The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design

Abstract

This article elaborates a theoretical case for considering new media as productive power, viewing web interfaces as both reflecting and reinforcing social logics. It then details an analytic method for websites – discursive interface analysis – which examines functionalities, menu options, and page layouts for the structures at work within them. The piece concludes with a short, illustrative examination of several official media company websites, articulating the productive constraints of their interfaces and the norms that they construct. Ultimately, the essay offers a tool for the new media research kit to improve our understanding of how norms for technologies and their users are produced and with what implications.

Keywords

Critical theory design discourse fandom normativity

The argument that technologies are neither inevitable nor neutral, but rather the product of social context, is well established. This macro-level theory explains new media through its conditions of production. On the micro level, there are many important case studies of what people do with technologies, such as open source software (Coleman, 2009; Kelty, 2008), videogame modding (Kücklich, 2005; Nardi and Kallinikos, 2007), and fan practices (Jenkins, 2006; Wilson, 2007). Though both macro and micro models are vital interventions, they are also somewhat incompatible, as one locates the force shaping new media in social structures and the other sites it in the agency of the individual user or user community; this essay proposes accounting for both constraint and individual action using Michel Foucault’s concept of power as productive. This lens allows examining the assumptions built into interfaces as the normative or ‘correct’ or path of least resistance – though, like all norms, this is not deterministically guaranteed in the actual encounter with a site visitor.

Although there has been critically oriented work done at the level of the web interface (Nakamura, 2008; White, 2006), and a great deal more quantitatively assessing features using experimental design (for example, Campbell et al., 2011; Chen et al., 2010), the current project differs from either approach. The former category of scholarship makes specific claims about the cases the authors examine, while the latter is premised on site visitors either accepting or rejecting features, which is insufficiently structural; consequently, neither body of work provides a general, comprehensive theorization of, nor an articulated method of analysis for, how the social forces that produce technologies manifest in web deployment. To remedy this gap, I first lay out a case for technology as productive power, viewing web interfaces as both reflecting social logics and non-deterministically reinforcing them. Next, I detail an analytic method examining website interfaces – functionalities, menu options, and page layouts – for the structures at work within them. Finally, I describe a short, illustrative analysis of several official media company websites, articulating the productive constraints of their interfaces and the norms they construct. Ultimately, the essay provides a research tool to improve understanding of how norms for technologies and their users are produced and with what implications.

Affordances as productive power

While power is often understood as subtractive or as preventing actions through repression, Foucault’s conception of power as productive – sometimes called regulatory power or normalization – asks what power incites, encourages, or produces. This approach appreciates that ‘yes’ indicates power relations as much as ‘no’, providing something is as enmeshed in power as preventing it, and the presence or absence of repression is a separate question from whether subjects are acting freely. A productive power framework operates from the premise that making something more possible, normative, or ‘common sense’ is a form of constraint encouraging that outcome.

Foucault (1990: 138) contends that governments ‘foster’ certain practices and ‘disallow’ others, and I contend that web interfaces similarly structure action by making some things more possible than others. A site’s design makes a normative claim about its purpose and appropriate use that both demonstrates an understanding of users and builds a set of possibilities into the object. This approach resembles what Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2007: 5, 28, 39) term ‘protocol’ in that it attends to ‘a set of tendencies’ that ‘operate at a level that is anonymous and nonhuman’ through being built into technologies and which no one controls but are nevertheless controlled. However, while they focus on ‘control’ and limitation, my productive power approach pays attention also to possibility – when and to what technologies say yes. The structuring ideals that position particular behavior as ‘correct’ or ‘normal’ matter, as the social valuation attached to the norm makes compliance with normativity a compelling option (Butler, 1993; Ferguson, 2003; Foucault, 1990).

Importantly, a site may not work seamlessly – the assumptions of how it should be used may not match actual site visitors – but the model distinguishes the site visitor who actually shows up from the ideal User the site recruits. Visitors may well arrive and find they are not welcomed; they may go elsewhere, adapt, or contest this, but the inbuilt ideal must be reckoned with. The interface makes a normative claim; it is not an omnipotent system. Not every site visitor responds in the same way, but to understand the norms sites produce, analysis must consider which responses become the path of least resistance and how.

After all, media-producing organizations tend to operate in terms of aggregates, such that examining those aggregate actions is vital to understand the contemporary mediascape. The productive capacity of interfaces, like what Foucault calls biopolitics, ‘deals with the population’, seeking

not to modify any given phenomenon as such, or to modify a given individual insofar as he is an individual, but, essentially, to intervene at the level at which these general phenomena are determined, to intervene at the level of their generality. (Foucault, 2003: 245, 246)

Discursive interface analysis takes sites’ affordances as such a general intervention – they reflect, and help establish, cultural common sense about what Users do (and should do), producing the possible and normative rather than acting on any particular individual.

Discourse is a particularly useful lens for productive power in design; discourses structure how we think about things and accordingly how it makes sense to us to act. Ruth Frankenberg’s (1993: 78) description of a ‘discursive environment’ provides one useful framework – like the material environment we inhabit, it is rooted and difficult to change, and it channels our actions in some directions more than others even as it often goes uninterrogated as just how things are (White, 2006). Discourses are ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault, 1972: 49) as the place where thought and action are structured in accordance with sets of knowledge or assumptions about what is true or correct.

Accordingly, discursive interface analysis is a productive tactic. Examining what is possible on sites – features, categories of use foregrounded, and how technological features make certain uses easier or harder – illuminates the norms of use. In this process, as Foucault (1972: 29) tells us of discourse in general, one attends to the

relations between statements (even if the author is unaware of them; even if the statements do not have the same author; even if the authors were unaware of each other’s existence); relations between groups of statements thus established (even if these groups do not concern the same, or even adjacent fields; even if they do not possess the same formal level; even if they are not the locus of assignable exchanges); [and] relations between statements and groups of statements and events of a quite different kind (technical, economic, social, political).

Considering the production of normativity means moving away from site designers’ intent to attend to structures in the interface. The underlying logic animating a design produces a ‘correct’ use even if different people produced various features – even if they were produced in apparent isolation from each other – and this happens in the context of factors like consumer capitalism and intellectual property maximalism. Indeed, it’s nearly obligatory to describe it in passive voice, as no particular actors do these things, but they nevertheless occur through accreted, seemingly disparate decisions. Examining interfaces lets us ask: ‘How is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another?’ (Foucault, 1972: 27). What beliefs drive design and are built in? And, ultimately, what are the consequences of these design choices?

Discursive interface analysis

The method elaborated here examines norms produced by ‘affordances’ of websites – defined by H. Rex Hartson (2003: 316) as what a site ‘offers the user, what it provides or furnishes’ (emphasis in original). This builds on the foundational work of Donald Norman (2002), who argues that ‘good design’ makes objects only usable as intended and ‘bad design’ renders people unable to understand or operate the object; rotating this premise, examining design illuminates objects’ intended uses. Accordingly, discursive interface analysis interprets websites’ embedded assumptions about their own purpose and appropriate use.

This approach may seem like the social-scientific Human–Computer Interaction framework that attempts to optimize technologies by testing user responses for which features produce particular attitudes (Hassanein and Head, 2007; Hausman and Siekpe, 2009; Hess et al., 2009), or behaviors (Campbell et al., 2011; Chen et al., 2010; Hess et al., 2009). However, despite our common interest in what interfaces produce, discursive interface analysis differs in two ways. First, the aforementioned approach assumes site visitors know what they want so sites must try to suit them; discursive interface analysis takes seriously that acceptance or rejection occurs within pre-determined options, asking instead what is available to want or choose from. Second, the former research is oriented toward designers’ goals, while discursive interface analysis takes a critical perspective attentive to unequal power between industry and site visitors.

The work most similar to discursive interface analysis is that of Lisa Nakamura (2008) and Michele White (2006), who both consider interfaces as structuring knowledge about categories and belonging. I build on these important contributions by expanding this thinking to situate structures like race (Nakamura, 2008) and gender (White, 2006) as (vital) factors within the broader social structuration of technology. The integral reorientation is using a Foucaultian model focusing on normativity rather than control.

Though affordances, owing to the concept’s origins in ecological psychology (Gibson, 1977), are often understood literally – this branch affords increased reach for this squirrel – the idea also has less concrete uses. Discursive interface analysis goes beyond function, examining affordances broadly – the features, but also what is foregrounded, how it is explained, and how technically possible uses become more or less normative through productive constraint. It takes the premise that how sites are built reflects assumptions about what site visitors will do, which becomes a normative claim about what Users should do when incorporated within the interface – acting to ‘configure the user’ (Hutchby, 2001: 451), at least as an ideal. Importantly, contending that websites construct their proper use is not technological determinism: affordances ‘set limits on what it is possible to do with, around, or via the artefact’, but how an actual site visitor rather than ideal User responds to the ‘range of affordances for action and interaction that a technology presents’ is not guaranteed (Hutchby, 2001: 453); considering norms allows parsing such distinctions. Hartson (2003) identifies four affordance types: cognitive, physical, sensory, and functional. Removing ‘physical’ as inapplicable to virtual interfaces leaves ‘functional affordance’ – what a site can actually do; ‘cognitive affordance’ – how Users know what a site can do; and ‘sensory affordance’ – which ‘enables the user in sensing (e.g., seeing, hearing, feeling) something’ (Hartson, 2003: 322, emphasis removed). The remainder of this section details each type, providing examples of what they illuminate to articulate how discursive interface analysis is conducted.

Functional affordances are relatively straightforward: what functionality does the site have? What can you do with it? For example, calbears.com affords watching videos of UC Berkeley (Cal) athletic news and highlights; the User is understood to desire such a capability and not solely text-based sports information – and the design both reflects this belief and reproduces it through building in this function. Importantly, calbears.com does not afford downloading this content. Instead, Users must visit the site to have access. Syfy.com/battlestar (Battlestar Galactica, BSG), on the other hand, both autoplays video – demonstrating and reinforcing a stronger sense that video is what Users (should) want – and provides a widget to embed at one’s own site. BSG’s affordance lets content travel, which Berkeley’s does not, but only within the provided tool – posing new limits and expanding some possibilities. Though both sites circumscribe circulation of intellectual property by eschewing downloadability and total free circulation, they go about it differently. Expanding from Mia Consalvo’s (2003: 82) attention to how ‘corporations have created new multimedia formats that circumvent the easy “copy and paste” usability of older standards’, it is clear that a single technological structure (Flash encoding) can facilitate different norms. Technology does not completely determine use, as a site visitor with the capacity to crack the Flash can do what s/he likes; however, the affordances provided make only some uses easy and normative. Functional affordances produce norms, as allowing this and not that implies that Users ought to do this and not that, demonstrating how power is productive.

Beyond pure functionality, two other types of affordances contribute to norms. These manifest through menu labels, the ease of understanding and distinguishing features, and which aspects are more or less noticeable (Hartson, 2003). A cognitive affordance lets the User choose an action; Hartson’s example is the label on a button. The discursive nature is clearer here: cognitive affordances facilitate processing information, and are therefore closely tied to the social act of meaning-making. Cognitive affordances relate to naming, labeling, and/or site taglines and self-descriptions; when Purduesports.com calls its online shop the ‘official store’, this is a claim to authority and legitimacy. Likewise, labeling a menu ‘Gameday’ at Purduesports.com instead of ‘Fan Zone’ at Calbears.com – though they have similar contents – makes a difference: one label foregrounds the identity ‘fan’ while the other implies the action of game attendance, shifting the emphasis. What a feature or menu or header is called matters, as these statements define what the User does by selecting that feature or option.

Building upon Louis Althusser’s (1971) notion of interpellation, which used the example of a police hail – ‘Hey, you there!’ – as a moment when the state addresses an individual as a subject, cognitive affordances also address particular types of people as Users. Though in Althusser’s original frame of police shouting, the subject was hailed as guilty, the concept also illuminates the relationship between being (literally or figuratively) hailed as a member of any category and recognition that oneself is meant; interpellation is a quotidian occurrence of awareness that something is intended (or not intended) for someone like you (Sandell, 1997). Design may hail particular Users when the male option is the default on a signup form (White, 2006) or indeed when such a form (a) requires inputting sex and (b) has exactly two options (Brookey and Cannon, 2009), cognitively affording an understanding that particular genders belong. A site may hail Users through various categories: a section for ‘Fans’ at the Seattle Mariners’ site makes a claim that ‘fan’ is a term with which people who use the site (should) identify, normalizing the fan in that space. Hailing demarcates expected or planned-for Users at the expense of other site visitors.

Last but not least is the sensory affordance, analyzed through visibility, legibility, or audibility. Hartson (2003) uses the example of font size, but having moving, Flash-based advertisements rather than still ones or a unified color scheme instead of colorful ads are equally relevant. Aesthetic analysis of interfaces tends to map quite closely onto sensory affordances – with aesthetically pleasing design being simple, organized, and clear (Alsudani and Casey, 2009; Michailidou et al., 2008; Zheng et al., 2009). Whereas commercialization encourages banner ads that use color, motion, or sound to get attention and click-through, ‘good design’ requires a unified interface that is ‘clean’ rather than ‘tacky’ or ‘busy’ (Nakamura, 2008); these aesthetic considerations indicate professionalism (Zheng et al., 2009) and credibility (Alsudani and Casey, 2009) as well as being gendered (masculine) and classed (middle-class) (Nakamura, 2008), and so reflect underlying assumptions about who and what sites are for. The Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog site, for example, has a unified color scheme and no moving elements, emphasizing content and eschewing the tactics of commercialized design; this arises from and reinforces the site’s self-identification as a labor of love created outside mainstream media production. By contrast, autoplaying video at the BSG site uses the sensory affordance of audibility to prioritize attention over all other considerations (including potential site visitor irritation). How a site negotiates between aesthetics and finance in sensory affordances reflects and reinforces beliefs about its purpose and what Users (should) care about.

Page placement is also important: appearing at the top or left makes something more visible (for these English-language sites) than being lower or on the right. Hartson (2003: 325), borrowing newspaper terminology, argues that what is ‘below the fold’ – what cannot be seen when a webpage loads without scrolling – is easily overlooked; reversing this statement, features ‘above the fold’ acquire more visibility and weight by that placement. ESPN.com, for example, displays the latest scores for current and recent sporting events at the very top, assuming and reinforcing the importance of this information to Users. Importantly, though of course not every site visitor has the same ‘fold’, items near the top and left provide a useful proxy for what a site considers important; that Google Analytics provides a ‘browser size’ tool to show site administrators what is visible for what percentage of site visitors (Yahas, 2012) shows the relevance of ‘the fold’ to design decisions. Sensory affordances may seem less discursively loaded, but making something stand out through design choices apportions scarce attention to both reflect and reinforce assumptions and valuations.

Illustrative analysis: Domesticating fandom

With the theoretical and methodological essentials now established, this section provides a short example of discursive interface analysis. The objects are 10 official media organization websites, documented using screen capture of their pages and menu options. To demonstrate that the normalizing properties of affordances are not content-specific but function-based, there are five sites each for speculative media (science fiction/fantasy/superheroes, etc.) and sports – that is, particular design decisions imply a similar User no matter what population of site visitors one draws from.

The sites were selected because their relationship to media or culture suggests they will provide particular insight. For speculative media, these are the sites for Star Wars, whose creator, George Lucas, is notoriously controlling;¹ the 2003 Battlestar Galactica reboot, whose executive producer, Ron Moore, is known for providing fans with lots of behind-the-scenes information; Doctor Horrible’s Singalong Blog, a project from fan-beloved creator Joss Whedon; the cable channel SyFy, which heavily recruits fan involvement through social media (e.g. inviting them to retweet announcements for a prize); and Star Trek (Trek), indispensable as the most-mocked fan object. The sports sites are Purdue University, which integrated technology to improve fans’ experience (Ault et al., 2008); University of California, Berkeley, a second college athletic site to compare with Purdue; the Seattle Mariners, who are reputationally fan-friendly and new-media-savvy; ESPN, which was an early adopter of letting fans interact (Bryant and Holt, 2006), and Major League Soccer (MLS), a sports organization contemporary with the internet and therefore net-native (Wilson, 2007). I analyze the sites in the present tense as they were at data collection, although the frequency of website updates means features may have been added or removed since.

Fandom provides an interesting case for discursive interface analysis. Digital technologies have been massively hyped as liberating everyday people from the tyranny of mass media, and there was particular hype with (a) groups who were presumed to already partially control their media experience, such as fans, and (b) scholars who already presumed that people partially controlled their media experience, such as active audience proponents (a category that includes many fan researchers). Moreover, fans are often understood as tech-savvy or early adopters of new media (Jenkins, 2006; Scott, 2011). There is also a widespread contention that fans and their practices, once marginal, are becoming the default or preferred audience (Andrejevic, 2008; Gray et al., 2007b; Russo, 2010). Additionally, looking across fan types (sports and speculative) with such historically different cultures demonstrates how technological change is picked up into the logics of distinct but related industries. If audiences in general and fans in particular are increasingly called to supposedly liberatory interactivity, analyzing interactivity – what the technologies afford and the norms they produce – is vital.

Sensory affordances

Beginning from sensory affordances, each site has advertising at or near the top. For Dr. Horrible, the Mariners, Trek, and Star Wars, these banners and buttons afford purchasing things from the site-owning organizations. The remaining sites advertise both for sponsors and their own products. This arrangement affords purchasing commodities and services from sponsors front and center on the sites – and so makes this central to them. This sensory affordance of placement demonstrates varying priorities. Sites that advertise only themselves prioritize brand or message unity over ad revenue. The other sites’ inclusion of patronizing the fan object’s patrons alongside the more ‘obvious’ (in a consumerist culture, at least) means of support through officially licensed products links being a fan with spending money in general, not just with consuming items related to the TV show, sport, etc. in particular. This produces a norm of fandom deeply enmeshed in consumption.

The majority of the sites also confer emphasis through the sensory affordance of motion. ESPN’s ticker at the top cycles through what is ‘Live Now’ on the company’s various TV outlets (ESPN, ESPN2, etc.); attracting visitor attention to this with motion helps the site point back to ESPN’s traditional media presence. More expansively, significant portions of the front page are in motion at Cal, MLS, Trek, the Mariners, and SyFy – a central block of screen real estate is an auto-advancing slideshow, sensorially affording learning about news, events, products, and services from these institutions. Finally, SyFy – and BSG as its sub-site – includes moving and video ads, increasing the emphasis on the commercial through both vision and hearing. Through the sensory affordances these sites employ, the User is produced as consumptive both figuratively through taking in information and literally through buying.

Functional affordances

The structures of sites – functional affordances – also construct norms. All the sites afford accessing information and purchasing items related to the object of fandom, whether tickets, t-shirts, or DVDs. The universality of these features produces taking in information and buying as what Users (should) care about; this consumptiveness diverges from the widespread argument that new media are normatively interactive. However, the majority of the sites also afford action. ESPN, Trek, MLS, SyFy, and the Mariners all afford links between their sites and social media platforms. Though site visitors can always copy-paste to link anything they choose, building social media capacity into the site does normative work. First, it facilitates and normalizes linking corporate-owned sites about one’s interests to one’s own account or profile; this implies ‘the right way to like us is to “Like” us’, positioning these sites and their parent companies as something to which one normatively articulates a social connection (boyd and Ellison, 2008). Second, by routing this connection through the site’s architecture, it also becomes measurable, letting site owners exploit the data-gathering potential of things Users are incited to do. Thus, though the affordances of social media platforms vary, they play the same role as functional affordances on sites where they are outbound links.

The sites also afford more intensive interactivity: Star Wars, SyFy, and ESPN provide games and ESPN, MLS, and the Mariners provide fantasy sports. In one sense, broad availability of games and fantasy sports indicates the passive, ‘couch potato’ consumer is no longer normative, since sites recruit Users to engage. However, games and fantasy sports normalize interactivity as ‘point and click and be entertained’ and as choosing between pre-coded options – not exactly the ‘consumers are in control’ scenario described by Jenkins (2006). Relatedly, though researchers often understand fandom as a community or culture (Crawford, 2004; Gray et al., 2007a), site design does not universally assume so, as only Trek, BSG, SyFy, and Star Wars afford fan-to-fan interaction (through message boards); that only speculative media sites afford collectivity is odd since sports fandom also functions as a community or culture. Point-and-click interaction with the site itself or connecting with other fans outside the legitimized space of the site proper via social media are instead most common. A majority of the sites do not afford community formation and maintenance, producing a norm of fandom as individual enjoyment rather than a communal activity.

Most dramatically, participation through creativity, a hallmark of what new media renders technologically possible, is generally not the norm: only Starwars.com’s ‘Star Wars Soundboards’ and BSG’s ‘Video Maker Toolkit’ afford creative production, and both pre-define what fans (should) care about through the pieces of remixable content they provide. As Julie Levin Russo (2010: 148) and Suzanne Scott (2011: 188) note, the BSG site provides clips of action scenes or battles rather than character-focused emotional moments, framing the action genre as normative for remix film. This equally describes the assumptions built in to, and the norm produced by, the Star Wars Soundboards, which provide memorable quotes – Darth Vader’s ‘I am your father’; Admiral Ackbar’s ‘It’s a trap!’ – and explosion noises. While these features produce an interactive norm by providing official content for Users to express their creativity and love of the franchise through remix, it is a narrow set of content, defining what fans (should) care about in consequential ways. After all, the explosions and gunfights at BSG are deeply gendered as masculine (Scott, 2011: 188), gendering the ideal use and User of the remix engine. More broadly, the fact that the sites prohibit including contents from other sources (Russo, 2010: 147) renders only particular forms of fan creative production legitimate.

Additionally, as Scott (2011: 187–188) and Russo (2010: 148) elaborate, the BSG video affordance requires that remixers cede the rights to their videos in exchange for using official material, assuming and creating a norm that industry should control fan activity. The Star Wars site functions similarly, offering a button to ‘Share Mix’ that affords export only to certain sites (Digg, Facebook, Del.icio.us, reddit, Stumble Upon, and mixx); alternately, fan remix artists can email their creation, but this sends a link back to starwars.com, such that--using the site as built--fans cannot take their works. Interactivity is narrowly circumscribed by content norms and technological sandboxing that maintain the company site as central to fan activity.

This dual impulse of encouraging fan activity, but only as subordinate to official sites, is evident from universally non-downloadable audiovisual media; organizations take on the cost of bandwidth to stream content rather than allowing fans to take copies (unless they know how to circumvent the security features). Not only do official creative affordances demarcate proper use, then, but it is not easy or normative for fans to conduct remix creativity on their own, nor indeed to even have ready access to material outside sites. This technological control on the circulation of site owners’ intellectual property produces a norm that ignores fair use, makes fan activity knowable and measurable, and helps industry control the image of its brand. These functional affordances construct fandom as consumptive, in the sense of taking in from the site rather than producing on their own, and they also work toward centering the sites through non-portable content, or what Jenkins et al. (2013) identify as ‘stickiness’ as opposed to ‘spreadability’.

Cognitive affordances

Cognitive affordances are perhaps most expansive, encompassing linguistic and nominative features of sites. Beginning with how sites identify themselves, four of the sports sites claim ‘official’ status for some aspect – the Official Site of the Seattle Mariners, the Official MLS Twitter feed, the Official Store at purduesports.com, and calbears.com identifies the Hilton Garden Inn as the Official Team Hotel on this sponsor’s banner advertisement. These affordances implicitly claim that this site or feed or store or sponsor is the real or legitimate experience. Far from trivial, this claim to be more normative than unofficial counterparts reinforces the organization’s authority to legitimate some things (and not others) – as with streaming media, this reinforces the ‘sticky’ logic of visiting the central, corporate site.

Imperative verbs are also important. Site visitors can of course refuse these commands, but as explicit calls to the User they demand analytic attention. Seattle’s ‘Vote Mariners’ button directs fans to support Mariners players in Major League Baseball’s All-Star balloting, implying that fan activity helps produce the value of the team. The ‘Enter the Dinner with the Admiral Contest’ banner at BSG differs somewhat as a command toward doing something that benefits fans – providing them a chance at dinner with lead actor Edward James Olmos. However, both imply that their respective companies desire fans’ goodwill or approval, demonstrating the shift toward actively wooing intensive audience investments, often identified as a hallmark of the contemporary era.

ESPN, on the other hand, calls fans to ‘Watch’, inviting consumption over interaction; alongside its status as a cable network and the aforementioned ‘Live Now’ ticker, this privileges traditional media and fan behaviors. Calbears.com’s exhortations to ‘Buy Tickets’ similarly frame fandom as consumptive rather than interactive. The Berkeley site also commands ‘Give to Cal’, and – though universities constantly ask for money from everyone – devoting an entire menu option to it makes financially supporting the university central to college sports fandom. ‘Give’, like ‘buy’, assumes a transaction-based relationship between fans and media – when you give us money, we provide you with sports entertainment. This second set of sites does not court fans as intensively as being asked to vote for Mariners players as All-Stars or invited to put themselves forward for a prize. These latter two apparently decenter their organizations – even if, ultimately, it’s superficial, since the Mariners as a franchise benefit from All-Star players and BSG benefits from the loyalty contests inspire.

Moreover, several of the sites explicitly hail fans by labeling sections ‘fan’, defining which topics fans should be interested in. Calbears.com has a category Fan Zone constructing a norm that fans physically go to games through links to tickets, directions, parking, visiting Berkeley, hotel accommodations, tailgates and pregame parties, away travel, and a Memorial Stadium map. Star Wars also normalizes event attendance by including ‘Event News’ as a category under their Fans header, though in-person attendance is not assumed or promoted by the same critical mass of links. The Fans sections at the Mariners and MLS sites, on the other hand, link fandom with attendance only indirectly, with MLS providing a list of pubs where fans can watch games and the Mariners recruiting for game-attending ‘Ball Girls’. With some internal variation, this event attendance norm constructs fans as relatively economically privileged, implying leisure time and/or job schedule flexibility and, in the case of Cal and Star Wars, the capacity to pay for tickets.

Fans are also recruited as purchasers of merchandise. Cal’s Fan Zone header houses the site’s store. Only at Berkeley’s site is the store a specifically fan feature; while this does narrow what ‘fan’ means, the other sites are equally commercial, as those with a store all give it its own menu – making the store more central to the overall site through sensory affordances. Other sites foreground particular purchasing opportunities as specifically for fans, with Star Wars having a subscription-based, premium-content fan club, MLS offering ‘Contests & Promotions’, and the Mariners including auctions and a fan cruise. All three proffer purchasing opportunities beyond basic gear, which are in some sense exclusive, as specifically of interest to fans. This positions fans as not just average site visitors or customers, but a specific, more committed kind with unique tastes. On the one hand, this makes intensive engagement normal or expected; on the other, it defines what form intensity ought to take, such that the logic animating these choices actually dovetails with assigning the store to the Fan Zone header at Cal. Attaching the word ‘fan’ to particular sections produces particular modes of fandom as correct, inciting site visitors toward that norm.

Hailing particular people as Users also happens more obliquely. Following Michele White’s (2006: 27) attention to the way the male option on signup forms is either the default or seen first by being above or to the left, the membership forms at ESPN, SyFy, Star Trek and Star Wars all construct their ideal website Users as male by doing one of these three things, combining sensory affordances making this easy to find with cognitively affording an understanding of a particular group as most suitable.² Similarly, Major League Soccer (MLS) constructs its audience as particularly male by displaying fan contests and prizes in relation to Father’s Day and not Mother’s Day, indirectly hailing men as the User at the expense of other site visitors through these cognitive affordances.

Implications

Ultimately, discursive interface analysis of these industry sites demonstrates that new media have actually not radically altered the traditional ideal of passive consumers who should grin and take what they’re sold. Despite claims that the digital ‘revolution’ has changed the position of fans with respect to industry, at these sites fandom is not figured as powerful but equated with consumption through universal stores and information, sensory affordances calling attention to advertisements and promoting taking in information, and functional affordances constraining fans to visit the site for involvement. The sites undoubtedly include interactive features: fans can engage with each other via social media, play games, or produce remix video and audio, but each of these produces actions that are measurable and manageable.

These official sites ultimately act to create a relationship between fans and the website or company rather than between fans. While there is nothing inherently wrong with corporations acting in self-interest to make themselves indispensable to fandom, this does trouble arguments that fans are newly empowered through being courted by industry. Importantly, though sports and speculative media fan cultures are common-sensically quite different, the same logics of fan management appear whenever corporations are involved despite the differences between these two types of fandom. Much as digitization makes information inherently comparable, the affordances of these sites produce ‘the fan’ as a consumptive relation interchangeable across objects of fandom. Corporate logics of profit thus act to flatten the specifics of fan cultures.

Discursive interface analysis demonstrates that, while some fan practices are indeed invited by industry websites, they are those that benefit site owners through providing goodwill or facilitating intensive consumption, producing what I call the domestication of fans: fans are made both more useful and more controllable in much the same way as domesticated livestock have been bred bigger and more docile. While fans participating at such sites undoubtedly benefit – like domesticated animals have safer and more comfortable existences than wild counterparts – it is nevertheless evident that design decisions produce normative fandom as both narrow and pro-corporate. Through discursive interface analysis, it becomes clear that through sites with lots of content, fun things to do, and ways to share, fan activity becomes more visible to administrators, moved ‘into the order of things that are counted’ (Foucault, 1990: 4). Sites facilitate making fandom known and regulated, normalized and valuable – both quantitatively/monetarily and qualitatively/affectively – for site owners rather than taking place in the ‘wild’ internet. Normalization of a particular relationship to industry, at the expense of uses and activities that could be possible were new media deployed differently, troubles arguments about the mainstreaming of fandom.

One solution to the way these sites are circumscribed by industry interests might be for fans to go back to (or stay in) that ‘wild internet’ and conduct fandom through fan-produced sites rather than engaging with ‘official’ web homes of franchises. However, this raises some of the same questions, since the social media platforms where fans often congregate are equally corporate-owned and thus employ the same logics of Users as data and intellectual property protectivism. To get out of this, sites would have to be fully fan-owned and controlled, which suggests some of the force behind the rallying cry ‘I want us to own the goddamn servers!’ at the formation of fan-advocacy group Organization for Transformative Works (Busse, 2009) – but this requires resources fans may not possess.

That fans have been noticed and recruited by industry, then, is not freedom, since as other scholars have noted becoming a group targeted by marketing does not necessarily indicate moving up in the world (Chasin, 2000; McRuer, 2006; Manalansan, 2005). Instead, invitations to participate signal fans’ ‘arrival into hegemony’ (Reddy, 2008: 2849); there is now an effort to get their consent, but they are not newly privileged. Embracing fandom at official sites incorporates more people into normativity by delineating certain practices as newly standard, but this inevitably defines those still not encompassed by the new ‘permissiveness’ as even more deviant. Ultimately, because these industries are now ‘officially’ fan-friendly – even though only to a particular definition of fandom – their practices become harder to dispute. What’s more interesting than fans being embraced is how, which is why analysis of the interfaces at these industry sites is so vital. The stakes of this partial incorporation are high, as ultimately fans are exactly the kind of consumer that ‘is an increasingly important part of the emerging interactive economy’, doing the work of making the object of fandom interesting for themselves regardless of its objective quality (Andrejevic, 2008: 33).

Conclusion

Examining websites as elaborated by this article makes it possible to parse which ideals, assumptions, and norms underlie design and shape the ‘correct’ or easiest way to use a site; Foucault’s idea of power as productive illuminates how encouraging particular actions (rather than simply forbidding undesired ones), offering content (rather than only threatening lawsuits), or the carrot (and not just the stick) act to mold media interaction to benefit industry. Research that adopts discursive interface analysis will consider site functionalities – literally, what does the site do? – as functional affordances; the uses that are made easy to find with sensory affordances like placement, sound, color, or motion; and how these features are named, classified, or explained (cognitive affordances), rendering such analyses sensitive to the productive capacity of websites.

Discursive interface analysis facilitates comprehending how technologies both arise from particular beliefs about what Users ought to do and reinforce them by constraining the actions of site visitors. The approach usefully supplements current research strategies, adding to what we learn from grounded analyses of what people do with new media once they get their hands on them and from broad analyses of the role of social forces such as economics, science, and culture that constrain which technologies get built in the first place. Future work might productively combine discursive interface analysis with ethnographic examinations of site visitors themselves or industry workers and their production processes in order to enrich the understanding of how interfaces reflect cultural common sense and produce norms. Researchers might also wish to expand discursive analysis beyond web interfaces to other technologies, examining what kinds of proper uses and ideal Users are produced by things like digital cameras, cell phones, or voice recognition software. Deploying the theoretical and methodological framework described here will greatly improve our understanding of how people and technology are mutually constitutive.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Portions of this paper were presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conferences in October 2011 and 2013 and the International Communication Association conference in May 2012. The author would like to thank CL Cole, Megan Condis, Lori Kendall, Alicia Kozma, Aimee Rickman, Brittany Smith, Michael Twidale, and Laurel Westbrook for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Mel Stanfill is a PhD Candidate in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Stanfill engages in critical media industry studies through the lens of the changing relationship between media companies and their fans in the internet era; key concerns include the ways fandom is articulated to industry through heteronormativity, whiteness, consumption, intellectual property law, and labor. Stanfill has been published in Transformative Works and Cultures, Communication Theory, and Critical Studies in Media Communication.

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