Gary Thompson, Saginaw Valley State University, University Center, MI, USA
Introduction |
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Note: this paper was first presented at the October 2003 AOIR conference in Toronto. Images in the paper mostly derive from a few months before that; as is the nature of the web, many have changed since.
Introduction
A recent Stanford University study found that looks count when people judge a website for credibility. "To look good is to be good -- that's the primary test when people assess a Web site's credibility," said B.J. Fogg, Ph.D, who led the Stanford study. "’People evaluate TV news and politicians in the same way: presentation matters more than substance. Why should we expect the Web to be any different?”
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2002/nt_2002_12_16_look.htm
By now we have seen several
iterations between extremes in discussions about the internet, ranging from
“It must be true—I saw it on the internet” to requirements
that students avoid using any internet sources. As the internet as a medium
is now a significant rival to television and print media, we are long overdue
for developing some nuance in our interpretations. It is my contention that
authenticity is something which must be constructed rather than simply accruing
to verbal content, and visual and other design features are an inherent, but
often overlooked, factor in this construction.
I mean for the point to have general application, but will focus on weblogs
as a useful if not quite representative application. Weblogs have multiplied
vastly since coming to public notice five years or so ago, thanks in part to
the popularization of bloghosts (Blogger,
Livejournal) making their design and
maintenance much more convenient to the ordinary person.
By authenticity I mean more or less what in rhetoric is called ethos—the
persuasive appeal of a text based on the character or believability of its source.
Authenticity has been a problem for on-line writing since the internet came
to wide public knowledge in the early 1990s, for reasons that are generally
known: institutional markers of authenticity did not automatically carry over,
and those which were could be easily simulated, as could personal identity.
Early on, mass media often treated the web as a competitor, warning audiences
of the dangers of false representation in textual forms ranging from misrepresenting
identity, to propaganda masquerading as objective reporting, to the net’s
well-known propensity for rumor and hoax. These representations have created
a sort of electronic hermeneutics of suspicion which is only gradually dissipating.
By and large, however, audiences have settled into acceptance of electronic
media as more or less equal in authenticity to non-electronic media, partly
because established institutions have staked out their on-line presences, partly
because of the internet’s increased familiarity and obvious utility, partly
because audiences have learned to discriminate between genres, partly because
a large segment of the population has grown up with these media, and partly
because the internet offers alternative sources and more capabilities for fact-checking.
However, weblogs, as a relatively new genre of electronic text, have reawakened
some of the old suspicions.