[Air-L] NEW BOOK: Net Work: Ethics and Values in Web Design by Helen Kennedy

[Helen Kennedy]

Net Work: Ethics and Values in Web Design by Helen Kennedy 

‘With rigor and heart, Helen Kennedy demonstrates that ethical decisions are interwoven into the labour 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 labour 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 and offers an alternative way of reading the hope and utopianism associated with the Internet in the 1990s. For web professionals, her 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
 
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.  
 
CONTENTS: 
PART I: FRAMING WEB DESIGN 
Chapter 1: A Book About Web Design 
Chapter 2: A Framework for Thinking About Web Design  
Chapter 3: A Brief History of Web Design  
PART II: ETHICS AND VALUES IN WEB DESIGN  
Chapter 4: Web Standards and the Self-Regulation of Web Designers  
Chapter 5: The Fragile Ethics of Web Accessibility  
Chapter 6: Going the Extra Mile: Web Accessibility for People with Intellectual Disabilities 
Chapter 7: Free Labour: Web Designers' Ethical Responses to User Activity  
Chapter 8: Narrow Fame: Micro-Celebrities Making Good of Conditions Not of Their Own Making  
Chapter 9: Hope and the Ethical Future of Web Design  

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