[Air-l] key terms/concepts for understanding the web

[Nancy Baym]

>Are we down to a problem of semantics here?
>
>Louise

Yes.

People studying the internet who are not User Experience 
professionals use the same term to mean different things.

Now if we're talking about a term like "hegemony" or "subaltern" or 
one which clearly emerges from a very particular intellectual 
tradition or was coined by one particular theorist, I think we can 
agree that there are right and wrong ways to use the term.

When we have words like "user" and "experience" we are talking about 
words that may have long traditions in different fields and even if 
everyone within one field believes the term to be theirs and the 
definition to be clear, it doesn't mean that others outside the field 
will or should relinquish rights to use the term to mean the things 
that they have always taken it to mean. Louise makes the contrast 
between 'what the user experiences' and 'what experience the user 
has', but grammatically the term 'user experience' does not 
priviledge one interpretation over the other, so we have to rely on 
disciplinary convention to make that distinction. My discipline would 
recognize the importance of that same distinction, but we wouldn't 
rely on the phrase "user experience" to capture it. Google searches 
tell us what sources that are on the web and use that phrase 
prominently mean by it, but I hope we haven't reached the 
intellectual point where we use Google to resolve questions of 
theoretical meaning and conceptualization. There are a lot of 
academic ways to use a term that Google won't catch till it starts 
indexing the content of all our publications.

-- 
________________________________________________________
Nancy Baym 	http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
102 Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org