WordPress “masks the database and creates a continuous blogging experience within the browser” (Helmond in Reader, p. 180), yet the database is rigidly defined and categorised. Discuss how this shapes the way we interact with the World Wide Web through blogging and how it affects user agency.
Here’s a metaphor for understanding what is otherwise a slightly confusing concept – let’s pretend we have a new-age vending machine where we simply use our fingers to write our request on a large touch-screen, and the machine vends out the drink we want. We’ll put this metaphor onto how a database, form, server, browser and user input works. The touch-screen is the browser (and, I suppose in this metaphor also the WordPress software), and the available drinks inside the machine is the database. As Anne Helmond suggests, “the interface is meant to hide the database from the user” (2007:44), so the user cannot see the drinks available in the machine, but is aware that the machine, for example, vends only soft drinks. The user is thus aware that they can input only soft drinks – not realizing that if the database/machine contains other forms of drinks, they can also access that: in this sense, “the browser…is a concealment of the source” (Helmond, 2007:45).
The rigidity of choice emerges at this point. The form – which can be seen as the sensors on the touch-screen which sends the written message into the part of the vending machine which recognizes the input (ie the server) – “is one of the standard ways to receive user input from a web page” (Helmond, 2007:46). Basically, there is a certain way in which one must fill out the form (in HTML code, or, such as in WordPress, in the dialog boxes) in order for the server to accept it – so writing a drink request in Chinese, for example, may not be recognized by an English machine, much in the same way that writing wrong codes or trying to write outside the parameters of a dialog box is ineffective.
User agency is affected in this case when the user isn’t aware of the other drinks available, or if other forms of drinks simply aren’t available, or if the user isn’t competent in coding/vending machine language.
Another problem that is perhaps outside of the metaphor is the requirement of an internet connection. While there are ways to “write your post offline, completely format it, save a draft version, add a category or tags and publish it to your blog when you have online access” (2007:48) it is perhaps not within an average blogger’s capabilities (or bother) to go through the process. As “WordPress relies heavily on its community that tests new versions” (2007:53) etc, it has to ensure that when the user IS online, their experience is made easy, and WordPress has done so, so that “users may not even be aware of the existence of the database” – that the user doesn’t even think about the shelves with the drinks, just the touch-screen and the input.
Helmond sums up WordPress’s intentions with its blogging software with this:
Writing posts in the graphical user interface of WordPress is less complex than directly writing posts in the database. The intuitive interface masks the database and creates a continuous blogging experience within the browser. (2007:53)
Because it is easier to write a command into the touch-screen than to reach in and find the drink yourself – provided you don’t mind the limit on what drink you can get.
References:
Helmond, A, ‘Software-Engine Relations’, in Blogging for Engines: Blogs Under the Influence of Software-Engine Relation, MA Thesis, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2007 pp. 44-53
Net Communications 