| Chapter 1: | Introduction and Underlying Assumptions |
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The meaning of text has changed over time and has expanded from written or spoken verbal discourse to include other, nonverbal, types of expression such as buildings (Berman, 1999), monuments (Blair, Jeppeson, & Pucci Jr., 1995; Foss, 1986) or cartoons (Bostdorff, 1987; Edwards & Winkler, 1997). Digital multimedia messages that include both verbal and nonverbal discourse, such as Web sites, could easily be considered texts and have been the subject of rhetorical and textual analyses (Brunn & Cottle, 1997; Fursich & Robins, 2002, 2004; Hernon, 1998; Jackson & Purcell, 1997; McKeown & Plowman, 1999; Mitra, 1997; Purcell & Kodras, 2001; Tian, 2006; Zhang & Benoit, 2004).
The lack of a rigorous definition of the concept of Web site experience makes it difficult to identify clear boundaries between experiences and texts. There are at least two important characteristics, however, that set experiences apart from texts: interactivity and control. Texts have audiences; experiences have participants (Aarseth, 1997; S. Johnson, 1997; Landow, 1997; Nelson, 1992; Shedroff, 2001). Experience participants interact with the artifact and have greater control than text audiences over the nature and pace of this interaction.
Moreover, associated with the notion of text is the connotation that the researcher analyzes the rhetorical artifact, not the audience’s experience of interacting with and using this artifact. This project advocates a research perspective that focuses on the Web site user’s experience rather than the structural and content features of the Web site. The argument has been made before, in favor of analyzing the experience of using the text rather than the text itself (Fish, 1980). Fish, the founder of reader-response theory in literary criticism, argued that textual analysis is grounded in the mistaken assumption that there is meaning in the text, a meaning that awaits discovery. Following the arguments of the linguistic turn and social constructionism, he argued that meaning is not in the text: