Net Work: Ethics and Values in Web Design

Despite growing interest in the cultural industries and the iconic status of the web designer, surprisingly little academic attention has been paid to the work of people who make websites. This book fills that gap, offering a detailed analysis of the work practices and working conditions of web designers. Helen Kennedy draws on over a decade of work and research within the web design industry to argue that web design is suffused with ethical inflections, which originate both in Tim Berners-Lee's ideal vision of the web as an open, accessible and universal medium, and in the ethics and values which individual web designers bring to their work. Rich in empirical detail, Net Work is a must read for people interested in digital media and the cultural industries, and for those who want to work in these fields.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements PART I: FRAMING WEB DESIGN A Book About Web Design A Framework for Thinking About Web Design A Brief History of Web Design PART II: ETHICS AND VALUES IN WEB DESIGN Web Standards and the Self-Regulation of Web Designers The Fragile Ethics of Web Accessibility Free Labour: Web Designers' Ethical Responses to User Activity Narrow Fame: Micro-Celebrities Making Good of Conditions Not of Their Own Making Hope and the Ethical Future of Web Design Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Helen Kennedy is Senior Lecturer in New Media in the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds in the UK. She has contributed numerous articles to journals such as Media, Culture and Society, The Information Society and Ephemera and is co-editor of Cyborg Lives? Women's Technobiographies (2001). She also teaches web design and occasionally designs websites.

Review :
'With rigor and heart, Helen Kennedy demonstrates that ethical decisions are interwoven into the labor of web design, making the work meaningful for designers and the internet more accessible for users. She successfully balances a critical yet hopeful tone in theorizing cultural labor in the new economy.' - Vicki Mayer, Tulane University, USA 'Beautifully written and carefully researched, this is an important book that makes a major contribution to thinking about labour, ethics and new media.' - Rosalind Gill, King's College London, UK 'Helen Kennedy has painted a detailed moral and emotional landscape of the web: beginning from its inception as a space founded upon principles of freedom, through the emergence of professional practices surrounding it, to the standards that now underpin making the web accessible to all. The book offers an alternative way of reading the hope and utopianism associated with the Internet in the 1990s. While many critical Socio-Technical Studies (STS) theorists perceived it as a collective technologically determined delusion that conveniently ignored ingrained inequalities, Kennedy argues that these affective beginnings were the basis for an industry founded upon ethical principles that subsequently attracts ethically motivated labourers. For web professionals, the book inspires some reflective thinking about why we were drawn to our industry and the ways we work in it. For students and teachers of digital media, it provides a much needed philosophical framework for web industry practice.' - Linda Leung, University of Technology Sydney, Australia