“It Was Really All About Books:” Speech-like Techno-Masculinity in the Rhetoric of Dot-Com Era Web Design Books

Abstract

The future of Human-computer interaction (HCI) communication requires researchers to develop a strong understanding of the factors that influence design practitioners. As a step towards building that understanding, based on interviews conducted with veteran web designers, we analyze a corpus of popular web design books published during and shortly after the dot-com boom. Using a combination of ethnographic methods and discourse analysis, we identify the rhetorical strategies in these books and why they were successful in shaping our participants’ ideas about web design. We find that the books exhibit a particular style of technical writing defined by a speech-like techno-masculinity . Despite their short shelf-lives, the books and their writing style contributed to the disciplinary identity of web design which exists today. Studying the history of best practice books is an important opportunity to reflect on the genre of best practices in design, and how we should frame them in the future.