The gulf between the practices of literary or humanistic knowledge and Web design is real and appears to grow wider every day. Since its rise to dominance in the 1990s, the usability-based approach to Web design has made separating “meaning from presentation” a primary imperative (Nielsen 28). While literary texts realize much of their meaning in their presentation—in the ironic implications of poetic word choice, for example, or in the rise of tension and the eventual sense of resolution generated by a novel’s plot—the usability-design ideal of separating meaning from presentation offers the prospect of extracting information from specialized genres, complex texts, or long-form narratives. Unlocked from these, information can flow and mingle freely on the network where it can be manipulated and repurposed. In the design of a single Web page, for instance, freeing content from presentation presumably enables information on the page to mean the same thing whether it’s viewed whole on a large computer monitor, or inch-by-inch on a miniscule cell-phone screen; whether the user reads the entire page top to bottom, or employs the browser’s search function to skip to a particular piece of content. Ostensibly made independent of the presentation, content can even be piped to different Web pages, as in the case of live, local weather data fed from an online weather service to a designated corner of someone’s home page.
“[I]n a world of knowledge freed from physical constraints,” observes marketing consultant David Weinberger, “information doesn’t just want to be free [as John Perry Barlow famously declared]. It wants to be miscellaneous” (7).
Politically, this ideal of miscellaneousness offers an apparent means of democratically redistributing knowledge by liberating it from jargon, obfuscation, and pretense—indeed, from agendas ingrained in any author’s choice of presentation and style. Current Web-design orthodoxy thus portrays this opposition of scientistic usability and aesthetic presentation as a narrative of progressive, open-access egalitarianism overturning the top-down authority of old-fashioned, academic disciplines, elite professions, and privileged social classes. The demands of usability-based Web design for simplicity, speed, and brevity, say its proponents, is the visual realization of such democratic access. Humanistic or literary practices, on the other hand, obscure meaning and restrict access with their density, time demands, and length, and are thus to be opposed, not just functionally but philosophically—as Liu says, “on principle.”
But why does knowledge, freed from physical embodiment, want to be miscellaneous? Is miscellaneousness indeed the ultimate, formal expression of democratic freedom—communicative practices traditionally taught as the Liberal Arts? The answer, suggests media-ecology scholar Alexander Galloway, is more nuanced than Weinberger’s narrative of liberation. In his book Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Galloway observes that the most fundamental protocols that allow the global network to function are based not simply on democratic openness, but on a
contradiction between two opposing machines: One machine radically distributes control into autonomous locales, the other machine focuses control into rigidly defined hierarchies. The tension between these two machines—a dialectical tension—creates a hospitable climate for protocological control…. [I]n order to be politically progressive, protocol must be partially reactionary. (8, 142)
In Galloway’s analysis, the very protocols that underlie the idealized, democratic miscellaneousness of Web design themselves contain agendas—enforced not explicitly and coercively, like speed-limit signs and police radar surveillance deterring speeders on a quiet suburban street, but like the installation of speed bumps that make speeders “protocologically” want to slow down. “[S]ignage appeals to the mind,” says Galloway, “while protocol always appeals to the body. Protocol is not a superego (like the police); instead it always operates at the level of desire, at the level of ‘what we want’” (241). The desire to develop endlessly miscellaneous and reusable information seems a natural expression of freedom—as if the disembodied, virtual content wants to disburse itself like a gas—when in fact that desire is an ideological product of the very tools of decentralization which make freedom possible. Miscellaneousness is a style of control.
Galloway’s insights into the political nature of invisible network
protocols suggest that we should look more closely at the conventional wisdom of practical, visual Web design, and the claims frequently made about it. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen, for instance, calls the scientistic anti-style of highly usable designs like U.S. Bank’s sample Accounts Summer Page in Figure 1 as “a customer-empowering environment” (9). Nielsen implies that such a design results in the individual’s achieving a degree of mastery over the financial system. And here, indeed, the presentation seems so simple, conventional, and invisible—following the principles of use-based Web-design advice—that that the page seems to reflect the practical reality of the fictitious customer “Bob’s” money. The page is a model not only of usability design, but of a
more fundamental informationalism: the belief that reality is ontologically stable and independent of expression, that information can be extracted from context and poured into a neutral container like a spreadsheet or list, that understanding is a pseudo-physical matter of finding rather than seeing, reading, or interpreting. Informationalism says that Bob either has $1,223.00 in his account or he doesn’t.
The dilemma lies in the fact that presentation cannot be avoided—at least not if the content is meant for human eyes and ears. And freeing denotative meaning from presentation in order to make it usable and portably re-usable does not free us from the inevitable connotative meaning of presentation. Indeed, from visual/verbal “edits,” to online communities, to the Web site as a genre of cultural expression, the chapters that follow show how this “return of the repressed”—in which the literary ethos (that is, a rhetorical role or performative identity) keeps appearing on the scene like the ghost of Hamlet’s father or the Poe’s Madeline Usher—represents not just an instability, irony, or slippage to be ignored, but the seed of a positive method of both reading and producing Web design. Beyond the numbers it lists, the visual presentation of the Accounts Summary page, for instance, tells a story—and not just of Weinberger’s anti-authoritarian miscellaneousness or Nielsen’s empowerment of customers like Bob, but of Galloway’s more ambiguous protocological control. The outlined tables and alternating blue/white cells suggest an accountant’s ledger, the solid blue lines securely corralling together the personalized label “Bob’s Checking” and the $1,223.00 balance. The square building blocks of the table cells are a digital corollary of the physical bank where Bob set up his account. Inside, Bob functionally finds his balance, it’s true, but he also infers a whole set of understandings from the narrative of what he sees and readson the way in—from the password authentication screens that open before him like a Get-Smart series of vault doors, to the personalized inner sanctum of his accounts page, and finally to the sturdy-looking lockbox of pixels where his cash presumably sits waiting for him.
The implied vault, the name labels on the page, and even the boxed balances, however, are fictions. In the most objective sense, the bank is not “holding” these funds for Bob, but making them available only in the just-in-time sense of contemporary financial practice. Even at the moment Bob is checking his balance in his personalized table of accounts, his moneyis really everywhere and nowhere, flickering infinitesimallyacross the vast nervous system of the global economy as it contributesits virtual energies to what network sociologist Manuel Castells calls capital’s “endless search for money by money through the production of commodities by commodities" (474). It would be possible for the page to show Bob what uses the borderless financial system was putting his money to at this moment. It could suggest to him the places his money had been between his depositing and spending it, as does the fine print of the bank’s disclosure statements and annual reports. This more unsettling but significant reality could be represented visually and alphanumerically on the page that Bob sees everyday, but instead we have the reassuring fiction of the lockbox metaphor. The page is a fiction not in the popular sense of its not being literally true—the story it tells is true enough as far as it goes—but because important aspects of the page’s meaning derive from its presentation: its status as a fictio, Latin for something that’s been made or fashioned and that bears the traces of that fashioning in its meaning and effects. Indeed, the scientistic anti-style of separating meaning from presentation, of dispersing information from context and genre, is an intentional style of presentation-with-effect and is itself a fiction.
Such a critical, literary reading of this online banking page does not perversely interpret fiction where function is simply intended. Indeed, both the design and selection of detail here not only determine what the people who see this page (“customers,” Nielsen calls them) are functionally to know, but realize—that is, quite literally, make real—the role these users play in the global economy. While the balances may be accurate, the structure may appear transparent, and the navigation may feel intuitive, these functional values of usability also servefictionally to reinforce a particular cultural and economic point of view. In fact, the page’s visual styles enforce a decidedly passive roleon its reader/viewer, just as beguilingly as a Dickens novel or Quentin Tarrantino film works to construct the cultural values and expectations of the implied, ideal audience—an effect known in rhetorical studies as a text’s “pathos.” This page demonstrates that simply pouring content into a table does not really “separate meaning from presentation.” Indeed, the bank’s literary, or what I’ll call “fictive,” use of the spreadsheet presentation itself tells the tale, and—far from democratically yielding to the user’s needs and desires—constructs the audience in the image of its own values.