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Analytical
Essay: 
The Unintended Consequences of Web Design
In this assignment, write a eight-to-twelve page essay (12-point type, double-spaced, one-inch margins) which analyzes an "unintended consequence of Web design" using one Web site as an example.
Books and articles about Web design typically advise us to present content as transparently as possible.
They suggest ways presumably to design pages and sites based on an ideal of unmediated access to information. You can hear this ideal in the praise of sites that are “intuitive” to navigate, of pages that are “easy to use,” or of designs that quickly let “users” perform the tasks they most want to complete. When you’re logged onto Amazon.com, for example, the site tracks the products you view or buy so it can personalize the recommendations that appear on the Amazon home page you see. The site attempts to anticipate your tastes and interests, which is nothing less than Web users supposedly expect. Paraphrasing the attitudes of this famously impatient user, one Web-design advice book is titled, Don’t Make Me Think!
Despite this ideal of transparency, however, Web design does influence us profoundly. While the ideal of transparency may strive for designs that don’t make us think, Web design is part of a phenomenon that is changing the ways we think and live far beyond the immediate intentions of particular sites. The theoretical readings from the Trend book trace these unintended consequences of Web design and digital culture in a number of directions:
- how digital media is transforming relationships of knowledge and power;
- how digital media contributes to the development of new, hybrid reality that combines physical and virtual existence;
- how digital media present new possibilities for imagining, creating, and expressing identity;
- how digital media not only grows out of historical contexts, but changes our very notions of past, present, and future;
- how digital media enables communities to develop beyond the traditional confines of neighborhoods, cities, or nations;
- how digital media is not just transparent delivery system for information, but is an aesthetic experience in itself.
In this assignment, write a eight-to-twelve page essay (12-point type, double-spaced, one-inch margins) which analyzes an unintended consequence of Web design.
In this analysis, you should
- examine the visual design and verbal “voice” of one particular Web site or page as an ongoing example of this consequence
- use specific details from this example in “close readings,”
- apply ideas and use several quotations from at least one of the readings from the Trend book to describe the unintended consequence (which may be cultural, psychological, philosophical, economic, political, legal, aesthetic, etc.).
- use at least one idea and a quotation from a Web-design advice book (or a popular analysis of network culture) which exemplifies a piece of conventional wisdom concerning the Web, and which serves as a “foil” for the critical idea you’ve chosen from the Trend book. (Note here how “popular” is opposed to “critical.”)
In this assignment, write a eight-to-twelve page essay (12-point type, double-spaced, one-inch margins) which analyzes an unintended consequence of Web design.
In this analysis, you should
- introduce the essay by quickly making a striking claim, offering an intriguing observation, playing off of “what everybody knows” or assumes, taking issue with an authority, etc.
- develope an argument that backs up and develops this claim, observation, or critique
- include at least one, but not more than four, screen shot(s) (not more than 1/3 page each)
- use MLA citation and documentation form (parenthetical citations in the text, a correctly formatted “Works Cited” section at the end)
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