Empty Templates: The Ethical Habits of Empty State Pages

ABSTRACT

This article examines how empty state pages (ESPs) constrain user-generated communication through the ethical lens of Bourdieu’s habitus. The authors define ESPs as interactive instructional templates that prompt users to input information to participate in an online network. Through a case study analyzing ~450,000 online comments from The New York Times, the authors find a direct connection between ESP elements, such as the character limit for comments, and online writers’ cultivated habitus.

KEYWORDS:

• Design of communication
• ethics
• research methods
• visual rhetoric/visualization techniques

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for productive feedback. Thank you to Rachael Lussos for looking at a final draft to assist with clarity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We’d like to thank Yinyin Chen, Xuan Wang, Zeng Zeng, and Alyssa Kong for creating Figure 3. They used the ggmap package in the programming language R to generate this visual.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John R. Gallagher

John R. Gallagher is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Gallagher has been published in Written Communication, Computers and Composition, enculturation, and Transformations. Gallagher focuses on template rhetoric and the way online writers contend with their participatory audiences. He is the author of Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing, which is forthcoming from University of Colorado/Utah State University Press in 2019.

Steve Holmes

Steve Holmes is an assistant professor of English at George Mason University. Holmes is author of two books: Procedural Habits: The Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice and Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues (with Jared S. Colton). Holmes has been published in journals such as Computers and Composition, Technical Communication Quarterly, Computational Culture, Rhetoric Review, and several others. He focuses on habits, especially as they exist in video games and code. This article is their first collaboration.