. This phase involves a number of things, like defining Publishr’s target market, brainstorming names and branding and writing copy. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve thought a lot about how Publishr could distinguish itself from the wealth of similar services already offered like Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad and Tumblr. (As a side note, Tumblr itself actually served as the primary inspiration for my fake product, since it also positions itself as a better alternative to Blogger and the others, and as a blogging service for creative people.) Starting from this early point in the process is a great way to consider every opportunity I have to build the verbal and visual rhetoric that will (hopefully) drive visitors to sign up for the service.
I’ve started designing and building the site itself, and my next step will be to analyze my own rhetoric directly on the site itself. This will be facilitated by some sort of mechanism that allows users to switch between the normal product page and my analysis—perhaps taking the form of a “rhetoric switch” to illuminate the “writing on the wall”, so to speak, pointing out specific and general examples of the site’s rhetoric.
Why is all of this important? As consumers, I think it’s imperative that we educate ourselves about the various ways in which sellers persuade us to buy their products or sign up for their services. I hope this project will help shed some light on those methods. I also wish to make an implicit distinction between a site like this one and others that might use “dirtier” tricks and shady techniques to get your business. Of course, every seller wants to persuade you, but that doesn’t mean that all methods of persuasion are necessarily evil. Some marketing techniques are perfectly valid (in my opinion, at least), and an informed customer might be encouraged to give their money to a company that doesn’t engage in shady tactics. I hope that my site will help people to make that distinction.
Questions
In what ways do product websites attempt to entice visitors to sign up? What kinds of tactics do they employ?
What’s the difference between “shady” rhetoric and legitimate rhetoric? How easy is it for readers to distinguish between the two?
What kinds of metrics can a website like this use to gauge the success of their rhetoric?
How do companies market online services differently than others—tangible goods, for instance? (I might have to downplay this one, since it will be difficult to explore in the context I’ve chosen.)
You Might Find Yourself
Bobulate
i can read
Sexpigeon
ill iterate
Eunoia
I Love Charts
All That Is Interesting
These blogs are particularly interesting to me because of the nature of their presentation. Seemingly endless fragments of content—images, quick thoughts, quotes, videos, audio clips—pour into reverse chronological order to create one vast stream of consciousness. This sea of content paints a rather vivid picture of who the author is, and it does so more effectively than the majority of blogs that I come across. In this way, each of these sites is very much a personal experience.
A few other common factors contribute to the relatively unique style of these websites. Most of them don’t allow comments, and while some users may not like this, I think it adds more to these sites’ experience than it takes away from it. They all distinguish themselves with minimalistic design, further emphasizing the actual content of each one. There are also few or no ads, and I think that ads would only detract from reading in this context.
One more note for web nerds and bloggers alike: All of these sites are powered by Tumblr, a service which lends itself well to these stream-of-consciousness style blogs. It’s free, so check it out if you’re looking to maintain yet another online profile.
Speaking of expecting hypertext even in traditional media:
Maria Fischer's "Traumgedanken" ... uses threads pierced through the pages and affixed to other pages to make physical hyperlinks between ideas.
[via BoingBoing]
As I make my way through the interviews in Designing Media, I find myself leaning further and further towards Chris Anderson’s opinion of the term “media”:
I think media is an expired word. I don’t know what it means. It’s a word that maybe once had meaning but that meaning has been fuzzied to the point that it means everything and as a result nothing today. I think in the twentienth century media meant something pretty crisp until Marshall McLuhan came and screwed it all up. Today I have no idea what media means.
I notice that as I read, the word “media” practically disappears—I ignore it in the same way that I ignore words like “a” and “the”. Like it has for Chris, the word to me has become stretched so thin that it no longer means anything.
Even so, one interview in particular stood out to me for the purposes of this blog assignment. In his interview, Roger McNamee discusses media in the context of musicians and promotion, particularly those of his band Moonalice. The implicit definition of media in McNamee’s interview seems to be any means of connection—connection between a band and their fans, connection among communities centered around certain passions and interests, and so on. This type of connection requires participation from all sides, and participation is highly valuable in today’s culture. He contrasts this to the old media models of forty or fifty years ago, where the aim was to get a very one-sided message out to large segments of consumers. As McNamee points out, “a behavioral change has taken place, and people are returning to the notion that it’s more fun and entertaining to create media than it is just to consume it.” The barriers for entry to the world of media creation have all but dissolved.
McNamee implies that the type of communication is not important; whether it be posters, t-shirts, DVDs, or Twitter, the medium is very much secondary to the connection that people seek by communicating across it. What’s valuable to him is what’s actually happening between the band and their fan base.
I am a reader who…
- gets distracted easily.
- loves discussing what I’ve read in a group, sometimes more than I enjoy actually reading it.
- sometimes finds it difficult to enter the frame of mind necessary to read a text for a class assignment.
- Googles unfamiliar concepts or phrases.
- rarely reads in a linear fashion, even with “linear” texts.
- loves experimental/non-traditional storytelling methods or textual styles.
- seeks connections to a story and its characters.
- sympathizes with authors and characters.
- expects a high level of linguistic fluency (spelling, grammar, syntax, etc).
- enjoys hearing about others’ reading and learning styles—they often help me better understand my own.
As I write these, I can’t help but think that I fit squarely into the “community-based literacies” camp, also described as “engaged learning” by Alexander and Fox. Even in my earliest education, my learning process has always been defined clearly by my environment—by my context as a student. As I alluded to in the above list, I absorb more from in-class discussions than I do from the actual reading process. I’m eager to hear what other people have to say about a text, and I’m also eager (perhaps too eager, at times) to share my thoughts as well and place them in the context of the class and ultimately, the overall community.
It’s also worth noting that my reading style has been heavily influenced by new technology—more specifically, the web. Hypertext has caused me to expect almost all reading to be easily cross-referenced, interactive, and my mind tends to wander when it’s not (in the case of a printed article or a book, for example). This proliferation of and transformation by technology is one of the guiding principles of the “Era of Engaged Learning” according to Alexander and Fox.
As a sidenote: It might be a bit premature, but I’d be willing to bet that the majority of this class will also claim “allegiance” to the community-based literacies camp, simply because it is the educational style that we’ve been subjected to for most of our student careers.
In a class entitled “Reading and the Web”, it is particularly important that we define and understand the first part of that title—that is, we must ask ourselves the question, “what is reading?” Can we learn about reading in the context of the internet without first having some understanding of what reading is in itself?
On a basic level, reading is the process of decoding and interpreting symbols. Given a variety of definitions of the words “decode” and “symbol”, this process can be applied to a seemingly infinite range of media and situations. For example, you might read a room as you enter it, or you may read a measurement on a thermometer. However, for the purposes of this post—and possibly for this class—I’m going to narrow my focus to the explicit process of decoding textual information, whether that text takes the form of a novel, a blog post, an encyclopedia or an academic journal.
As Alexander and Fox discuss in A Historical Perspective on Reading Research and Practice, reading researchers over the previous 50 years have debated whether the process of reading is cognitive, aesthetic, or sociocultural. Recently however, many of these researchers have begun to acknowledge that reading is cognitive, aesthetic, and sociocultural, and that these three dimensions actively work together in many different ways. It may in fact be detrimental to research the process of reading without focusing on all three of these aspects. So perhaps we need to expand our earlier definition of reading to take this into account:
“Reading is the cognitive and aesthetic process of decoding symbols and interpreting them within a sociological context.”
It’s also important to note that reading is not a linear process. As Bush so astutely points out in As We May Think, reading, like learning, is an associative process. A reader’s mind blazes intricate trails, often changing direction and form in a seemingly sporadic manner. Especially with such enormous advancements in information technology, reading is increasingly defined by these non-linear cognitive processes.