User:Gusandrews/SearchProject/AffordanceAnalysis

From Studyplace

(Note: I was experimenting here with different observer perspectives, as Latour and Woolgar were in Laboratory Life. I realize I sort of got what they were doing backwards. Latour and Woolgar posit a hypothetical observer who is NOT familiar with the scientific understandings they as researchers have. What I did was posit a hypothetical observer who IS familiar with the technical understanding that bloggers, their readers, and the developers of blogging software probably have here, and I distinguished that observer from the ersatz-naive analysis I am doing in the rest of the writing here. As a result I may be muddying the "naive" analysis with my own understanding of the Internet and blogs. Probably I should just call both observations out ("a newcomer might wonder" vs "a native assumes"). What do you think of this approach?)

ANALYSIS OF ONE GUMBABY THREAD

Usability studies of reading on the Web have indicated that internet readers do not usually begin at the top of the page and read all the way down to the bottom, methodically taking in all text. Instead, "heatmaps" made with eye-tracking software indicate that users tend to read in an F-shaped pattern. (Nielsen, 2006) So a thorough scan of all of the elements of a web page may be misleading as to what a reader might actually get out of it. Good research on reading on the Internet should include observation of the act of reading.

Nevertheless, it may be useful to do a thorough analysis of a page to see what it might and might not offer a reader. First let's take a look at the evolution of the beginning of one gumbaby comment thread from an original post on the blog Communications from Elsewhere (breaks in the page are due to graphic software limitations):

The very first text we see at the top of the page is in a graphic border. It does not appear to be in English. The graphic continues down the left-hand side of the page and is matched in style by a graphic on the right which also appears to mostly not be in English, aside from the word America. Is this a website made by an American, English-speaking writer? What is this website about? The remainder of the text on the page is in English, so we can continue under the impression that this page is aimed at an English-speaking audience.

The next-uppermost text reads "Ads By Google AOL Support AOL 8.0 Cancel AOL My AOL AOL Mail." This might be an indication that this line of text consists of ads from Google, or perhaps that all ads on this page are somehow related to the Google search engine or company. But the rest of the links seem to be associated with AOL. Is this perhaps a menu bar from AOL? Has AOL hijacked this page? Or are we in AOL "space" on this page?

Surprisingly, each of these links does not direct the viewer to AOL pages; each leads to a page with a Google logo at the top, with the subheading "Ads by Google" and a number of links to pages, some of which are related to "AOL" or "email," but one of which is titled "10 Rules of Flat Stomach" and another of which is titled "Dump Your Boss." None of these links are to the AOL.com domain.

(Our Internet native says: What these links are, in fact, is a range of paid advertisements from Google. The viewer may never find any of this out if they do not click through. They also may see another range of text links when they load this page, as the ads are dynamically generated when the page is loaded.)

Continuing down the page, we see "Communications from Elsewhere." This is in a large font size. Maybe it is a title? Where is "Elsewhere" -- is it a literal place from which the author is writing, which should inform our understanding of the text, or is it a figure of speech? If we remember to look at the address bar of the browser, we see that the word "elsewhere" is also in the address of this page. So are we to understand that "Communications from Elsewhere" simply refers to the web address of the page?

Mousing over these large-print words yields a change in the shape of the cursor, an indication that this is a link, whose tag also reads "Communications from Elsewhere." This link goes to another, similar-looking page, whose differences include the text which comes after "Communications from Elsewhere," and a greater amount of text in the small-print column at the right-hand side of the page.

Returning to the page where we started, we see "CANCELLING EFAX SERVICE," also in a large font. Is this the title of the page? Perhaps we should read on.

Next we see, with unusual formatting:

   — Josh 2004/04/05 @ 9:23 am

   Categories: General

   To learn how to cancel your eFax service, click here.

Time and date next to a name, Josh. Which Josh is this? Is he famous? Is he someone the reader knows personally? Is he an expert on eFax, or an eFax staff member? Is he associated with Communications From Elsewhere? Is he its sole author? Is he one of many people paid to write pages for this domain? There is little else on the page which explicitly discusses who Josh is or what his reasons for writing are.

Then we see a link to general categories, which aims elsewhere in the elsewhere.org domain.

Next we see one of the most eye-attracting things on the page: a red, yellow, and green bar which says "To learn how to cancel your eFax service, click here." Mousing over the "click here" link indicates that it goes to www.efax.com/cancel . This might be a useful tip for anyone who has come to this page hoping to cancel their eFax service -- but should we trust that red-and-yellow bar? Who placed it there? Plenty of advertisements on the Internet look like that. 94% of users in one study said that they had negative feelings about any ad which "tries to trick you into clicking it." (Nielsen, 2004) (CITE PEW) Then again, maybe the link is telling the truth?

(Our Internet native says: Many bloggers whose blogs develop gumbaby comment threads put in flags like this one in an attempt to redirect traffic someplace else, to a link which will help strangers find what they need. My guess is this link did not exist in Josh's first draft of the post, but that he added it later when errant commenters began to deluge his blog. Then again, a new reader to the website may not be aware of this.)

Briefly visiting the content on the right-hand side of the page (though Nielsen's (2006) research seems to indicate this does not often happen), the reader finds a white rectangle, and beneath it a similarly-sized grey rectangle which reads "Search." When clicked, the white rectangle gets highlighted around the edges; the user might find s/he can now enter text. So this appears to be a search field. But what does it search? Communications from Elsewhere? The current page? The Internet? (Our Internet native is pretty certain the search is limited to Communications from Elsewhere, but notes that as search fields go, this one exhibits some unusual behaviors: searching for no text yields a blog entry about searching; searching for a string which does not appear in CFE yields the front page of the blog--with yet another search field appended to the top of it -- rather than a "no results" message; and searching for a string which does exist may turn up a handful of blog posts with the message "If the page you're looking for isn't found in the results below, you can use this form to perform a Google search of the archives" over a search field at the top of the page.)

Beneath the search field, a message tells us what page we are on. It is not clickable. Beneath that, a number of links under the headline "NAVIGATION." Then a number of small banners, icons, or buttons. Are they ads? One of them contains another search field. What does it search? It is enclosed within graphics about Amazon.com. Finally, a few more text links under the headline "META."

Back to the text on the left-hand side, which we left off after the red and yellow banner. This text begins:

   You know, I really dislike customer service scripts.

   I just tried to cancel my eFax account. I haven’t used it… almost a year? 

It is probably reasonable to assume Josh is writing -- his name is at the top of the page -- but to whom? He says "You know," but that is more of a metalingual placeholder than a real address. It is not clear who the intended audience of this text is.

Josh launches into a narrative, evidenced by the use of the metalingual "So I..." From here the cues on how to read this page become clearer for a little while, as he phatically and metalingually indicates to us what is happening in the text with a script-like structure and references to the format of the narrative:

   I don’t have a transcript of the session, but it went something like this:

   Me: I’d like to cancel my account.
   Kyle: I can do that. Can I ask why you’re cancelling it?

Josh continues with a second script, and ends by implying he will be upset if something like the story he has just told happens again. Then we see the words TAGS: RANTS, STUPID PEOPLE, the latter three of which are linked to new pages. What does this mean? It seems to have something to do with the subject of the story above. Are these categories? We have already seen something about categories earlier. Where would the links take us?

Next we see an outlined box which pretty clearly states what it contains: Ads by Google. Relatively self-explanatory. Between the fact that it is an ad and the fact that it is on the right-hand side of the page, we might conclude that the average reader does not take a good look at this part of the page. (Nielsen 2004, 2006).

The next box is also delineated from the rest of the text, this time with a dotted line. Is it an advertisement? Well, it contains a date synchronous with the other date information at the top of Josh's story about cancelling eFax, so maybe not. Does "THIS ENTRY" thus refer to what Josh wrote? That seems a reasonable expectation. The text in this box then tells us other things we can do with this text, including responding and following responses using RSS. It also helpfully tells us that if we wish, we can "leave a trackback from [our] own site." Here is perhaps our first indication of who Josh (or the authors of the blogging software?) thinks the audience of this page is: people who have their own websites, with trackback capabilities.

Then there is a brief dotted line, and bracketed in some arrowlike characters are the seeming non-sequiturs "What the hell?" and "Fried rice how-to."

Here again we encounter a large-sized font, which reads "102 RESPONSES TO 'CANCELING EFAX SERVICE.'" Apparently this is a new heading, and it suggests that what follows are 102 responses to the narrative written above. All right. But are these responses a new narrative in their own right? The heading is in the same size and style of font as the heading on the narrative. Did Josh write this headline? Did he write what follows? (Our Internet native is familiar enough with blogging software to have seen a similar structure on other sites, and thus suspects this headline is a computer-generated piece of text.)

The formatting changes after this headline, suggesting that this is a new part of the text. Somebody named Josh, commenting four minutes after the original post, throws doubt on the nature of the "Kyle" character in the previous narrative. Perhaps a piece of code wrote Kyle's part of the story?

Is this the same Josh who wrote the original narrative? There is no indication that it is. And if it is the same Josh, why did he not just write a new narrative, or change the narrative he ostensibly wrote four minutes before?

That comment's box ends, and a new one begins. Someone named delores -- twenty minutes later -- responds to Josh-the-commenter, adding to the speculation that the Kyle part of the story could have been computer-generated. delores then responds to a speculation made in the original narrative.

So far, both comments have directly commented on the narrative itself, though neither makes metalingual reference to this action. The third commenter does not make any direct reference to the narrative, but instead begins a new narrative. This narrative has a scriptlike form similar to the original narrative. It also throws doubt on the human status of one speaker in the dialog, C Anie. The writer, Sean Harding, notes that the script is remembered, not cut-and-pasted from the actual interaction between himself and C Anie.

Then Sean Harding leaves another comment, in which he links to what he says is another similar narrative. (However, at this point the link is broken.) In both of these comments, the writer's name has a link to a page which, as it happens, is mostly blank except for the notice "This site has been discontinued. My blog is at sharding.org." It seems likely (from the domain name in the redirect) that Sean has linked in order to give more information about himself. He also seems likely to be the audience this page is seeking -- he has his own blog; does this mean he can trackback from his own page?

Comment number five is from Bernadine Southall, who ten days after the posting of the original narrative and first comments, writes,

   I do not need efax. please cancel and let me know if i cancel.

This does not appear to be a response to the previous narratives. It appears to be addressed to someone who is able to disable eFax accounts.

In a face-to-face conversation, it might be relatively trivial and fast to indicate (through language, gaze, posture, and other nonverbal cues) to Sean or Bernadine if they had spoken out of line in some way. However, the nature of the Internet makes such correction more ambiguous.

The next comment is from Josh, written some 45 minutes after Bernadine's comment. It reads:

   *boggle*
   What the hell is wrong with these people?

This could be read a few ways. Is this Josh (we still don't know for certain if this is the same as the original writer and first commenter) addressing Bernadine? His comment does come right after hers. Or is this further commentary on the characters in the original narrative? Or perhaps the original narrative and Sean's narrative? It is not clear who "these people" refers to. Are Sean, Bernadine, and delores still reading? (Here our Internet native misses threaded discussions, which were developed years ago to solve just these problems.)

The next comment is written over a month later, by someone named yvonne whose name includes a link to http://cancel%20e-fax%20service. Attempting to link to this page yields an error message from the browser. (Our Internet expert notices it includes the string %20, which she knows is a character used to replace the space key in URLs, and that the link does not end in a recognized top-level-domain suffix; she suspects this link was not intended to be a URL.) yvonne's message reads:

   I did not order e-fax service. My youngest daughter did this. she does not live here. I do not want or need this service. I am having enough problems paying my bills now on SSI . Please contact me at my e-mail address. If you have a phone number to call, let me know. YVONNE BULLARD bullard642000@yahoo.com

yvonne's mention of a daughter and Social Security insurance suggests that she is an older adult; we may now know more about her than we know about anyone else who has commented so far on this page.

(to be continued)