Neil Randall, University of Waterloo and Isabel
Pedersen, Lawthority Publishing Inc.
Webs of Discourse: The Intertextuality of Science Studies. 31st Annual Texas Tech University Comparative Literature Symposium. February 5-7, 1998.
The
discourse surrounding computer technology grows at a rate that makes it
difficult, if not impossible, for even the most devoted researcher to keep
abreast with its constantly updated terminologies, concepts, applications, and
controversies. The reasons for this difficulty are multifold, encompassing the
seemingly endless expansion of specialized terms (jargon, to the uninitiated),
the rapid adoption of initialisms and acronyms, the
frequent announcing of new technologies and new products based on those
technologies, and the expansion of issues in computing into associated
discourses such as business, art, education, news, and society. The discourse
of computer technology has become nearly ubiquitous, and that ubiquity has
(perhaps ironically) rendered a thorough assimilation highly improbable.
There's too much, and it happens too fast.
The
information providers who would seem to stand to gain the most from a public
capable of joining this discourse are the corporations, both large and small,
whose products are based on the technologies and the issues surrounding those
technologies. Indeed, the marketing departments of these corporations expend an
enormous amount of effort trying to draw potential customers into the discourse
surrounding their supported technologies. Today's consumers and possible
consumers are expected to be sufficiently aware of terminology such as
"megabyte" and "gigabyte", "32-bit" and
"multitasking", "CD-ROM" and "DVD",
"megahertz" and "MMX", "IMAP" and
"client/server", to be able to make intelligent purchasing decisions.
Raise the ante a level, and the invited discourse includes concepts such as
networking protocols, groupware applications, client-server systems, site
development, and intranets. Beyond this level are the potential technologies,
the issues surrounding the technologies, and the legal and economic
sub-discourses. In fact, the discourse of computer technologies even
incorporates the writings of, and stories about, the personalities at the
forefront of the industry, because some of these people, through their
technological influence, have captured the public imagination either positively
or negatively.
Corporate
Web sites provide information at all these discourse levels. The information is
presented through a fairly predictable set of genres that includes press
releases, marketing materials, frequently asked questions, white papers,
support and technical documents, opinion columns, short biographies, and
hyperlinks to associated information. While the quantity and quality of
information varies widely from site to site, the sites invite us to participate
in and experience the discourse of computer technology by offering new and
continuing terminology, arguments and comparative studies, and the contextual
placement of the content of that site within the larger discourse encompassing
the corporation's technological focus. In other words, the corporate sites
situate us within not only a specific technological discourse, but also within
the larger discourse of computer technology as a whole.
But if our goal is to understand computer
technology, and therefore to be able to participate responsibly and
authoritatively in the surrounding discourse, then the corporate site hinders
as much as it helps. The
reason is obvious: corporate information contains a self-serving bias. What is
less obvious is the degree to which this bias imbues all the information on the
site; even the most technical document exists for the purpose of promoting a
technology that underlies a product or service. In fact, every discursive
element on a corporate site, right down to the technological terminology
itself, is a matter of choice, and hence of rhetorical design. It is imperative
that we understand that design, and the choices that underlie it, if we wish to
determine how the site contributes to the discourse surrounding the subject
matter it discusses. There is much "leading" information at the Web
sites of computer corporations, but there is much misleading information as
well.
Any
number of approaches suggest themselves when analyzing
a Web site. Indeed, in our existing research, we are attempting to determine
the rhetorical design of Web sites using models drawn from not only rhetorical
theorists such as Kenneth Burke, Chaim Perelman,
Ernesto Grassi, George Landow,
Richard Lanham, Richard Buchanan, and others, but also from such fields as
human-computer interaction, visual design, and computer-mediated communication.
The obvious need to range across multiple disciplines stems from the fact that
the design of Web sites incorporates multiple media and the multiple
aesthetics, functions, and interactions integral to each. But despite the need
(and our desire) to span all these disciplines, early in our research it became
clear to us that one rhetorical concept appears to lie at the core of
practically all site design, and we have based this paper around that
observation. The concept in question, the design element that
informs so much of what we see and read on the Web, is the rhetorical appeal of
ethos.
Ethos, as it appears in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, is usually translated simply as “character”, and as such its most frequent application in rhetorical theory has been as a means of describing how the audience perceives the rhetor. The audience calls into question the morality and credibility of the speaker before accepting the speaker's claims. The speaker's character becomes part of the argument. According to Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, the ideal rhetor was (in Quintilan’s phrase) “the good man speaking well”, ideal because the reaction of the audience could be founded on the knowledge that the rhetor was morally sound, knowledgeable about the topic, and credible both professionally and personally.
Obviously, the entire relationship between audience and rhetor changes when the message is conveyed through a technological medium – book, telegram, radio, billboard, television, Internet – because frequently the audience has no means of directly judging the “character” of the rhetor, and indeed very often has no means of determining who the rhetor is at all. And the reverse is also true: with mediation, especially a mass medium, the rhetor (whether an individual or a collective) must usually guess at both the nature of the audience and the means of creating an ethos acceptable to that audience. This two-way uncertainty, indeed, lies at the heart of customer surveys, Nielsen ratings, software usability testing, and demographic research.
For
Web designers, the uncertainly has another dimension. On the one hand, the
audience is unknown, since at this point in the Internet’s history, accurate
identification of site visitors is difficult, if not impossible, despite the emergence of technologies such as “cookies”
(text files containing user information, exchanged by browser and server) and
site measurement software. On the other hand, a great deal is known about the
Internet as a communications milieu, and this knowledge has already
informed the design of a great many sites. The Internet’s milieu is one of open
access to information, a desire for novelty (in all its implications) and
constant change, a shattering of the traditional barriers between information
provider and information seeker, and a belief in interaction and two-way
communication. Corporate advertisements in magazines, on television, or on
billboards are monologic, and the corporation itself
monolithic, despite the multimillion-dollar efforts of public relations
personnel and image designers. For a corporate Web site to be successful within
the Internet’s milieu, its visitors must perceive it as having been created by
real people providing accessible information in a relatively personal voice.
And there is no mystery behind this need: corporate Web sites share the same
information-space, and are accessed by the same technology, as sites created by
students, activists, zealots, satirists, homemakers, senators, pranksters,
pornographers, support groups, and fans of anybody who has ever had fifteen
minutes of fame.
No
discussion of ethos can afford to ignore Aristotle, but neither can it stop
with him. His assertion that “[p]ersuasion is
achieved by the speaker’s character
when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible” (1356a, 153) is
as true today as it was twenty-four centuries ago, and in fact forms the basis
of refereed scholarship and academic conferences. But like his famous expansion
of this statement, “There are three things which inspire confidence in the
orator’s own character – the three, namely, that induce us to believe a thing
apart from any proof of it: good sense, good moral character, and goodwill”
(1378a, 161), it is simply too imprecise to be useful as an analytic basis for
a communication in which we must construct the speaker/writer/author/creator. Baumlin and Baumlin comment on
this problem, suggesting, in fact, that we read Aristotle’s statements in a
fashion much more suited to our psychologically interpreted times:
More than an affirmation
of common cultural values, ethos describes an audience’s projection of
authority and trustworthiness onto the speaker, a projection that is triggered
or elicited by the speaker but otherwise supplied by the audience. Aristotle
could not have been aware of this psychological mechanism, yet the use of such
verbs as believe, think, and seem to explain ethos
suggests that he, more deeply than most rhetoricians after him, recognizes
ethical appeal to be a radically psychological event situated in the mental
processes of the audience – as belonging as much to the audience as to the
actual character of a speaker. (99)
In
other words, ethos is at least doubly constructed, part by the
speaker/author/designer and part by the audience/reader/viewer. Or, in reverse,
part by the perceiver and part by the perceived (or the would-be perceived). Further, as Phillip Sipiora reminds us,
this “a relationship that is always reciprocal” (267) and, furthermore,
co-dependent.
Even
this model, however, is too simplistic for a multiple-mediated communication
such as a corporate Web site. In such a communication, the designer operates
under the constraints imposed by the policy surrounding the corporate image,
and corporate image is itself a manifestation of ethos. But the designer also
operates under the constraints imposed by the milieu of the World Wide Web
itself, as suggested above. The designer must create a particular ethos that
satisfies both sets of constraints. On the other side, the viewer constructs
ethos not only on the basis of the corporate site itself, but also on the basis
of the existing ethos of the corporation as created and developed by
advertising, public image, media coverage, product reputation, reviews and
assessments, and word of mouth (or of electronic discussion). Aristotle might
well have wanted ethos to “be achieved by what the speaker says, not by what
people think of his character before he begins to speak” (1356a, 153), but
preconceptions lie at the core of all constructions of ethos where a well-known
person or organization is concerned. For a quick proof of this, we need only
turn to the sagas of the two most famous late-20th century American
Bills, Clinton and Gates.
While
certainly Aristotle’s notion of credibility will inform some of our discussion here, and with that credibility the related notions of
reliability, trustworthiness, and knowledgeability,
we have found Burke and Perelman to be of equal use for discussing the means by
which corporate Web sites rely on ethos to disseminate technological
information. Burke is frequently cited in discussions of ethos, primarily for
his work on the concept of identification. The essentials of this theory
are as follows:
A is not identical with his colleague, B. “But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so. … To identify A with B is to make A “consubstantial” with B. … Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man’s very essence. (1020)
The
Web has created a fascinating twist on the notion of identification. Part of
the Burkean joining of interests
lies, indeed, in the viewer’s desire to obtain information, and thus the
viewer’s interest in getting information joins with the designer’s desire to
present it. But for many Web users, at least in these early years of the Web,
the interest lies as much in simply experiencing the medium, and designers must
satisfy that interest as well. Furthermore, proclaiming unity between designer
and viewer is difficult on the Web, because the designer is usually granted an
extremely limited amount of the viewer’s time in which to do so. The default
user behaviour on the Web is to leave, not to stay, and
first impressions matter greatly. The designer must assert identification, and
the viewer must accept identification, within the time frame of a very few
seconds. Here, of course, preconceived identification plays a significant part:
if a viewer visits a corporate Web site having already accepted identification
with the corporation, as a result of advertisements or product loyalty or
simply corporate image, the designer’s need to eliminate division is obviously
less significant.
Pereleman’s primary contribution to the enquiry about ethos lies in his discussion
of the concept of presence. His use of this term differs substantially
from its use in the literature on computer-mediated communication and virtual
reality, where, according to Lombard and Ditton, presence
refers to “the perceptual illusion of non-mediation”, the disappearance in the
viewer’s mind of the medium that lies between them and the thing they are
experiencing. Perelman explains presence as a technique of emphasis, a means by
which rhetors can guide their audiences to select one
piece of information over another:
By the very act
of selecting certain elements and presenting them to the audience, their
importance and pertinency to the discussion are
implied. Indeed, such a choice endows these elements with a presence … . Presence acts directly on our sensibility. As
Piaget shows, it is a psychological datum operative already at the level of
perception: when two things are set side by side, …
the thing on which the eye dwells, that which is best or most often seen, is …
overestimated. … Accordingly, one of the
preoccupations of the speaker is to make present, by verbal magic alone, what
is actually absent but what he considers important to his argument.
Clearly,
in discussing Web sites and other wholly or partially non-verbal media, we can
dispense with the phrase “by verbal magic alone,” but otherwise the principle
of endowing an element with a presence applies very well. The fundamental unit
of Web design is the hyperlink, which by its nature offers a Perelmanian presence: textual hyperlinks are usually
presented as underlined text of a different colour
from that of the rest of the text, as obvious an example of presence as we
could ask. But even where the links are not obvious, such as those represented
as graphics, presence is still implied in the nature of user behaviour. A graphic on a Web page might have an immediate
presence, both a negative one in its length of downloading time (which gives it
a different type of presence) and a positive one in its aesthetic appeal, but
viewers grant such design elements only the briefest endowment of presence.
Instead, they will move the pointer onto the graphic and see if the software
itself endows it with the most important presence, the changing of the pointer
into a small hand or another indicator of potential action. In this manner,
viewers in fact search for presence, and it is up to the designer to
ensure that their search is rewarded. For that reason, a static graphic is
often a ineffective design element.
Since
the rhetorical appeals have, throughout the centuries, been much more
frequently associated with text than image, we begin our analysis with a
primarily textual corporate site, and in fact one of
the most often-visited sites on the Web. Microsoft Corporation
(http://www.microsoft.com/) offers a home page with a typical column-oriented
design, several indices of navigation, and a plethora of easily visible
hyperlinks. The page purports to be friendly, as evidenced by the first link
under the Contents heading in the top left corner, “Recommended for [this
user].” By personalizing the page, Microsoft attempts to demonstrate that it is
not, in fact, the multi-billion dollar megalith that we keep reading about and
whose name keeps appearing on our software. Nor does the
ethos of site-as-friend, or site-as-personable-guide, stop there. A link
to “Tips and Tricks” appears at lower right, and here we are promised “expert
suggestions on how to use Microsoft software.” We can win a sweepstakes, we can
help our teachers become more successful, and we can even get “breaking news”
delivered “right to [our] doorstep.” And as if we needed more, we have access
to an entire section of the site that features “free downloads.” Microsoft,
quite clearly, wants us to feel welcome, and the design is reminiscent of both
newsletters and trade show invitations.
The
Microsoft front page works well according to Burke’s principle of
identification and Perleman’s notion of presence. The
site speaks, in essence, to the primary consumer of Microsoft’s products: the
users of Windows 95 and the Microsoft Office family of applications. To be
sure, Microsoft produces a wide variety of additional products, ranging from
the high-end NT Server operating system and through equally high-end
application development and database management packages, but the front page
offers little immediate identification with these audiences, beyond the
practically mysterious “Business” and “Developer” links directly under the main
Microsoft heading, and the small, de-emphasized “Business Solutions” and
“Developer & Partner Resources” categories in the lower half of the
navigation bar along the left side. The textual explanations throughout the front
page offer a style that quite clearly identifies the designer of the site (and
hence the company) with the largest consumer base, with its persistent theme
of, “You can get hot news, free stuff, and even some help.” Presence is granted
to the small photograph beside the lead story, to the headline of that story
(itself a hyperlink, albeit a relatively hidden one), and to the free downloads
link at top right. Presence is denied the more serious nature of the site, as
exemplified by placing the link to information about Microsoft and the
Department of Justice at the bottom of the news stories, and thus effectively
out of the immediate browser view of users with small monitors.
But
while the front page offers identification with the largest possible consumer
base, much of the inside of the site is devoted to a more focused and detailed
look at specific products and technologies. Microsoft’s audience, after all,
also includes software and hardware developers, corporate sales professionals,
information technology specialists, and the press, and the site caters to these
audiences as well. Of particular interest for our purposes is the
semi-technical “white paper”, which has become a staple of the corporate sites
of computer companies. The white paper, usually produced at the behest of
marketing departments (and often written by contracted writers), is an
essay-length or report-length technical document aimed at non-specialists who
are nonetheless familiar with the basics of the subject matter, and who want or
need to know more details about that subject matter: definitions, explanations,
applications, and comparisons. The white paper is situated in an extremely
powerful and dangerous position for the corporation, directly between product
information and technical specifications, and as such its authors must exercise
great care in the construction of ethos. White papers present both the
technologies that underlie the company’s (and competitors’) products, and they
assert the corporation’s official stance on those technologies and products,
but they must do so in a way that seems fair, credible, and as unbiased as
possible. As such, they represent the leading source on computer companies’
sites for both leading and misleading information. The paper presents new, i. e., leading technological
information, but it also misleads because it is produced and/or approved
by the company whose product or technology is under discussion, and is located
on that company’s Web site. And everything that comes from within a corporation
must be seen as under that corporation’s control.
A
single example of a Microsoft white paper will show the leading and misleading
characteristics of this genre. Placed on the Microsoft site on January 15,
1997, the white paper “Office 97 vs. Java Office Suites”
(http://www.microsoft.com/msoffice/office97/documents/o97vsjav/default.htm) is
quite clearly aimed at a readership curious about what, in early 1997, was a
much-publicized topic: software applications written in the Java programming
language. Java proponents were claiming that Java-based applications would
replace those written for a specific programming language, because any
operating system would be able to run them. By comparison, Microsoft’s Office
97 application suite could run only on operating systems for which they were
specifically written: Windows 95, Windows NT, and the Macintosh. Microsoft’s need to address the differences
between Office 97 and Java-based application suites stemmed from its desire to
educate those Office 97 customers who were aware of the potential trend towards
Java about the pros and cons of each type of package. This type of education
simultaneously eases customer confusion and allows Microsoft to present its
justification for not moving its suite to a Java environment.
The
contents page quickly establishes the focus on this audience, with its use of
familiar, perhaps even clichéd, hyperlinked headings. With a clearly marked
introduction and conclusion, a separate section called “Customer Needs” (its
separateness demonstrating presence, and its focus demonstrating
identification), and sections for pros and cons, the white paper promises a
clear and simplified guide for its audience. So clear and simplified, in fact,
that condescension seems likely. After all, the pros and cons headings apply
only to Java suites; Office 97, with only one link, offers nothing but pros. Inside the white paper, these early indications are
confirmed. The section on the cons of Java-based suites is over three times
longer than the section on Java’s pros , and the
information about Office 97 suites is longer still. None of this is surprising;
this is information, after all, from the Microsoft site, and indeed from the
company’s marketing department.
Further
into the white paper, however, we discover the simultaneous leading and
misleading nature of the information. The section on the pros of Java suites
opens as follows:
Java office suites like Corel's or Oracle's are designed in conformance to the Java Enterprise Computing Architecture (Sun Microsystems’s name) and the Network Computing Architecture (Oracle’s name) specifications. These specifications describe a three tier model of computing that is believed to offer a solution to high software support costs and cross-platform compatibility. In this model data resides on host machines, while applications, generally those created using Java, reside on applications servers, and clients (commonly Network Computers or NC's) run only a thin user interface layer. The applications and data are downloaded to the client when accessed by the user from the client.
Even
in as basic a technical paper as this, a relatively sophisticated computing
lexis emerges. Beyond the awkward names of the specifications (and Microsoft is
quick to point out the potential confusion here) are concepts such as “a three
tier model of computing”, “cross-platform compatibility”, “servers”, “clients”,
and “thin user interface layer”. All these terms are glossed over, but many are
repeated in the subsequent section on Java cons, but only in a negative
context. By contrast, the section on Office 97 offers computing terms that
would be familiar to anyone who has worked with computer applications for even
a short time. Instead of a technical lexis, this section offers the lexis of
usability and productivity. Java suites are for techies, the message is clear,
while Office suites are for people who need to do real work.
The
leading and misleading information in this white paper both revolves around
Java. We are presented with several leading-edge computing concepts, but
instead of offering a neutral presentation of these concepts, and thereby
allowing the readers to assimilate them for their own discursive use, the
authors cast them in the context of negativity, indeed almost ridicule in some
places. In doing so, the white paper misleads its readers, and in the process
asks them to adopt the presented lexis, use it in their own discussions of this
topic, and thus mislead others as well. Again, this is hardly an unusual
technique for anyone with a vested interest in promoting one product, service,
or technology over another, but because computer terminology retains a strong
degree of mystery for most consumers, any systematic criticism of a technology,
especially one that demonstrates a mastery of that technology through a
confident use of its key terminology, creates for the author of that critique
the ethos of a credible guide. And in the world of computers, the guide is a
powerful figure indeed.
Studying
any product-based white paper on the Microsoft site, no matter how
technologically complex the product, will reveal similar patterns. The three
white papers about the company’s NT-based Hydra 1.0 technology (thin clients
connecting to Windows NT Server) offer technical terminology at a considerably higher
level, but ultimately they perform the same function of the Office 97/Java
white paper, forcing the terminology into a context fully positive about the
technology and the products (available from
http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/). The white paper for Site Server 3.0
(available from http://www.microsoft.com/siteserver/) is even more explicitly
pro-Microsoft, using the discourse of computing to dismiss all competing
products and even suggesting that no true competition exists. For the purposes
of this paper, however, moving to a different corporate site entirely, and a
different type of analysis, will prove more effective than additional proof
drawn from the white paper genre. Along with this move, we change speakers as
well: the task of our analysis of visual design falls to Isabel Pedersen.
In this section, we turn away from textual rhetoric and into the area of visual rhetoric. While the techniques for analysis are different, the findings are similar: ethos and visual design combine to provide viewers with leading and misleading information alike. Our sample site is that of Apple Computer (http://www.apple.com/), chosen not only because of its unique design, but also because Apple effectively established the graphical nature of computers with the release of the Macintosh interface in 1984, and simultaneously established the personal computer as a visual design tool. They are, in other words, intricately associated with graphics and multimedia, and we would expect their corporate ethos to built upon that association.
To begin, we return once more to Aristotle. Following his statement (quoted above) about our reception of a speaker who seems “credible” comes the fascinating statement, “We believe good men more fully and readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided” (1356a, 153). The audience must believe the speaker to be good in order to think him credible, and credibility is the foundation upon which logos and pathos sit, as suggested by Aristotle’s point that ethos is the most important of the three appeals. Yet, Aristotle brings ethos to the fore in one particular situation, “where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.” When mystery and confusion consume an argument, the speaker must fall back on his or her character, credibility and moral sense-making.
Bob Kuperman, President & CEO of TBWA Chiat/Day advertising firm claims three important reasons for a brand to have an “identifiable personality” (Kuperman). He writes:
First, because more and more parity products are arriving on the scene to duke it out with one another, the brand's personality may be the one and only factor that separates it from its competitors. Second, when a purchase decision involves (or perhaps even depends on) an emotional response, a likeable personality may well provide that necessary emotional link. Third, a consistent brand personality can help not only the brand, but that brand's advertising stand out and be recognized.
Kuperman uses ethos to give a product salience amid similar products, to establish an emotional link and to maintain a consistent presence of the product in the mind of the consumer. He echoes Aristotle here and provides a solution for selling a product in a climate “where exact certainty is impossible”. Ethos becomes the crucial tool in the act of persuasion.
Chiat/Day is responsible for Apple computer’s current Think Different advertising campaign, which relies nearly solely on identifiable characters with perceived ethical superiority. The ads appear on billboards, sides of buildings, television, in magazines and on the Internet. Apple’s corporate Web site (http://www.apple.com/), projects a unique message. As the user waits for her browser to load the page, she is caught in the gaze of a set of eyes. The eyes turn into the portrait of Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Alfred Hitchcock, Amelia Earheart or one of the other fifteen or so faces that randomly appear at the site with each visit. These black and white images of historical figures dominate the right-hand side of Apple’s top-level page. White space dominates the left-hand side and emphasizes the word Apple. The words Think Different appear neatly inside the portrait below the famous multi-coloured logo. At the bottom of the page, an animated CD-ROM twists on an axis dangling a single piece of technology in front of the user.
Apple’s corporate ethos has made an about face over the past decade. Chiat/Day is also responsible for Apple’s legendary television spot aired once during the 1984 superbowl game. The ad featured an Orwellian vision of computing. Hundreds of drones march into an assembly hall and sit staring at a screen while big brother spouts ideology at them. Suddenly, a young woman runs into the hall, tosses a sledgehammer at the screen and shatters it. The hall fills with light and Apple plugs its revolutionary message, “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.” In the 1984 campaign, Apple’s ethos invited the consumer to join in its revolutionary action against IBM. It signified the agency of the consumer, the viewer, in violent reaction to IBM’s perceived monopoly. Apple’s 1998 ethos, on the other hand, communicated through the Think Different campaign, is that of an old, established revolutionary. Apple aligns itself with old revolutionaries and casts them as archangels in the creation of its own ethos. Figures like Mohammed Ali, Mahatma Ghandi and Pablo Picasso challenged the establishment in their own eras, but were vindicated with time. While the words think different suggest a present call to action like the 1984 ad did, the images suggest the words thought different.
Apple chooses legends of the past for a specific purpose. Their worlds are hazy, but brilliant, and this position dazzles the consumer. Charles P. Campbell writes about ethos in technical discourse and makes claims about the nature of the personas behind early technical writers:
Did their writing therefore escape the claims of pathos and ethos? No: often their prose created such obstacles to understanding, through jargon and density, that it created the ethos of the expert: one whose esoteric knowledge makes him ...a member of a priesthood, a wizard whose mysteries aren’t supposed to be understood by the uninitiated.
Apple appropriates these priests and wizards, einsteins and edisons to purvey scientific discourse. This discourse is both leading and misleading, but it is also always characterized by condescension of the legendary expert to the dazzled consumer .
Apple’s strategy for selling technology relies more on visual persuasion than on forms of written argument. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen devise a method for analyzing the grammar of visual design through their work Reading Images . Drawing on the theory of Michael Halliday, Kress and van Leeuwen overlay a linguistic model on visual semiotic systems:
(quote) To use Halliday’s terms, every semiotic fulfils both an “ideational” function, a function of representing “the world around us and inside us” and an “interpersonal” function, a function of enacting social interactions as social relations....[and a ] “textual function”...in which representations and communicative acts cohere into a kind of meaningful whole we call a “text”. (13-14)
Kress and van Leeuwen use metafunction rather than function for application to visual systems. The ideational metafunction organizes the way that objects in an image or “represented participants” (46) relate to each other. It isolates “patterns of representation” (13). The interpersonal metafunction governs the social interaction between the represented participants and the viewer. Depicted human participants establish relationships with viewers. Lastly, the textual metafunction manages the image as a whole; it organizes the way that the pieces fit together as a complete work.
[overhead]
Apple uses the ideational metafunction by visually forcing some images into a subordinate role. The front page of the site breaks down into five main partitions. The word Apple and the human figures share the width of the screen. They make up two equal partitions. Below them appear three graphics of equal height and width. They appear to be three equal rectangles across the bottom of the page. Each graphic portrays Apple product. One is the picture of computer hardware. The second is a CD-ROM, which is software. The third is a monitor depicting an image of the on-line Apple store, which is a service. This tree structure places Apple and the historical human figures on one level and the three branches of Apple’s business on the second level. Kress and van Leeuwen call this a “covert taxonomy” (81). It is a taxonomy because each image is grouped in such a way that implies a type or “genus”. Hardware, software and service are of the same classificatory genus as Apple and the human figures. More importantly, they are subordinate on this chain of being to Apple and to the human figures who back Apple. Apple makes it visually clear that its ethos is far more significant than its technology.
Once the visual rhetoric establishes this hierarchy — Apple’s dominance and mastery over its technology and technology in general — the viewer zooms in to read the text of each frame. The text of the first frame reads “Rocket fuel for the G3 flame. New Minitower options crank up the system speed to almost frightening levels”. The hypertext link takes one to a screen that continues in this vein:
(quote) The PowerMac G3’s have already embarrassed the fasted Pentium PCs. But just for the sport it, let’s throw some additional fuel onto the G3 flame. Rocket fuel. The Power Mac G3 Minitower offers new options that crank up the system speed to almost frightening levels. Like new high-performance hard drives that can pump information through at up to 40/MB/sec., and new 100MB ethernet cards that offer dramatically faster network connections — both extremely helpful when opening or moving large graphics and video files. It’s the Mac version of “the rich get richer”.
The language is nearly ridiculously arrogant. Apple tosses around jargon amid metaphorical references to aviation technology. One may not understand what a megabyte per second means or what an ethernet card is, but everyone understands the nature of the speed of a jet airplane. Apple translates the feeling of wizardry and scientific superiority from the images into the words. And Apple would not be able to get away with this sort of arrogance without the careful construction of ethos on the previous screen.
The Apple Web site features
portraits. Kress and van Leeuwen claim that within
the ideational metafunction, portraits are largely
“symbolic representations” (109). The participants suggest being over doing.
Einstein is a symbol of intellectual greatness. Earhart
is a symbol of humankind’s domination of nature. Apple places these images on a
random sort feature so each time a viewer visits the site,
a new face appears emphasizing each participant as a symbol. The effect is akin
to looking through a stack of photographs. As the viewer shuffles past each
picture, suddenly unique traits fall away and the common thread comes to mind.
The interface forces the viewer to place these participants in the same frame
of reference. And it reinforces Apple’s position in the gallery of great
scientists, artists and athletes.
Most advertising on the Internet avoids using human participants in order to sell technology. Aside from the odd thumbnail photograph of a CEO or a happy client, most corporate Web site sites avoid using people for product identification. Adobe systems, Sun Microsystems and Intel make use of visual rhetoric yet there are no faces at any of these sites. In real life, interpersonal relations reflect the way that people look at each other, stand in relation to each other and posture their bodies. The “interpersonal metafunction”(41) governs these properties within a visual image. Most of the human figures at the Apple site make direct eye contact with the camera. They look into the viewer’s eyes. According to Kress and van Leeuwen, this is a demand (126) upon the viewer. In linguistics, this relationship is akin to the first-person voice (e.g. I see you). The person in the photograph is the subject and the viewer is the object. Through its cast of good and credible characters, Apple demands that the user “think”. The site is riddled with variations on this demand, Think Different, Think Faster, Think now, Think WWW, Think WOW, Think First, but what does this tell one about technology, about science, about hardware or software. This type of demand vaguely could be a call to pray or to have faith by a religious leader who is faced with a confused or lost congregation, but it is definitely the mantra of a scientist who has reached understanding and is waiting for the masses to catch up.
Apple’s attitude to visual persuasion, through the graphical user interface, documentation, and advertising is often cited by experts as a model for Web design (Veen 60). Despite such careful attempts to lead and mislead the audience through images, it becomes obvious that Apple does not recognize the Web as a new genre. Apple imposes the layout of a magazine ad on its site and it uses the tactics of a billboard to draw the audience under its spell. Yet, it refrains from using any web-based, dynamic elements except for the twisting CD-ROM and newsflash-style moving text. Apple sells and supports software and hardware that could make a Web site dance with animation and moving parts. In fact, the black and white portraits, embedded in a world of saturated colour, make Apple seem static and stagnant. Kress and Van Leeuwen judge the level of reliability in a visual image through modality markers (165). Modality measures truth value through elements like colour saturation, illumination, brightness, exposure depth and contextualization. An extreme simplification of this idea, for example, is the way that soft lighting and hazy edges in a photograph can suggest the ideal, while stark medical photographs suggest the real. Apple positions its Web site to meet the modality of magazines and billboards and it ignores the context of what is truthful and credible in the realm of the Web. The stasis of Apple’s site jars the viewer’s expectation and minimizes the credibility of its claims about technology.
Conclusions
While the Web offerings of Microsoft and Apple provide convenient material for a discussion of the (mis)leading nature of the contents and even the design of their sites, exploring practically any corporate Web site in the computer industry would result in the same conclusions. In researching this paper, we examined many industry sites, including Sun Microsystems (http://www.sun.com/), Intel Corporation (http://www.intel.com/), Corel Corporation (http://www.corel.com/), IBM Corporation (http://www.ibm.com/), and Novell Corporation (http://www.novell.com/), and all sites offered either white papers per se, or similar documents providing technical information tailored to users and customers of varying familiarity with the featured technologies. Most of these sites featured similar designs, however, with the focus on magazine-like columns and multiple hyperlinks. To examine sites similar to Apple’s required a more in-depth search through the Web, and the closest comparisons came in the computer game industry, where, as we initially expected with Apple, visitors should have been able to find a convincing demonstration of multimedia technology. Where such demonstrations did in fact exist, such as at the Origin Systems site (http://www.origin.ea.com/), the site offered few of the same design features as found on the Apple site, except one: the technology itself, the seeming magic behind the products, remained similarly unrevealed, similarly mysterious. It would seem that the companies perceived to possess the most technological wizardry of all wish to project an ethos suitable to the mystery of magic, while those who wish to be perceived as increasingly technically powerful aspire to an ethos that casts them as a guide through the technological mazes of their own making.
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