Language is at the heart of digital media, although sometimes in obscure and not necessarily obvious, visible ways. In fact, language in digital media interfaces is often specifically designed in such a way that it (ideally) goes unnoticed. As a whole, my book is concerned with the cultural politics of digital media, and the way digital media interfaces assert and reproduce existing, normative discourses. I examine how digital media interfaces are written or designed – that is, purposefully crafted – and how such design choices are enmeshed with social, economic, and (cultural-)political matters. Specifically, I focus on the working practices of so-called user experience (UX) writers. Typically working behind the scenes and often invisibilized, these are the professionals who create the verbal content of websites, apps, or other software interfaces.
According to UX writer Lisa Sanchez, people encounter UX writing whenever they use the internet, but ‘when it’s doing its job well, you don’t even notice it’ (para. 8).Footnote 1 As such, UX writing influences what people can do with digital media. Often, this occurs in banal, seemingly harmless but actually consequential ways. As a first example, I offer Figure 1.1, which shows the sign-up interface of Facebook in 2022. Inconspicuous as this interface may be, it makes a number of assumptions about who can and who should be using Facebook. Clearly, there is a default or ideal user that is inscribed in this text: someone with a first and a last name, with a known date of birth, and who is preferably female or male. While the interface also allows users to enter any or no description of their gender by selecting the ‘custom’ option, the fact that ‘female’ and ‘male’ are presented as default options emphasizes a binary and heteronormative view of gender (cf. Bivens, Reference Bivens2017). I will return to these normative aspects later, but for now, my point is simple: the work of UX writers is both banal and at the same time influential; the texts they produce effectively shape (or even dictate) what people can do and who they can be when using digital media. Texts like the ones in Figure 1.1 are everywhere in people’s interactions with digital media and yet, as citizens and as scholars, people often misrecognize their influence. Certainly, only little is known about the circumstances under which these texts are written and designed.
Figure 1.1 Facebook’s sign-up interface in 2022
Figure 1.1Long description
The headline of the signup form reads, Sign up. It’s quick and easy. The form asks users to fill in the following fields. First name, last name, mobile number or email, new password, birthday, and gender. For this last field, three options are offered in the following order. Female, male, and custom.
While scholars in digital discourse studies have examined in depth how people communicate with and through digital media (e.g. Thurlow & Mroczek, Reference Thurlow and Mroczek2011; Jones et al., Reference Jones, Jones, Chik and Hafner2015; Georgakopoulou & Spilioti, Reference Georgakopoulou and Spilioti2016), only some scholars have taken up interface texts as objects for critique (e.g. Chik, Reference Chik, Jones, Chik and Hafner2015; Hafner, Reference Hafner, Jones, Chik and Hafner2015; see also Djonov & van Leeuwen, Reference Djonov, van Leeuwen, Flowerdew and Richardson2017, on semiotic software). Regardless, there is usually little consideration given to the linguistic work that goes into producing interface texts. Indeed, academics and everyday users of digital media alike may not even be aware of the specific professional roles that shape the texts they see when they interact with software.
It is precisely the linguistic production of interface texts that I seek to address in this book. I do so by looking not just – or not even primarily – at these interface texts themselves, but by foregrounding instead the language work that goes into producing them. Concretely, I am interested in UX writing as an influential contemporary domain of language work, and in how the specific practices and processes that structure this work shape the norms that become embedded in software interfaces. Grounded in sociocultural linguistics, my project thus orients to two major research traditions: digital discourse studies (specifically with regards to recent work addressing the cultural politics of technology and so-called digital pragmatics, e.g. Djonov & van Leeuwen, Reference Djonov, van Leeuwen, Flowerdew and Richardson2017; Jones, Reference Jones, Tagg and Evans2020b), as well as research in critical sociolinguistics on language work/ers (e.g. Duchêne & Heller, Reference Duchêne and Heller2012; Thurlow, Reference Thurlow2020b). Before elaborating on this broader theoretical framing of my research, however, I offer a brief introduction to UX writing itself.
1.1 UX (User Experience) Writing: A Brief Introduction
Simply put, UX writers are contemporary language workers typically employed in web and software design companies, where they are responsible for writing the words ordinary users see whenever they interact with digital media. This might include the text on buttons that users click, error messages they see, or the labels of online forms (recall Figure 1.1). UX writers typically refer to these little texts as microcopy or (user) interface copy. The day-to-day work of UX writers is of course more complex than this; for now, however, suffice it to say that microcopy is the most emblematic linguistic output UX writers produce as part of their work.
Microcopy itself is evidently not a new phenomenon. Indeed, before the emergence of the graphical user interface (GUI), digital media were almost entirely text-based (e.g. Bolter & Grusin, Reference Bolter and Grusin1999, pp. 23, 197). In light of this, it is all the more interesting that the job title ‘UX writer’ only surfaced in the mid-2010s, and that the task of writing the words which appear in user interfaces thus only recently received attention as ‘proper’ work within the software design industry. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the kind of work UX writers do is novel or unprecedented; as mentioned, words have always been part of software interfaces. Still, what makes this profession compelling for scholarly investigation is the fact that many UX writers themselves claim that this work is new, and that they put considerable effort into establishing UX writing as its own professional field, all of which influences their work, including the interface texts they produce as part of that work.
It is worth noting that UX writing is also a relatively prestigious profession. The UX writers I encountered through my research were all proud of their work and expressed strong personal identification with their jobs: the title ‘UX writer’ appears to have a particular kind of cachet in the broader professional field that UX writers are situated in; certainly, it bears none of the stigma associated with other kinds of language work, such as that of call centre workers (cf. Woydack, Reference Woydack2017). As part of the so-called tech industry (cf. Dorschel, Reference Dorschel2022), UX writers also tend to earn a relatively high salary. A recent industry survey reports, for instance, that the average salary of a UX writer in the US in 2019 was USD $126,000; the average salary in the US in 2019 was USD $66,400.Footnote 2 The fact that the work of UX writers is so highly valued – both in symbolic and material terms – is in part what makes them interesting to me as elite language workers or wordsmiths (Thurlow, Reference Thurlow and Thurlow2020c, more on this term below). As outlined above, UX writers are also quite influential language workers, as they – together with others working in software design – shape the use and possibilities of contemporary digital media. But their work is typically done behind the scenes, and so its influence or impact is often misrecognized and obscured. It is exactly this interplay between high-status language work and cultural-political impact that interests me here. This leads me to the broader theoretical framing of the current book: the cultural politics of digital media and the economy of language work.
1.2 Digital Media as Cultural Politics
Situated within digital discourse studies, this book offers a sociolinguistic investigation of the role of language in the design of software interfaces and the (cultural-)political consequences of such design choices. As such, the book addresses how language is entangled in particular, normative interactions users have with and through digital media (cf. Jones, Reference Jones2020a). By ‘cultural politics’, I mean the way culture (including people’s attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and perspectives) comes to shape society and give rise to particular social, economic, and legal realities (cf. Nash, Reference Nash2001). In speaking of the cultural politics of digital media, I want to draw attention to the fact that technological artefacts are not neutral, neither in their design nor in their use. Instead, they are bound up with specific ways of being and doing things in the world; they are inscribed with and in turn re-inscribe particular norms and identities.
Arguing that digital media are political is, in some ways, unremarkable. In an era when politicians use social media platforms like Twitter (Now X) as major publicity channels (e.g. Lee & Shin, Reference Lee and Shin2014; Frame & Brachotte, Reference Frame and Brachotte2015), it has become clear that the technologies people use to socialize can and are also deployed to gain political advantage. In this way, one could say that ‘technologies are political in that they can be used for political ends’ (Slack & Wise, Reference Slack and Wise2014, p. 165). While this is certainly true, it is, as Slack and Wise suggest, an oversimplification. Such a view sees technology as a tool, politics as the dealings of political parties, and understands the relation between both as politics being ‘done’ via technology. However, if one views technology and politics from a cultural point of view, a more complex picture emerges.
From a cultural perspective, politics can refer not just to political parties, but also to how relations of power are configured, exercised, and challenged in all aspects of social and cultural life (cf. Kramsch, Reference Kramsch2021); technology then becomes ‘an assemblage in which political and economic work is performed’ (Slack & Wise, Reference Slack and Wise2014, p. 168). Such an approach rejects seeing technology as a neutral tool. Instead, culture and technology are understood as inherently enmeshed, with one constituting the other and vice versa. In short, there is no culture and technology but technological culture (Slack & Wise, Reference Slack and Wise2014) or technoculture (Ross, Reference Ross1990; see also Roderick, Reference Roderick2016), which is both material and semiotic at the same time. It is this view that I take when speaking of the cultural politics of digital media.
1.2.1 The Cultural Politics of Technology
Cultural-political approaches to technology are not new. A prominent example of such scholarship is Winner (Reference Winner1980), who in his 1980 essay of the same name asks: ‘Do artefacts have politics?’ Critiquing both technological determinism and the social determination of technology, Winner argues that technologies ‘can embody specific forms of power and authority’ (p. 121). For Winner, there are two ways in which technological artefacts may do this. The first are instances where the design or arrangement of an artefact has a political effect. Winner’s famous (and sometimes contested) example is the case of the low-hanging highway overpasses on Long Island, New York, designed by Robert Moses.Footnote 3 Because of their design, the highway overpasses made it impossible for buses to pass through, exerting a politics of racial and class-based exclusion: upper- and middle-class white people (i.e. those wealthy enough to own a car) could use the highway, whereas poor and typically Black people, dependent on public buses, could not. Consequently, Moses’s design limited the access of low-income groups to his widely acclaimed public park, Jones Beach. For Winner, this narrative shows how artefacts are never just what they appear to be; rather, they are always also ways of building social order in the world.
Winner’s second case of how technologies are political are what he calls ‘inherently political technologies’ (p. 123), which are systems that through their very nature require (and thus construct and reinforce) particular political circumstances. To choose these technologies entails subscribing to a particular form of political life. As an example Winner discusses large-scale technological systems such as oil pipelines, which, in order to work effectively, require centralized and hierarchical control. Here, it is the very nature of the technological system that necessitates a particular mode of power and authority. As such, Winner makes a compelling case for how artefacts are always bound up with the norms and values of those who construct and/or control them.
Like Winner’s oil pipelines, digital media can also depend on large-scale systems that favour centralized and hierarchical modes of control. For instance, the seamless, rapid delivery systems of an e-commerce giant like Amazon are only possible because of the strict, hierarchical, and sometimes inhumane conditions to which its warehouse workers are subjected.Footnote 4 Similarly, food delivery apps such as Foodora or Deliveroo, often hyped as innovative and progressive technology start-ups, depend on centralized and non-transparent managerial control of human labour (Ivanova et al., Reference Ivanova, Bronowicka, Kocher and Degner2018). Beyond such examples of the potentially ‘inherent’ political nature of digital media, digital media are also political in terms of how their designs build order in the world. In this regard, Djonov and van Leeuwen (Reference Djonov, van Leeuwen, Flowerdew and Richardson2017) argue that software always comes with a built-in ‘semiotic regime’ (see also Poulsen et al., Reference Poulsen, Kvåle and van Leeuwen2018). Using the example of PowerPoint, Djonov and van Leeuwen (Reference Djonov, van Leeuwen, Flowerdew and Richardson2017) show that the software itself not only imposes norms about what counts as an effective presentation, but that it may also ‘intervene in the ways people use language and other semiotic resources’ (p. 579). In other words, software design shapes how people are able to make meaning in the world – or not.
Another obvious example of the politics of digital media are sign-up interfaces, which quite literally ask users to identify themselves in terms of pre-defined categories (recall Figure 1.1). This ordering of people into pre-defined social categories – usually based on a Western, heteronormative worldview – is often connected to commercial interests. A fashion retailer might ask people who sign up to their newsletter to indicate their gender in order to provide more ‘relevant’ news and discounts. Typically, this means showing users ads and incentives that are more likely to incite them to buy something. Others yet may sell such data off to third-party advertisers, who in turn can show users more ‘relevant’ advertisements. These commercial logics can become deeply intertwined with the design of an interface. For instance, so-called cookie consent notices are typically written and designed in such a way that they leave users almost no other option than to accept cookies (Jones, Reference Jones2020a; see also Portmann, Reference Portmann2022). Another poignant example of how commercial interests shape digital media is Facebook, which until mid-2019 used to ask new users to select ‘male’ or ‘female’ when signing up – long after the options for gender identification that the platform offered to already registered users had been redesigned. While users were free to change their settings once logged in, Facebook asked for an initial binary identification in order to retain the commercial advantage of being able to classify users into traditional, gendered marketing categories (Wachter-Boettcher, Reference Wachter-Boettcher2017). Once again, normativity is here directly linked to commercial interests.
In the case of Facebook, the underlying commercial and computational logic is so strong that even today, with the possibility to choose a so-called ‘custom’ gender option when creating a new Facebook account, beneath the surface, custom gender options are still re-categorized into a heteronormatively coded database (Bivens, Reference Bivens2017). Thus, while the user-facing side of Facebook allows people to choose out of more than fifty gender options, in its underlying database, the platform classifies people into the categories male, female, and custom.Footnote 5 What is more, Bivens (Reference Bivens2017) shows that Facebook’s code determines these values not by evaluating what users enter into the ‘gender’ field, but through the pronouns they pick. Following this computational logic, even someone choosing ‘gender questioning’ will be re-coded as ‘female’ if that person also selects the pronoun option ‘she/her’. In the end, the platform’s custom gender project is therefore bound up with binary gender norms, which remain aligned with the company’s financially motivated goals.
It is tempting to dismiss ideological decisions in software and interface design on the grounds of technical limitations. The digital is by definition discrete, and computer code is by its very nature binary: this might be another way in which digital technologies are (or at least seem to be) ‘inherently political’ (Winner, Reference Winner1980, p. 123) – implementing software that accounts for a fluid conceptualization of gender may simply be incompatible with the binary nature of code. However, it is important to consider how such (apparent) limitations are treated. For instance, despite the binary and discrete structure of code, more fluid representations of gender are indeed possible, as a handful of video games which employ a ‘gender slider’ instead of ‘either/or’ options demonstrate.Footnote 6 Decisions about whether (and which) technical limitations are addressed can therefore be understood as an indication of which problems are deemed worth solving.
An example in Benjamin’s (Reference Benjamin2019) discussion of race and technology nicely exemplifies the unequal ways in which technical limitations tend to be addressed or not. She recounts that, in 2013, media specialist Allison Bland tweeted that the voice directions of Google Maps had instructed her to ‘turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard’. Google Maps did not recognize the name of Black civil rights activist Malcolm X, instead interpreting the ‘X’ as the roman numeral ten. As Benjamin points out, this decoding of ‘X’ as ‘ten’ is a case of misrepresentation; ironically, however, having a computer correctly parse ‘X’ as ‘ten’ is, from a technical standpoint, actually a significant achievement. This tension between technical achievement and social misrecognition is exactly the point, Benjamin argues: ‘This illustrates how innovations reflect the priorities and concerns of those who frame the problems to be solved, and how such solutions may reinforce forms of social dismissal’ (p. 84). Effectively, this is the digital equivalent of Moses’s highway overpasses. While Google Maps does not literally prohibit Black people from going anywhere, this glitch, which is perhaps ‘better understood as a form of displacement or digital gentrification’ (Benjamin, Reference Benjamin2019, p. 83), also tells people where they do and do not belong. Such matters are clearly rooted in issues of production and connected to who designs digital media. It is no secret that the software design industry is disproportionately white, middle-class, and male; this structural privilege inevitably impacts the software that is produced (Bettivia, Reference Bettivia, Rodríguez Ortega, Díez-Platas and Kuivakari2016). Although frequently veiled in claims about neutrality and objectivity, computers and code are also implicated in the articulation and reproduction of racist, sexist, and classist systems of belief (cf. Nakamura & Chow-White, Reference Nakamura and Chow-White2012). Digital media, too, have politics.
1.2.2 The Politics of the Interface
As the main way in which people access and interact with contemporary digital media, software interfaces are particularly key in how social norms are perpetuated through digital media. Interface, however, is a complex term. Even if one reduces the scope to digital technologies, ‘interface’ has multiple meanings. While most people may think of the graphical user interface as ‘the’ interface, user interfaces can also take the form of, for instance, voice or command-line interfaces. What is more, interfaces in the context of digital media need not necessarily be user interfaces; there are, for instance, also application programming interfaces (APIs), which specify interactions between different software parts. That said, in this book, I use the term interface to denote user interfaces, and most of the examples I discuss are examples of graphical user interfaces – the kinds of interfaces UX writers typically work on.
By framing the choices people have when interacting with digital media, user interfaces both enable and constrain users. They allow people to use digital media without having much knowledge about the underlying technological system, yet they also limit them to the options the interface makes visible. For Monteiro (Reference Monteiro2017), the interface thus ‘remains an important site in contemporary culture—perhaps the most important site—for the function of power on, and through, the individual’ (p. 8). As such, interfaces give insight into the politics of contemporary digital media, indicating how and by whom digital media are (supposedly) meant to be used.
Again, understanding software interfaces as political is not necessarily a new perspective. In 1994, rhetoric and media scholars Selfe and Selfe (Reference Selfe and Selfe1994) suggested that ‘[c]omputer interfaces … are also sites within which the ideological and material legacies of racism, sexism, and colonialism are continuously written and re-written along with more positive cultural legacies’ (p. 484). Three decades later, it seems that not much has changed. Today’s interfaces are still structured by the same white and middle-class principles that Selfe and Selfe (Reference Selfe and Selfe1994) identify: the computer is still conceptualized as an ‘office’ with a desktop, folders, and files (a decidedly middle-class environment, as Selfe and Selfe point out). At the same time, English is still the dominant language of digital media. For instance, even as the web is getting more multilingual support, program shortcuts remain based on English: CTRL + S for ‘save’, CTRL + C for ‘copy’, CTRL + P for ‘print’, and so on.Footnote 7 In this regard, it is of course also telling that technical support for scripts other than the Roman alphabet are often deemed second priority, supposedly due to technical limitations. This is not a necessity, but something that has persisted out of convenience, all while reinforcing an anglophone and typically middle-class reality.
The ‘legacies of racism, sexism, and colonialism’ Selfe and Selfe (Reference Selfe and Selfe1994) speak of run so deep that it is only in light of the renewed public interest in the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement in 2020 that some major software companies such as the Microsoft-owned GitHub finally started working on removing racist coding terminology such as ‘master/slave’ and ‘whitelist/blacklist’ from their codebase.Footnote 8 While it is surely laborious and time consuming to replace these words in thousands of lines of code, the remedial actions of GitHub demonstrate how changes are not impossible. Like the Google Maps glitch mentioned earlier, such decisions are a matter of priority, where inaction is as telling as action (see Benjamin, Reference Benjamin2019, discussed above). How digital media are written and designed thus remains a normative process. Additionally, what emerges is that the cultural politics of digital media depend neither on producers nor users alone, rather, producers, users as well as the software itself are part of a complex technocultural system. It is in this way that I turn also to posthumanist approaches in order to address the politics of digital media interfaces.
1.2.3 Posthumanist Approaches
Posthumanism is an umbrella term used for a range of allied, contemporary movements in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, which, at their core, are concerned with questioning the notion of the ‘human’ (cf. Herbrechter et al., Reference Herbrechter, Callus, de Bruin-Molé, Grech, Müller, Rossini, Herbrechter, Callus, Rossini, Grech, de Bruin-Molé and John Müller2020). Concretely, posthumanism rejects the idea of the (rational) human as central or exceptional vis-à-vis non-human entities. This entails questioning the humanism of the Enlightenment, acknowledging that the humanist conceptualization of human (including the concomitant notion of human rights) is not inclusive but exclusive (e.g. Herbrechter, Reference Herbrechter2013; Pennycook, Reference Pennycook2018a). As such, posthumanism aligns most obviously with the formative work of science and technology scholar Haraway (Reference Haraway1991). While Haraway herself rejects the label posthumanist for her own work (Haraway & Goodeve, Reference Haraway and Goodeve1998), her Cyborg Manifesto – which argues for a breakdown between human and animal, human and machine, and physical and non-physical – crucially informs posthumanist thinking; her theorizing of gender equally addresses matters of who is considered ‘more’ and ‘less human’.
Evidently, distinctions between ‘more’ and ‘less’ human are still prevalent today, and one way in which they surface is through technology. For instance, cars are typically manufactured according to standards which protect only male crash dummies (Criado Perez, Reference Criado Perez2019), automatic soap dispensers frequently respond only to white skin (Benjamin, Reference Benjamin2019), and almost 95% of the most popular Android apps are said to be only partially accessible to people with disabilities (Yan & Ramachandran, Reference Yan and Ramachandran2019). Seemingly meant for everyone, these different kinds of technologies – cars, soap dispensers, and mobile apps – turn out to be made only for particular groups of people. In this regard, posthumanism acknowledges also that the human is not a singular notion but a plural one, understanding ‘human’ as a socially constructed category.
Lamb and Higgins (Reference Lamb, Higgins, De Fina and Georgakopoulou2020) note five key areas of posthumanist thought in the social sciences and humanities: (1) critiques of humanism, which address and complicate dominant understandings of humanism and the human as based on Enlightenment thinking; (2) actor-network theory (ANT), which is perhaps best known for stressing the agency of non-human entities and complicating the human as the sole source of action; (3) assemblage theory, which, similarly to ANT, stresses relational exchanges and relations between human and non-human entities, though emphasizing the fluidity and unpredictability of these relations; (4) new materialism, which emphasizes our entanglement with the material world and the active role of matter; and (5) critical plant and animal studies, which, as the name suggests, interrogate the often arbitrary boundaries that are being drawn between the human and other living organisms.
Acknowledging that the term posthuman encompasses all this, my current discussion draws most strongly on ANT (e.g. Latour, Reference Latour2005) and new materialism (Barad, Reference Barad2007) for understanding power and agency in the context of technoculture. ANT sees the social (and thus culture) as a series of connections, constituted by human and non-human participants (e.g. Callon & Latour, Reference Callon, Latour, Knorr Cetina and Cicourel1981; Latour, Reference Latour2005). In this view, agency (which is not to be confused with intentionality), is not limited to the human but can also be held by non-human entities. If one accepts that the non-human can be an actor (which is to says that it can cause an effect in a sociotechnical system), separating the human from the non-human becomes pointless: both contribute to making up the social (cf. Latour, Reference Latour1990). Similarly, Karen Barad’s agential realism situates agency not in individual beings or things but sees it as ‘a matter of intra-acting’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 178). Unlike the traditional notion of interaction (where separate entities act upon each other), the term intra-action emphasizes the fundamental entanglement of human and non-human entities, whereby subject and object are seen as always co-constitutive, emerging precisely through particular intra-actions. This split into subject and object is enacted through multiple, cross-cutting ‘agential cuts’ through which particular boundaries are rendered meaningful. Bearing this in mind, I am interested in understanding how the category of ‘human’ is constructed in such sociotechnical systems through material-discursive intra-actions and in how UX writers conduct their language work from within complex assemblages in which they are subject to specific configurations of agential cuts which lead to the emergence of particular professional identities and norms. In this way, I seek to address some of the normative processes involved in the production of digital media by focusing on the language work of UX writers. This brings me to a second field in sociocultural linguistics I orient to: critical sociolinguistic research on language work.
1.3 The Economy of Language Work
In examining how language is taken up as a resource in the design of digital media, I orient to scholarship on language work. As a whole, language work has been linked to the shift from manufacturing-based economies to service-based economies and the ensuing commodification of knowledge and communication. In this vein, scholars in discourse studies and critical sociolinguistics have sought to address how language practices relate not only to society and culture but also to economy, arguing that language can be commodified and (re-)negotiated as a source of profit (cf. Duchêne & Heller, Reference Duchêne and Heller2012). Scholars like Fairclough (Reference Fairclough1999), Cameron (Reference Cameron2000b), and Heller (Reference Heller2003) have shown in depth how language and work have become increasingly entangled in the wake of late capitalism. Not only do professions that used to depend on skills and resources other than language now often require communicative skills, but language in itself is also increasingly the central focus of people’s work. For businesses, language can become a potential source of competitive advantage as well as a factor in business productivity (Boutet & Heller, Reference Boutet and Heller2007), something that can be – or, it would seem, must be – actively managed (Boutet, Reference Boutet, Duchêne and Heller2012; see also Cameron, Reference Cameron2000b). For Heller and Boutet, this is what has led to the emergence of language work and the language worker – professions where ‘the language part of work’ (Boutet, Reference Boutet, Duchêne and Heller2012, p. 208) is not just part of people’s work, but its main point.
Language work in late capitalism is often seen as enmeshed with more symbolic uses of language. In this way, linguistic practices in call centres may, for instance, take on stylized and at times highly regulated forms (see e.g. Cameron, Reference Cameron2000b). The importance of such symbolic aspects of language is something that Kelly-Holmes (Reference Kelly-Holmes and Machin2014, Reference Kelly-Holmes and Thurlow2020) observes quite pointedly with regards to the use of multilingualism in marketing. Speaking of the ‘linguistic fetish’, she shows that in the linguistic business of marketing, languages are often used not for instrumental purposes but ‘to enhance the semiotic landscape of the advertisement’ (Kelly-Holmes, Reference Kelly-Holmes and Thurlow2020, p. 38). Through its symbolic meaning, language can thus become a source of added value in the ‘saturated markets’ of late capitalism (cf. Heller, Reference Heller2010b). This is how language becomes part of the production, circulation, and consumption of resources; in other words, language becomes a matter of economy.
Of course, not all language work is equal. While language scholars have examined at length the work of low-status language workers such as call centre workers, it is only recently that scholars have started paying attention to more elite language workers such as marketers, PR officers, or academics themselves (cf. Thurlow, Reference Thurlow and Thurlow2020c). Following Thurlow (Reference Thurlow and Thurlow2020c), I understand the adjective ‘elite’ here not necessarily as a sociodemographic category, but as a relational status that is discursively constructed and materially rooted (cf. Thurlow & Jaworski, Reference Thurlow and Jaworski2017a). These more elite language workers are what Thurlow (Reference Thurlow and Thurlow2020c) calls ‘wordsmiths’ in order to better map the relative hierarchies of language work. Wordsmiths are relatively speaking more privileged – for instance vis-à-vis other, low-status language workers. That privilege can be material (e.g. a higher salary) or symbolic (e.g. more influence); importantly, though, it is always also discursively negotiated, for instance through particular appeals to professionalism and/or expertise. As Thurlow (Reference Thurlow and Thurlow2020c) suggests, what makes wordsmiths powerful is that their work typically hinges on its behind-the-scenes nature while nonetheless being influential in people’s everyday lives and potentially instrumental in shaping societal norms and social values. It is these two aspects – status and normativity – that sit at the heart of my book. However, before I turn to my research design, I briefly want to clarify my understanding and use of the term ‘political economy’ as it relates to language work.
In a nutshell, political economy is centrally concerned with the allocation of resources. In writing about the Political Economy of Communication, Mosco (Reference Mosco1996) defines the term as describing ‘the study of the social relations, particularly power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution and consumption of resources’ (p. 25). More generally, political economy can be understood as a sociopolitical approach to economy based on the fundamental understanding that material economy cannot be separated from social foundations and power relations (cf. Stilwell, Reference Stilwell2019); as such, political economy orients to and addresses matters of social class and/or social stratification.
Looking to research from language scholars, there seem to be two primary traditions in the way scholars tend to operationalize the term political economy. On the one hand, there are some who assert that scholarship done under this rubric ought to thoroughly engage ‘with the past and present of political economy’ (Block, Reference Block2017, p. 53), i.e. both with classic political economy from Smith to Marx and with contemporary work on current economic developments. Research in this tradition typically entails a strong orientation to Marxism and economics (e.g. McGill, Reference McGill2013; Block, Reference Block, Schmenk, Breidbach and Küster2018; see also papers in Petrovic & Yazan, Reference Petrovic and Yazan2021b). On the other hand, there are scholars who take a less explicitly economic approach, and who are more interested in using the term political economy as a way of highlighting the material (and thus necessarily also economic) nature of language, aiming to address how language is always tied to a speaker’s material and economic position. For Del Percio et al. (Reference Del Percio, Flubacher, Duchêne, García, Flores and Spotti2017), scholarship on the political economy of language is therefore centrally concerned with how language determines whether and how people can gain access to particular symbolic and/or material resources, whereby ‘language emerges as a key site’ (p. 55) for determining access to these resources. Analyses in this tradition typically orient more to Bourdieu’s conceptualization of capital and, specifically, the linguistic marketplace rather than to Marxist political economy (e.g. Boutet & Heller, Reference Boutet and Heller2007; Boutet, Reference Boutet, Duchêne and Heller2012; Del Percio et al., Reference Del Percio, Flubacher, Duchêne, García, Flores and Spotti2017). It is this second tradition, orienting more to sociocultural matters, that I align with.
In my book, I do not claim to provide a thorough political-economic analysis of UX writing; what I do offer, however, is a critical discussion of UX writers’ status claims in light of their relatively privileged position in the marketplace – both linguistic and more generally. In other words, I am interested in understanding the specific hierarchies that structure contemporary language work (cf. Thurlow, Reference Thurlow and Thurlow2020c), and how, say, claiming symbolic capital (for instance in the form of a particular job title) is necessarily also linked to matters of economic capital (such as receiving a higher salary because of said job title). In speaking of ‘hierarchies of language work’ (cf. Thurlow, Reference Thurlow and Thurlow2020c), I thus consider both cultural-symbolic as well as material-economic dynamics. It is against this background that I am interested in UX writers as relatively elite wordsmiths; it is precisely their prestigious, behind-the-scenes, and high-impact language work that makes them interesting as an example of the kinds of professionals that shape people’s everyday life. My aim with the present book is to document the nature of this work, its (meta)pragmatic organization, and, finally, its cultural-political implications. As such, my book is organized around three key research questions:
1. How is the work of UX writers as elite language workers accomplished and organized?
2. How do UX writers themselves understand the role of language in their work?
How do UX writers describe their own work and expertise with regards to language?
What beliefs about how language works do UX writers make use of in their work, and how do these beliefs impact the interface texts they write?
3. What are some of the cultural-political consequences of UX writers’ language work?
How do the production circumstances of UX writing influence how interface texts reinscribe normative/ideological discourses?
What identities and subject positions do UX writers thus produce and/or privilege through their work?
1.4 Methodological Approach
The research that forms the basis of my book was conducted as part of a larger research project titled Elite Creativities aimed at investigating the professional practices of an array of elite language workers.Footnote 9 In this way, my research design follows that of the Elite Creativities project by taking a discourse ethnographic approach (Macgilchrist & van Hout, Reference Macgilchrist and van Hout2011; see also Blommaert & Rampton, Reference Blommaert and Rampton2011; Krzyżanowski, Reference Krzyżanowski2011). As the name suggests, a discourse ethnographic approach integrates ethnography and (critical) discourse analysis as complementary frameworks. This allows for a shift from more textually-oriented analyses towards more situated and actor-related analyses, and aligns with current trends in discourse studies of exploring language/discourse as always situated in specific sociocultural contexts (see Krzyżanowski, Reference Krzyżanowski2011). In other words, instead of analyzing only texts-as-products, a discourse ethnographic approach emphasizes the dynamic processes involved in text production, which makes it particularly suitable for my research on the language work of UX writers.
Following Macgilchrist and van Hout (Reference Macgilchrist and van Hout2011), I purposely call my research ethnographic instead of calling it an ethnography. Ethnography is a contested term, sometimes reserved only for the kinds of sustained, year-long projects typical of conventional, anthropological ethnography. Vis-à-vis such a narrow conceptualization of ethnography, discourse ethnographic approaches align with more recent forms of ‘focused ethnography’ (Knoblauch, Reference Knoblauch2005) or ‘short-term ethnography’ (Pink & Morgan, Reference Pink and Morgan2013), which emphasize intensity – of time, data, and analysis – over extensity. It is for this reasons that Macgilchrist and van Hout (Reference Macgilchrist and van Hout2011) describe their own approach as ethnographic, using the adjectival form to signal an orientation to the epistemology and research methods of ethnography without over-stating the scope and findings that a discourse ethnographic study can provide. Similarly, my own research is ethnographic, but it does not constitute a conventional ethnography in a narrow, anthropological sense. In fact, given the specific conditions and constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic during which I conducted my research, I inevitably had to find creative solutions for meeting my participants through online encounters, as I will discuss below.
Overall, I understand ethnography not as a fixed method or a set of fieldwork techniques, but as a ‘“full” intellectual programme’, which entails a particular understanding of humans, society, and ultimately also language (Blommaert & Jie, Reference Blommaert and Jie2010, p. 5). With its roots in anthropology, ethnography inevitably understands language as ‘socially consequential’ (Blommaert & Jie, Reference Blommaert and Jie2010, p. 5). In other words, from an ethnographic perspective, language is always understood as a resource people use to do something in the world. This, of course, is also how sociocultural linguists understand language, who, especially recently, frequently incorporate ethnographically-oriented methods and approaches (cf. Blommaert & Jie, Reference Blommaert and Jie2010; Krzyżanowski, Reference Krzyżanowski2011). Understanding language as sociocultural practice has a number of consequences for ethnographic research, two of which are particularly relevant for the research I present in this book. First, from a (discourse-)ethnographic perspective, communication inevitably entails not only language but also non-linguistic means, since language is always situated in wider patterns of social behaviour. As will become apparent in the subsequent chapters, such a multimodal and often more-than-linguistic understanding of communication is crucial for UX writing. Second, a (discourse-)ethnographic approach tends to centre an emic perspective and focuses on the practices, perspectives, and beliefs of research participants. This, too, was central in my research, where I sought to analyze the work of UX writers primarily in terms of how they themselves understood and made sense of language. I will return to this aspect when discussing my research design; first, however, I account for my own positionality in this discourse ethnographic research.
1.4.1 Situating Myself
The question of access is a key concern in ethnographic research. Not only does access stand at the beginning of most ethnographic projects, but it is also inevitably tied to the researcher’s own identity. In my case, my research on UX writing is underpinned and informed by my previous experience of working in the UX industry for almost a decade. Between 2012 and 2021, I worked as a content and communications specialist at a small Swiss UX agency, where I was responsible for anything that had to do with language and communication. My work included only little UX writing, and there was no one else who worked as a UX writer at the company. Still, it was there that I encountered UX writing – as a term and as a professional role – for the first time. Importantly, my experience of working in UX meant that when I started my research, I had the status of an insider, which made it easy (or at least easier) to connect with UX writers for informational interviews. Throughout my research, I also continued to attend and eventually started to organize online community meetings with and for UX writers.
My past experience of working in the UX industry as well as my continuing engagement with the UX writing community certainly influenced my research. For instance, while my analysis of the history and origins of UX writing is based primarily on interviews with practitioners, it is of course also informed by my own, lived experience. I distinctly remember the first time I encountered the job title ‘UX writer’ (in early 2017); it is also through my own experience that I know that the job title ‘content strategist’ predates it, but the job title ‘content designer’ does not. (I will discuss the relevance of these various job titles in Chapter 3.) Similarly, my discussion of the ideology of the invisible interface in Chapter 5 emerged from my analysis of interview data, yet throughout this analysis I was distinctly reminded of how, in my own professional introduction to UX, I had been told – and had believed for a long time – that a good interface should be invisible. As such, my past work in the UX industry influenced not only my access to UX writing as a research site, but it also shaped the analyses and the interpretations I present in this book. Having said which, the same would be true if I had had no prior knowledge of UX or UX writing – although differently, this, too, would have shaped my research. There is, as Irvine and Gal (Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000) remind us, no ‘view from nowhere’; all research always comes from a particular position.Footnote 10 In light of this, I find that my involvement in the UX industry has been mostly beneficial to my research, not just in terms of gaining access, but also because it allowed me to more thoroughly focus on UX writers’ accounts of their work instead of spending time on explanations of, for instance, UX-specific terms I was already familiar with. As a whole, my conclusions are thus grounded in immersion in the field.
1.5 Research Design
In keeping with my focus on practitioners’ own, reflexive views, my research was organized into three consecutive stages, each addressing a different aspect of UX writers’ language work. As mentioned above, this three-part research design was developed within the Elite Creativities project with its common framework. Three core data collection activities were shared: (1) profession mapping, (2) language biographies, and (3) production chain analysis. In short, this entailed moving from the profession in general to language workers’ reflexive understanding of language to the realization or application of these understandings in actual production processes. In what follows, I give a brief explanation of each of these data collection stages.
1.5.1 Stage 1: Profession Mapping
I began my research with a method called profession mapping, which we took to be a necessary first step in research engaging people’s professional practice (Thurlow, Reference Thurlow, Brommer, Roth and Spitzmüller2022; cf. also Candlin, Reference Candlin and Sarangi2003; Sarangi, Reference Sarangi2005). This entails a broad description of the profession itself, establishing, among other things, its history and origins, typical training programs and career trajectories, information about regulatory bodies or otherwise influential institutions, insights into professional associations and/or networks, information about employment conditions and salary scales, as well as a general sense of how people working within this profession organize themselves as a profession (or not). In terms of data collection, profession mapping is necessarily a broad and diverse endeavour that differs from profession to profession. In my case, it ranged from archiving industry newsletters to conducting informational interviews with UX writers to attending a three-day training course on UX writing. (I will discuss these different, complementary datasets in more depth in Chapters 2 and 3.)
Profession mapping is useful not least because it enables researchers to (more) clearly define the profession they discuss. Scholars in applied linguistics have long argued that such an engagement with the particular working conditions of practitioners is a necessary condition for research in the workplace. As Candlin (Reference Candlin and Sarangi2003; after Cazden, Reference Cazden1970) explains: ‘if the researcher cannot enter the world of the practitioner, then the practitioner cannot enter the consciousness of the researcher’ (p. 389). In other words, there is a need to first understand the ‘world’ of a particular profession, especially if one seeks to offer more than a naïve description of professional practices. At the same time, a thorough engagement with the profession sheds light on the structural conditions that impact (language) work. In short, profession mapping is about examining what Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1993) might call the (professional) field, including the internal and external power relations that structure and determine the field.
1.5.2 Stage 2: Language Biographies
The second stage in my research entailed the elicitation of what we have called language biography interviews. Orienting to work of scholars in second-language acquisition such as Kramsch (Reference Kramsch2009) and Busch (Reference Busch, Busch, Jardina and Tjoutuku2006, Reference Busch2012), these language biography interviews centre practitioners’ own perspectives on language as part of their work; this is connected also to their (professional) biographies and career trajectories. In my case, they were conducted as semi-structured interviews and organized around a set of shared questions established within the wider Elite Creativities project. To give a sense of the nature of the interviews, some of the questions I asked UX writers were, for instance: How were you drawn to this type of work? What kind of professional and/or language-related training did you receive? What role do you see language playing in your work? As such, questions centred interviewees’ metalinguistic or reflexive framing of language in relation to their work.
Language biography interviews have traditionally been used for language learning purposes; in our research on wordsmiths, we expanded this notion, using them to elicit another form of ‘folk-linguistic’ (cf. Preston, Reference Preston1996) – or simply non-academic – account on language. In this way, the language biography interviews were partly intended to de-centre the academic researcher, bringing to the fore practitioners’ own views on how language can and should be used. As Busch (Reference Busch2012) suggests, (language) biographic accounts are particularly suitable for mediating between micro and macro level analyses. In my case, this meant that while a single interview might focus on an individual’s experience and perspective, taken as a whole, a corpus of language biography interviews on one profession could offer a unique, practitioner-centred view on the role and understanding of language more generally. This method was thus particularly suitable for tracing how certain beliefs about how language works (or should work) traverse UX writing; related to this, my language biography interviews also served as a starting point for understanding the cultural-political implications of these beliefs.
1.5.3 Stage 3: Production (Chain) Analysis
As a third and last stage in the research design, I initially envisaged conducting a production chain analysis. Loosely orienting to the notion of commodity chain analysis, which entails tracing the design, production, and distribution of products (see Thurlow, Reference Thurlow2020a), a production chain analysis aims to offer a holistic view on the production of specific texts or semiotic artefacts. Akin to research centring text trajectories (e.g. Woydack & Rampton, Reference Woydack and Rampton2016; Lillis & Maybin, Reference Lillis and Maybin2017), this would have entailed following UX writers’ work from initial briefing meetings to the eventual publication of their work (or its ‘release’, as this stage is typically called in UX writing), ideally through fieldwork at a software design company. As mentioned, however, because the start of my research coincided with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had to adapt these original fieldwork plans. While I had envisaged doing on-site fieldwork with UX writers, I had to rely on remote fieldwork – partially because, for a long time, the borders of different countries were closed to outsiders,Footnote 11 but also because as a result of local restrictions such as lockdowns or curfews, most UX writers ended up working from home, regardless of where in the world they were located. The conditions of their work had also changed with and because of the pandemic.
In fact, unlike some professions where on-site work was strongly encouraged once governments started lifting pandemic restrictions, many UX writers continued to work partially from home long after restrictions were lifted. In light of this, I adapted my fieldwork towards a form of ‘remote ethnography’ (Postill, Reference Postill2016), which entailed observing team meetings of UX writers as well as follow-up interviews focused on UX writers’ day-to-day work practices. Orienting to the kinds of reflexive, discourse-based interviews that Macgilchrist and van Hout (Reference Macgilchrist and van Hout2011) consider typical of discourse ethnographic research, the follow-up interviews I conducted involved UX writers discussing a particular semiotic artefact they had recently produced or were currently working on. Such reflexive interviews typically aim to understand writing choices and explore the tacit knowledge and strategies people draw on when writing in professional contexts (cf. Odell & Goswami, Reference Odell and Goswami1982); in my case, I used them to also learn more about the broader production processes and different stages that make up the production chain of UX writing.
While I could not conduct a production chain analysis per se – most of my fieldwork was relatively focused and selective due to its online nature – this remote fieldwork nonetheless provided valuable insights into some of the backstage production processes that structure UX writing. At the same time, it helped me revisit some aspects of my initial mapping of the profession, clarifying certain points about the day-to-day work of UX writers that I had started to understand but could not fully explain with the data I had from the profession mapping. Ultimately, then, my book remains underpinned by a decidedly discourse ethnographic approach, one which involved sustained engagement with UX writers, and which allows me to discuss the implications of language in digital media from a production-oriented perspective. To close this introduction, I offer a brief overview of what my production-oriented perspective looked like in practice by outlining the individual chapters of the book.
1.6 Overview: The Production, Pragmatics, and Politics of Digital Media
As a whole, my book addresses the production of digital media by centring UX writers’ metapragmatic understandings of language and communication. Throughout the course of my substantive chapters, I move from addressing UX writing as a profession to discussing UX writers’ reflexive understandings of their (language) work to, finally, a critical examination of the production and products of UX writing. In most chapters, I draw on more than one data set; as indicated above, in my analysis, I triangulated data and insights from usually two or sometimes all three stages of the research. The chapters in the book are thus loosely organized around the three methods/stages outlined above. Beyond this, the chapters are organized into three thematic parts that address the profession of UX writing (Part I); matters of status and hierarchy (Part II); and, finally, the cultural politics of UX writers’ work (Part III). A throughline in the book is UX writers’ posthumanist way of working, and how they, without naming it as such, emphasize aspects such as the non-determinacy or the more-than-representative nature of interface texts. To make sense of this, I draw on posthumanist thinking at various points in my analysis; most importantly, though, I draw these threads together in the concluding chapter, where I outline a proposal for a posthumanist approach to analyzing digital media interfaces in order to better address the overall politics and power of such texts.
1.6.1 Part I: Mapping the Profession: The Language Work of UX Writers
In the first part (Chapter 2), I begin by giving a general introduction to the language work and expertise of UX writers. Through this, I show that the work of UX writers is not always easy to pinpoint and sometimes hard to delimit from that of other professionals in software design. I discuss how UX writing is (historically) connected to user experience design and human–computer interaction (HCI), and I begin to outline some of the ways in which this impacts UX writers’ work in terms of how they understand language and/or communication. Additionally, I explain in more depth in what way I understand UX writers as elite language workers or wordsmiths (Thurlow, Reference Thurlow and Thurlow2020c), who work within the privileged space of the so-called tech industry (cf. Dorschel, Reference Dorschel2022). As a whole, this first analytic chapter is somewhat more descriptive than subsequent chapters, but it offers a necessary mapping of the terrain that I build on in the remaining parts of the book.
1.6.2 Part II: Establishing Status: UX Writing as Elite Language Work
In the second part of the book (Chapters 3 and 4), I turn more specifically to UX writers’ status as wordsmiths by exploring how, specifically, they claim status and expertise. In Chapter 3, I focus on how UX writers discursively professionalize and legitimize their own (language) work. Drawing on Urciouli’s (Reference Urciuoli2008) work on skill discourse and on scholarship in the sociology of professions, I identify ‘writing-as-designing’ as a unique skill UX writers claim for themselves in order to establish the privileged status of their language work. I argue that the discursive construction of skills can be understood as an ‘appeal to professionalism’ (Fournier, Reference Fournier1999) that wordsmiths like UX writers deploy in order to claim status and expertise in both local and wider hierarchies of language work.
Staying with the topic of privilege and status, Chapter 4 looks at UX writers’ status claims with a particular view to their (dis)avowal of creativity. Orienting to recent work on discursive creativity (Jones, Reference Jones2010) and rhetorics of creativity (Thurlow, Reference Thurlow2019), I discuss how UX writers strategically deploy claims to non-creativity in order to establish their (elite) professional identity. I show that this is connected to an ideological distinction between form and function, whereby UX writers position themselves as concerned primarily with the communicative function of software interfaces and not with their verbal form. A common thread in both Chapter 3 and 4 is UX writers’ strong orientation towards UX design, which in turn informs their specific views on how language works – or should work – in digital media interfaces. These deep-seated beliefs in turn influence the kind of texts UX writers produce, as I argue in the third part of the book.
1.6.3 Part III: Producing Little Texts: Politics and Power in UX Writing
In the third part of the book (Chapters 5 and 6), I address how UX writers’ understanding of language and communication impact their text production in normative ways. In Chapter 5, I turn specifically to the matter of semiotic and media ideologies (Keane, Reference Keane2018 and Gershon, Reference Gershon2010, respectively) in UX writers’ work. Building on my analysis of non-creativity in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 hones in on invisibility as a presumed ideal in UX writing. Invisibility is a characteristic of much elite language work (cf. Thurlow, Reference Thurlow and Thurlow2020c); here, I am specifically interested in the ideology of the invisible interface that permeates UX writers’ beliefs about how language should work. I discuss how UX writers’ invisible language work has wider, cultural-political consequences as it always privileges a particular position from which things are made (in)visible. In other words, the invisibility UX writers strive for depends on a default or ideal user.
I elaborate on the concept of the ideal user in Chapter 6, where I argue that UX writers’ work necessarily also involves stylizing and crafting a certain audience. In this last analytical chapter, I turn, finally, to some of the concrete textual products UX writers create. Examining cookie consent notices as one particular – and particularly prevalent – form or genre of UX writers’ work, I discuss how the ‘little texts’ (Pappert & Roth, Reference Pappert and Roth2021) that UX writers produce are both interactionally and ideologically consequential. Specifically, I argue that in their work, UX writers do not only write for an audience, but that they also craft an audience through their work, thereby configuring who should and who should not be using digital media. Importantly, the normative aspects of UX writers’ work surface not just in the verbal aspects of these interface texts, but also through the dynamic interactions these texts encourage or even demand. It is this that I turn to also in the conclusion of the book, where I reflect on how power and normativity surfaces in UX writing through dynamic and more-than-representational aspects.
1.6.4 Conclusion: Towards a Posthumanist Sociolinguistics of Digital Media
In the final chapter and general conclusion of my book, I reflect on what an analysis of the production of digital media can reveal about the cultural politics of these technologies. Specifically, I suggest that the work of UX writers reveals how digital media interfaces are normative not just in representational terms, but also through the patterns of usage they create. Revisiting some of my interviews with UX writers, I propose that these ‘more-than-representational’ (cf. Lorimer, Reference Lorimer2005) aspects of digitally mediated communication are something UX writers understand particularly well – better, perhaps, than sociocultural linguists. On this basis, I return to UX writers’ own understanding of language and communication, this time not to examine their semiotic ideologies, but to ask what sociocultural linguists might, perhaps, learn from UX writers. Concretely, I propose that the expertise of UX writers offers a starting point for extending the recent turn to posthumanist approaches in sociocultural linguistics (see Pennycook, Reference Pennycook2018a). Taking a posthumanist approach to interface texts and attending to more-than-representational, transmodal, and embodied aspects can in turn enable scholars to deepen their understanding of the overall politics and power of digital media interfaces. In order to understand and – perhaps – eventually challenge the cultural politics of digital media, it is necessary to study not just how people use digital media, but also how digital media are produced, and why they are produced in particular ways. Ultimately, and as I hope to show through the book, looking at the production of digital media and the views of producers is central for understanding how digital media interfaces contribute to the (re)production of status, power, and normativity – sometimes in obvious ways, but often also in more covert and less visible ways.
