Constructing Structured Content on WordPress: Emerging Paradigms in Web Content Management

Abstract

Web content management systems (WCMSs) are widely used technologies that, like previous writing tools, shape how people think about and create documents. Despite their influence and ubiquity, however, WCMSs have received exceedingly little attention from scholars interested in social aspects of technology. I begin to address this gap by analyzing the development of WordPress's content creation experience through the lens of structured content. Based on this analysis, I contribute to ongoing discussions of content management by first suggesting that concepts such as structured content need to be understood as the contingent products of technical lineages and technical and social relationships and by second drawing attention to emerging paradigms of content creation, such as the merging of content creation and arrangement and the conflation of visual and abstract representations of content objects.