Dot-Com Design: The Rise of a Usable, Social, Commercial Web

摘要

Dot-Com Design: The Rise of a Usable, Social, Commercial Web is a richly layered cultural history of web design in the United States, tracing its origins in the early 1990s to the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000. While "dotcom" and "design" come together in title and analysis, the book also separates the two, parsing the ways that "dot-com" came to symbolize discourses around networked culture in that decade, and the ways that "design," as process and product, offers ways of imagining the future while materializing social dynamics. Put together, Dot-Com Design not only tells the story of shifts in web design aesthetics and industry, but through these shifts traces struggles for meaning over what the web itself was and could be. These contestations over what the web was are entwined with questions about who could make money from it; that is, the cultural narrative is put in close conversation with the dot-com era's market dynamics. To this end, Sapnar Ankerson structures the book around the Minsky-Kindle-berger model of financial crisis, an economic-historical perspective organized in five stages: displacement, boom, expansion, euphoria, and bust. Through this, Dot-Com Design not only highlights the primacy of the market in understanding the web's development and design, but also makes a strong analytical case for further examination of the relationship between economic speculation and visual culture.