UX Writing, User Stylization, and the Symbolic Violence of Little Texts
from III - Producing Little Texts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2025
This chapter investigates the normative impact of UX writers’ language work by discussing how they craft particular audiences through their work. As such, this chapter turns to the textual products that UX writers create. My analysis focuses on a particularly impactful example of this work, the texts produced for cookie consent notices. Examining the kinds of audiences and addressees that surface in and through these texts, I suggest, can help scholars consider how digital media entail not just traditional notions of audience design but also a more explicit and active crafting of audiences, whereby some people are constructed as audiences and others not. Specifically, I discuss how automated participant roles, the stylization of users, as well as the design of imposed interaction lead to an encoding of both specific participant roles as well as particular social identities in software interfaces. Ultimately, I suggest that this may be understood as a form of symbolic violence, whereby the software interface is used as a means to impose not just an interaction order but also a particular social order onto users.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.