Net Work Ethics and Values in Web Design [Hardcover]

A detailed study of the work of web designers, drawing on empirical research carried out from the birth of web design as an area of work in the 1990s to its professionalisation in the twenty-first century.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

'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 pl³4