Description
Taking to heart Mel Stanfill’s assertion that interface design shapes perceptions of not only what one can do on a given website (functional affordances), but also what a website’s purpose is (cognitive affordances) and how welcoming it is of diverse and marginalized groups (sensory affordances), please explore the website for Optima Health (Links to an external site.) and then address in the discussion board how the user design experience might shape your perceptions of how to dispute a denied health insurance claim on this site. How might the site “read” to someone with a disability seeking information on whether Optima would be a good choice for health insurance? Use Stanfill’s language in discussing your takeaways.
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research-article2014
NMS0010.1177/1461444814520873new media & societyStanfill
Article
The interface as discourse:
The production of norms
through web design
new media & society
2015, Vol. 17(7) 1059–1074
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1461444814520873
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Mel Stanfill
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
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
Corresponding author:
Mel Stanfill, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 228 Gregory
Hall, MC-463 810 S. Wright St. Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Email: [email protected]
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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 fanbeloved 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 newmedia-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
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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
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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-tofan 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 predefine 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’.
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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 Admi
