Written by Me, Designed by Someone Else

Arola, Kristin L. “The Design of Web 2.0: The Rise of the Template, the Fall of Design.” Computers and Composition 27 (2010): 4-14. Print.

Calls for developing student competencies in multimodality to make students more successful as students and professionals are not new. Nor are calls for critical awareness of potential consequences of the use of these different modalities. So in some ways, Kristin L. Arola’s article is a bit old hat. However, her emphasis on the rhetoric of templates in Web 2.0 technologies (specifically in social networking sites) seems a useful addition to issues instructors should consider in their multimodal writing course. By analyzing the predominance of templates in Web 2.0 technologies, she argues that templates have not only reduced users’ ability to determine how others view them but also have strengthened the notion that form and content are separate and insignificant for one another.

She notes this divide is especially troublesome now as rhetoric and composition becomes more focused on instructing students in composing with various technological applications. An irony exists here: on the one hand, we attempt to encourage students to think about how and why they design a text as they do (in addition to content considerations), but on the other hand “Net Generation students, as well as ourselves, are discouraged in Web 2.0 from creating designs” (6). And as we lose this control, we lose certain amounts of individuality on the Internet and opportunities to more fully and rhetorically consider the role of design. She notes this is especially true on social networking sites. Her examples include Facebook and MySpace. She argues through these examples that page layouts and the control (or lack thereof) of what information appears and where it appears suggests an identity dictated by the platform. For example, when people view our Facebook page, they see our image most prominently; but when we view our own pages, we see our News Feed most prominently, suggesting this is perhaps how Facebook designers feel we should view ourselves. She does praise MySpace because it allows users to vary what content appears on the page, but these can only appear in predetermined locations, again establishing patterns of identity not controlled by the user.

However, as Arola claims, this represents an opportunity for instructors in composition and rhetoric. By calling attention to these limiting features, we can teach students about the roles and rhetoric of design: we can rely on a space familiar to our students and encourage them to think in new, critical ways about it. And under Arola’s discussions simmers the idea of empowerment (and, indeed, she uses the term on occasion), yet she does not take this opportunity to explore how this greater awareness of the rhetoric of design can bring us into discussions of power, hierarchy, and personal identity with our students. This may be by design, of course, with the intention of leaving such discussions open to individual instructors, but if we are not to separate form and content, leaving out the discussions of the consequences of form beyond their rhetorical effects seems to do just that.