RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE: EXPLORING USER RESISTANCE IN TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION By Minh-Tam Nguyen A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Rhetoric and Writing—Doctor of Philosophy 2017 ABSTRACT RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE: EXPLORING USER RESISTANCE IN TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION By Minh-Tam Nguyen Despite ongoing investments to technology and usability in technical communication—and despite ongoing commitments to humanistic perspectives concerning those two domains—scholars of technical communication have yet to explore the topic of “user resistance” explicitly. User resistance gained prominence in fields like Information Technology (IT), Management Information Systems (MIS), and related fields and has traditionally been conceptualized as oppositional, hostile, or adversarial—a phenomenon meant to be avoided before it occurs. Because of this, traditional definitions of user resistance value the systems with which users engage, with little work theorizing the contexts, behaviors, and agencies of actual users. My dissertation responds to this lack of a user-centered approach by offering a thick literature review that examines how resistance is defined and situated across a range of scholarship. From this literature review, I offer a theory of user resistance that draws on the concept of “everyday resistance” (Vinthagen & Johanssen, 2012) to value users and their contexts. By situating the work done on resistance and providing a theoretical concept of user resistance, I then rhetorically analyze two examples of user resistance on the social networking site, Tumblr to illustrate how and why users resist in dynamic online spaces. The first example demonstrates how users resist within a system to design changes and the second illustrates the how users resist systems of power and oppression created and upheld (implicitly and explicitly) by the site developers and designers. Through an analysis and discussion of these examples, my dissertation seeks to start conversations about user resistance in the domain of technical communication and pivot existing conversations outside the field from a negative phenomenon meant to be avoided before it occurs, to a productive area of inquiry for technology design. Ultimately, I argue that attending to user resistance allows for a more nuanced and engaged approach to user-centered, participatory, and ethical design principles. By examining user resistance, technical communication researchers and practitioners can attend to the local, contextual, and most importantly dissonant needs of users. Copyright by MINH-TAM NGUYEN 2017 Dedicated to my dad, Nguyễn Minh-Chiếu. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not be possible, first and foremost, without the help and guidance of my committee, Dànielle DeVoss, Jeff Grabill, Liza Potts, and Stuart Blythe. To Dànielle, I thank you for your endless encouragement, support, enthusiasm, and patience as I conceptualized and drafted my dissertation. To Jeff, Liza, and Stuart, I thank you for your generosity in time, feedback, and support. To all my colleagues and friends that I’ve had the pleasure to work, collaborate, celebrate, and learn from at Michigan State University, thank you for helping me navigate what it means to be a PhD student and supporting me along the way. To my writing committee, thank you for reading early drafts of my dissertation and helping me grow, challenge, and expand my ideas. Lastly, I owe most of my gratitude to my family—my mom, dad, and sister—for their undying love, support, and encouragement that has shaped me into the person I am today. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................ ix LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... x CHAPTER ONE: RESISTING RESISTANCE .................................................................. 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1 Why User Resistance? .......................................................................................... 2 User-Centered Design and Technical Communication ............................... 3 Participatory design. ........................................................................ 7 Culturally aware and ethical design principles. ................................ 8 User-centered design and user resistance. ..................................... 9 Defining User Resistance Across Disciplines ...................................................... 10 Defining User Resistance in Technical Communication and Related Fields ....... 16 Griefing ..................................................................................................... 17 User Participation ..................................................................................... 18 Non-use .................................................................................................... 18 Naming Resistance as its Own Act ........................................................... 19 Toward a Theory of User Resistance .................................................................. 20 CHAPTER TWO: METHODS & METHODOLOGY ........................................................ 24 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 24 Building a Methodology of Mapping Resistance Taxonomies ............................. 25 Reading the Taxonomies: Understanding Tensions in Definitions ........... 30 Building a Methodology of Identifying Resistance ............................................... 31 Data Collection .................................................................................................... 32 Data Analysis ....................................................................................................... 33 Rhetorical Content Analysis ...................................................................... 35 CHAPTER THREE: RESISTING WITHIN A SYSTEM: THE CASE OF THE MISSING #REPLYBUTTON ........................................................................................................... 38 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 38 Social Media and Technical Communication ....................................................... 38 User Resistance and Social Media ........................................................... 42 Why Tumblr? ....................................................................................................... 43 The Role of Social Media, Design Changes, and Resistance .................. 46 Defining the Problem: Removing the #Replybutton ............................................. 48 A Tool for Creating Connectivity ............................................................... 49 Analysis of Power ..................................................................................... 50 Data Collection .................................................................................................... 51 Data Analysis ....................................................................................................... 54 Results and Findings ........................................................................................... 56 Community-Building Moves ...................................................................... 57 vii Articulation of a shared experience (SE) ....................................... 57 Calls to action (CTA) ...................................................................... 58 Maintaining the status quo (MSQ) ................................................. 60 Identity-Building Moves ............................................................................. 61 Use of affect (A) ............................................................................. 62 Negative emotion (NE) ................................................................... 62 Storytelling (S)................................................................................ 63 Audience-Building Moves ......................................................................... 64 Requests (R), callouts (C), and questioning (Q). ........................... 64 Tools of Articulating Resistance ............................................................... 66 Outcomes of Resistance ........................................................................... 67 Significance ......................................................................................................... 68 CHAPTER FOUR: RESISTING THE SYSTEM: THE CASE OF A TUMBLR #BLACKOUT .................................................................................................................. 71 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 71 Analysis of Power ................................................................................................ 71 Defining the Problem ........................................................................................... 74 #Blackout .................................................................................................. 75 Not Just Tumblr......................................................................................... 77 Data Collection .................................................................................................... 79 Data Analysis ....................................................................................................... 80 Results and Findings ........................................................................................... 81 Community-Building Moves ...................................................................... 81 Shared experience (SE). ................................................................ 82 Calls to action (CTA) ...................................................................... 84 Words of encouragement (WE) ..................................................... 86 Identity-Building Moves ............................................................................. 87 Identity markers (IM) ...................................................................... 87 Storytelling (S)................................................................................ 88 Self-affirmations (SA) ..................................................................... 89 Outcomes of User Resistance .................................................................. 90 Significance ......................................................................................................... 91 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION & IMPLICATIONS...................................................... 95 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 95 Resistance in Two Ways ..................................................................................... 95 Resistance is Not Futile ....................................................................................... 98 Resistance is Elastic ................................................................................. 99 Resistance is Multiple ............................................................................. 101 Resistance is Deliberate ......................................................................... 102 Further Implications ........................................................................................... 103 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................ 106 viii LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Selected definitions of resistance ..................................................................... 12 Table 2: Timeline of Tumblr’s design changes and announcements ............................. 53 Table 3: Coding scheme for #replybutton ...................................................................... 55 Table 4: Coding scheme developed for #blackout ......................................................... 80 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Vosviewer data visualization of text from 4,814 technical communication articles ............................................................................................................................ 26 Figure 2: “Resistance” on Vosviewer visualization ......................................................... 27 Figure 3: First data visualization of resistance definition keywords found in TC, IT, IS, MS, etc. .......................................................................................................................... 29 Figure 4: Revised data visualization of resistance keywords ......................................... 30 Figure 5: Screenshot of Tumblr’s methods for interaction between users. From left to right, users can share (to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or other social media sites), reply, reblog, and like content on their dashboards. ................................................................ 45 Figure 6: Screenshot of posting options that users can choose from to create a blog post. From left to right, users can: “Text; Photo; Quote; Link; Chat; Audio; Video” ........ 46 Figure 7: Screenshot of Tumblr’s old comment-tree reblogging interface (left) and the new, streamlined reblogging interface (right) ................................................................. 47 Figure 8: Screenshot of user hazelcat13 articulating a shared experience (SE) ........... 58 Figure 9: Screenshot of user ifthecreekdontrise articulating a call to action (CTA) ........ 60 Figure 10: Screenshot of user totaldrivel referencing past norms (MSQ) ...................... 61 Figure 11: Screenshot of user wargaymon employing affect (A) ................................... 62 Figure 12: Screenshot of user carryonwaywardstirrup expressing negative emotion (NE) .................................................................................................................. 63 Figure 13: Screenshot of user delladilly-delladilly sharing a story (S) ............................ 64 Figure 14: Screenshot of user blithedreadwolf making a request (R) ............................ 65 Figure 15: Screenshot of user allisas asking a rhetorical and explicit question (Q) ....... 66 Figure 16: Screenshots of images used to supplement acts of resistance. From left to right, the images read: “BRING BACK REPLY” and “PLEASE BRING BACK REPLY” .......................................................................................................................... 67 x Figure 17: Example holiday/event themed logos in 2015. From left to right, top to bottom, the logos correspond to: Valentine’s Day, New Years Eve, Halloween, US Election Day, Stop Internet Slowness Day, National Literacy Day, World UFO Day, LGBTQ+ Pride, National Donut Day, Earth Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and World Cup Kickoff Day. ........................................................................................................................... 72 Figure 18: Screenshot of Tumblr staff’s official blog header, which reads “It’s Women’s History Month, Tumblr.” .................................................................................................. 72 Figure 19: Screenshot of sponsored brand deals as themed holiday content across Tumblr. Festivus sponsored by Seinfeld (left) and National Coffee Day sponsored by Starbucks (right). ............................................................................................................ 73 Figure 20: Screenshot of user chiraqi-warlord articulating a shared experience (SE) ................................................................................................................................ 82 Figure 21: Screenshot of user watermelonlioness urging users to action (CTA) ........... 85 Figure 22: Screenshot of user hanaibraham expressing words of encouragement (WE) ............................................................................................................................... 86 Figure 23: Screenshot of user rampyourvoice articulating an identity marker (IM) ........ 88 Figure 24: Screenshot of user lareinadecorazones sharing a story (S) ......................... 89 Figure 25: Screenshot of user night—skyy articulating a self-affirmation (SA) .............. 90 Figure 26: Screenshot of the trending searches on Tumblr during a scheduled #blackout ........................................................................................................................ 91 xi CHAPTER ONE: RESISTING RESISTANCE Introduction In her SIGDOC 2016 keynote talk, Jan Spyridakis, professor of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at Washington State University, asserted, “people don’t like what’s good for them.” To Spyridakis, it was the role of the user researcher/practitioner to create interfaces that users “like.” This claim came in support of her discussion of the past 20 years of user research and how academics studying user experience should attend to the shifting landscape of online spaces. Despite the veracity Spyridakis’ claim, exploring the term “user resistance” as it relates to human-centered design and technical communication can act as an important entry point into the interrogation of what users—people—do and do not like. And, in the case of my study, user-resistance reveals much more than what people “like.” The term user resistance gained prominence in fields like information technology and information science (Hirshheim & Newman, 1988; Markus, 1983) and has long since been a phenomenon meant to be avoided before it occurs—as an obstacle to forward motion, growth, and success. More importantly, the term “user resistance” has been absent from technical communication literature despite its connection and relevance to principles of user-centered design (Andrews et al, 2012; Blythe, 2001; Johnson, 1998; Putnam et al, 2016; Zachry & Spyridakis, 2016), participatory design (Spinuzzi, 2005;), and ethical design (Miller, 1979; Parsons, 1987; Rubens, 1981). Paying attention to user resistance in the field of technical communication can lead to more nuanced ways of enacting user-centered/participatory design principles in ways that attend to the local, contextual, and most importantly, dissonant needs of users. 1 I begin my study by addressing the impetus for researching user resistance by exploring how user-centered design, participatory design, and ethical design principles have contributed to the field of technical communication and how user resistance fits within these contributions. I then use this positioning to I trace the history of the term resistance in technical communication scholarship along with analogous fields like user experience, information technology, management information systems, etc to visualize a taxonomy of resistance that can help lay the groundwork for the theorization of user resistance. I end this chapter by using these definitions to inform my own theorization of user resistance, which pushes against the traditionally negative or destructive conceptions bounded in the word “resistance” and illuminates the productive qualities of articulations of user resistance (Vinthagen, 2015). In the chapters that follow, I use my theorization of resistance to offer a methodology of analyzing the everyday resistance articulated on the social media site, Tumblr, by examining two examples of user resistance in chapters three and four. Both examples offer an interesting lens to understand how users truly engage with technology. I conclude my dissertation by discussing how and why user resistance can be a productive line of inquiry to create technologies that enact a more complex and attentive user-centered approach to design and how technical communicators are prime agents of change for attending to issues of user resistance. Why User Resistance? Investigating resistance offers an interesting lens to understanding technical communication regarding issues of users, agency, technology and power. Importantly, attending to user resistance complicates and extends conversations about user- 2 centered, participatory, and ethical design principles as well as usability studies. Users necessarily sit at the forefront of the work that technical communicators1 and user experience practitioners do. Not only do users inform, but they perform important tasks and roles in every stage of the design process, making them active agents—or participants—in the products, technologies, and interfaces they use. But, to enact a truly participatory design and to allow users to truly participate means listening to and amplifying voices of dissent and points of tension—resistance. And, despite the usercenteredness of the field, little attention has been paid to the ways that users resist within and to systems of power. User-Centered Design and Technical Communication User-centered design, and by extension, user research, and usability testing are all well-documented in the technical communication literature (Blake Scott, 2008; Blythe, 2001; Bartolotta, Bourelle & Newmark, 2017; Chong, 2015; Salvo, 2009; Ranney, 2009; Redish, 2010), with the publication of Patricia Sullivan’s “Beyond a Narrow Conception of Usability” in IEEE Transactions of Professional Communication (T-PC) in 1989 being one of the first calls to action. In Sullivan’s (1989) canonical article on usability research, she notes how multiple disciplines have a stake in leading conversations on usability, including human-computer interaction, sociology, marketing, and technical communication (p. 258). In addition to presenting a range of fields interested in usability testing, Sullivan (1989) highlights the need to move from usability 1 For the purpose of my dissertation, I am applying The Society for Technical Communication’s definition of technical communication to my use of technical writer/communicator. According to them, technical communicators “make information more useable and accessible to those who need that information, and in doing so, they advance the goals of the companies or organizations that employ them.” 3 as a mere testing moment–typically one that appears at the end of the design process– to be a full-scale, iterative research process, in turn calling for a broader view of usability in technical communication (p. 256). Sullivan (1989) is careful to identify rhetoric as tangible and needed, a framework for understanding the value of audience (users) and their needs, and emphasizing the importance of context in shaping the design process. Usability research, then, is an important precursor to work that technical communicators do in the realm of user-centered design. As revolutionary changes to a knowledge economy where work is now marked by the access, interpretation, and exchange of information, the importance of context, audience, and culture are even more relevant than ever. Johnson, Salvo, and Zoetewey (2007) explore the role of rhetoricians and their power to mediate knowledge and use between science and culture. Expanding on Charles Percy Snow’s conception of science and culture, Johnson, Salvo, and Zoetewey (2007) argue that usability is situated as a unifying concept that bridges the discourses of science and culture. Further, rhetoricians and engineers work to ensure that user-centered design principles, usability research and practice does that work of bridging. This broad sense of culture, however, leaves one wondering if culture is synonymous with “public,” “nonexperts,” or “users.” So, while an adaptation of Snow’s science-culture theory is meaningful to articulate a theory of usability, it is incomplete in accounting for the way everyday users and publics must struggle to find value and meaning in design decisions made on their behalf. This struggle is where user-resistance can occur—a place where much of the scholarship overlooks or rebrands in different terms. 4 Technical communicators, who have been heavily involved in usability testing and research since at least World War II, play a crucial role in working to maintain the boundaries between producers (experts) and consumers (non-experts). Despite the rich body of scholarship on usability research in technical communication alone, there remains a “scholar’s long arm view” of usability research practices in organizations, relating to the distance between research and practical applications (Johnson, Salvo, and Zoetewey, 2007, p. 330). Greater connections need to be made between usability research and actual practice in order for the design of technologies to be truly usercentered and designed for user needs, cultural diversity, and organizational values. Further, as Spinuzzi (2005) has noted, usability testing carries an added formality to the design process that can obstruct the informative, knowledge-making moments that are truly valuable in holistic participatory design. As Bradley Dilger’s (2006) work on extreme usability illustrates, the initial fixation on pragmatism, efficiency, and effectiveness in technical communication “consistently undermin[es] user-centered approaches to usability” (p. 48). He argues for a culturally situated approach to usability testing to “prevent the task orientation of usability from myopic exclusion of discursive, historical, and cultural contexts (Dilger, 65).” However useful, Dilger falls short of offering ways for practitioners to negotiate the efficiency demanded of them by those in power and the users that are compromised in this process. Additionally, Jason Palermi (2006) examines how conversations of usability testing around rhetorics of disability accessibility can unintentionally reinforce problematic representations of users with disabilities. Palermi argues that traditional usability studies undermines the knowledge that users with disabilities possess, which 5 reveals a huge rift between user contexts/needs and processes of usability testing. Indeed, the articles included in my literature review are not exhaustive, but they do highlight the relationship between usability research and user-centered design. Importantly, these articles showcase that there remains a rift between the two. As such, stronger connections need to be made that bridge the value of usability research to user-centered design and how both contribute to a generative process of designing for user needs. I argue, in my dissertation, that user resistance can offer a bridge to connect the values of user-centered research and a generative process of not just designing, but also listening to user needs. Regardless, technical communication scholars have helped build a rhetorical theory of usability and usability research, and scholars are now leading conversations in broader contexts of technology design, spanning methods and methodologies such as participatory design, user-centered design processes, cross-cultural design, localization, and ethical considerations. In User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts, Johnson (1998) demonstrates that classical rhetoric can serve as a theoretical frame to grant more power to user knowledge and expertise. Giving more voice to the users who engage with technology is central to Johnson (1998), who is interested in revealing the “know-how” of users in their everyday contexts. To Johnson, the knowledge of everyday practice has become “voiceless” and lost as experts have colonized technology onto users (p. 5). The classical rhetorical concept of metis – or cunning intelligence and ability to act quickly in a range of contexts – is haled in both Johnson (1998, p. 53) and Spinuzzi (2005, p. 166) as a way to place greater understanding on the rich knowledge and skills brought forth by users. While Johnson 6 (1998) conceptualizes users as practitioners, producers, and citizens, Spinuzzi (2005) understands users as bringing forth both tacit (know-how from experience) and explicit (defined, written down, and categorized) knowledge. And while Johnson (1998) worked to construct a rhetorical theory, using a revised “user-centered rhetorical complex of technology” that served as a visual model for user-centered design, Spinuzzi (2005) calls for a methodology of participatory design. Participatory design. Spinuzzi (2005) recognizes that participatory design is research, informed by theoretical grounding, brings forth a rich history, and is capable of being understood as a methodology in itself (p. 164). According to Spinuzzi (2005), participatory “methods are always used to iteratively construct the emerging design, which itself simultaneously constitutes and elicits the research results as co-interpreted by the designer-researchers and the participants who will use the design” (p. 164). Participatory design is grounded in constructivism, a theory that rejects formalized and classified knowledge-making (Spinuzzi, 2005, p. 165). Originating in Scandinavia, participatory design was intended to serve as a democratizing and liberatory process that give more agency to workers in regard to the technologies introduced to their workplace environments. Similar to Spinuzzi (2005), Sun (2012) identifies the thrust of empowerment behind participatory design (p. 36). To Sun, this empowerment is grounded in both functional and democratic outcomes, and when collaboratively involved with designers, users are granted more agency to reveal the knowledge and skills they bring with them. Ideally, participatory design works to account and value the knowledge and input brought forth by users, who are increasingly tethered with multiple technologies for everyday tasks and activities. But while participatory design was 7 transformative in its origins, it has not played out with the same rigor in North American organizational contexts (Spinuzzi, 2005, p. 168). This lack of transferability illustrates how research methods used in one cultural context cannot be simply applied to another cultural context. The local contexts where technologies are designed, developed, and deployed are unique, requiring careful consideration of appropriate design methods in those contexts. Culturally aware and ethical design principles. Ethical and cultural considerations must always guide the work of user researchers and technical communicators. The work of technical communication means more than just conveying objective “technical information, but also values, ethics, and tacit assumptions represented in goals” (Drombrowski, 2000, p. 3). And, with the advent of new information technologies comes new rhetorical powers in how different kinds of information is represented and shared. This is especially true when researchers and designers are working with new communities in diverse cultural settings. Sun (2012) furthers the need for both user-centered design and the methods used to be sensitive and applicable to different cultures. Identifying a significant issue with the way “culture” was framed in user-experience literature, Sun (2012) argues that culture cannot be reduced to simple business mores, geopolitical boundaries, and images of idealized and stereotyped individuals. User experience guides have focused too much on understanding culture as an added guideline or consideration, yet culture, as Sun identifies, needs to be placed to the forefront of technology design. Constructing a methodological model for Culturally Localized User Experience (CLUE), Sun (2012) offers a sound theoretical and methodological approach to ensure that technology 8 design is richly grounded in local contexts of use and valued with culture at the center of the process. As work is becoming globally distributed and technologies are designed to mediate the communication of work across borders, languages, and cultures, CLUE serves as a useful strategy for design that values culture and local context. Yet while user experience design has tended to emphasize technologies in workplace, corporate, or enterprise environments, Sun (2012) notes that everyday technologies, such as mobile devices, can benefit enormously from a framework such as CLUE. With CLUE as a guiding concept for this dissertation, I can identify, define, and interpret userresistance as it happens, paying particular attention to the contexts, cultures, and communities in which it is constructed. User-centered design and user-resistance. Although technical communication draws from user-centered design, little is done to link these principles to that of prevailing user resistance narratives in the wake of interface design changes. Audience reception and user acceptance (Ede & Lunsford, 1984; Ceccarelli, 2009; Harris, 2009; Warren, 2004) offers one way to access user experiences, but does not account for the ways in which users write, express, and share their discontent and defiance. It is my hope to bridge the perceived gaps in literature and make more lucid what technical communicators can learn from user resistance and how narratives of resistance can be agents of change toward more successful communication and technology design and exchange. In isolating user-centered, participatory, and ethical design principles, I believe that user-resistance fits squarely in the middle. Each represents an area in technical communication that does attend to issues of resistance. However, resistance is 9 discussed as it pertains to the role of the technical communicator, not the users of the systems, tools, and technologies they have a hand in building. For example, technical communicators resist traditional design processes by listening to and valuing users experience, feedback and expertise. Technical communicators resist biased or deceptive design by implementing sound and ethical design choices rooted in culturally aware practices. Technical communicators resist Westernized representations and structures in technologies, resisting universal design. As such, it is important for researchers to instead look outward and pay special attention to the explicit act of user resistance as it relates to technology design and implementation. Doing so offers new strains of thought regarding user experience and adds a layer of complexity to the ways culture, identity, and power is constructed in designing systems, structures and processes. Defining User-Resistance Across Disciplines The term user resistance emerged from fields like Information Technology, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Systems, Management Studies among others, with the earliest definition I found dating back to 1983 (Markus). According to M. Lynne Markus, a scholar of Management Information Studies, user-resistance is “behavior intended to prevent the implementation and use of new systems, or to prevent system designers from achieving their objectives” (p. 430). He positions resistance as a phenomenon meant to be avoided before it occurs—as an obstacle in the implementation process. Many other representations of user-resistance take on the same negative valence that Markus promotes. In fields such as Information Technology and Organizational Studies, user-resistance is defined as a multifaceted phenomenon, 10 which brings forth unanticipated delays, costs and instabilities into the process of strategic change (Ansoff, 1988; Klaus, Wingreen & Blanton, 2010). Other likeminded scholars see resistance acting as a way to avoid change (Zaltman & Duncan, 1997; Ashforth & Mael, 1998). This resistance to change is rooted in stakeholder narratives of gains and losses. In an enterprise setting, avoiding losses are vital to a company’s success. Change requires time for users to learn and adopt new practices and tasks, which can deplete resources such as time and money. To stakeholders, efficiency is key and avoiding any kind of loss is an obstacle to success (Markus, 1983). In this way, perceptions of user-resistance value the system, softwares, and technologies that businesses and companies use to ensure success and forward motion in their enterprise. Table 1 offers a way of visualizing the different definitions of resistance that run across fields like Information Systems, Organizational Studies, Management Studies, Digital Humanities, and Technical Communication. The definitions presented are not meant to be an exhaustive attempt to describe how different fields conceptualize resistance. Instead, they begin to offer glimpses of the language used to explain resistance to different areas of scholarship, which illuminates the different values held by certain fields. For instance, humanities-based fields use language like “power,” “agency,” “identity,” and “culture”—words that seem to highlight the role and agency of the resister. On the other hand, fields like Information Systems and Management Studies use language that emphasizes the (negative) impact of the resister on the technologies resisted upon. Words such as “prevent” “adverse” and “sabotage” characterize user 11 actions and their impact on systems and technologies. Such language casts the word resistance as a pejorative to most IT-related fields. It is also important to note that much of the definitions that are most commonly adopted in these fields are decades old, some even predating the web. This calls into question the role of “user” and how it should be defined in relation to resistance. The differences in the ways users are seen as passive agents in the implementation of information systems to rhetorical agents in digital social networks has a massive impact on the ways user resistance manifests itself today in environments that aren’t necessarily linked to enterprise. I define enterprise, in this context, to mean the activity that occurs within a business or company. The enterprise technologies that many of these scholars research are software created to satisfy company needs, not individual employee needs. Examples of this might be communication portals (such as an emailing client), accounting systems, and customer relationship management. Because of the heavy focus on such enterprise settings, it is no wonder that prevailing definitions of user-resistance take on a negative cautionary valence. Table 1: Selected definitions of resistance. AUTHOR/S FIELD DEFINITION Duncombe Sociology “the practice of using (2007) meanings and symbols, that is, culture, to contest and combat a dominant power, often constructing a different vision of the world in the process” 12 CONTEXT Duncombe places resistance within the scope of different cultures—does so by focusing less on deficits or impediments created by resistance and more so on production and means of production. Table 1 (cont’d) Sholle (1990) Cultural Studies Wharton (2014) Digital Humanities Hirshheim & Newman (1988) Information Systems “...defensive activities [...] that [...] work to limit the capacity of power to define the parameters of action.” Resistance is “refusal to participate in a strategic contest that power dictates,” i.e., “a rule-breaking activity” aimed at “encourag[ing] or discourag[ing] other activities aimed at altering power effects.” “rule-breaking, interfering with and perhaps even restructuring power relationships” “an adverse reaction to a proposed change which may manifest itself in a visible, overt fashion (such as through sabotage or direct opposition) or it may be less obvious and overt (such as relying on inertia to stall and ultimately kill a project).” 13 Sholle describes resistance by understanding how power relations — social, economic, political — work to perpetuate things like inequality or poverty or racism or “evil,” Wharton argues for the utility of resistance in the field of digital humanities as a way call to action to not just critique or make, but also bend and break concepts of DH. She also describes ways DH breaks or bends rules in its scholarship through issues of copyright and authorship/ownership Authors showcase the multiple ways resistance is manifested while proposing new ways of approaching a “traditionally...highly problematic area” Table 1 (cont’d) Howarth (2011) Communication “The ways in which Studies communicative exchange enables dominant representations to be challenged, rejected or transformed, for example through the articulation of oppositional representations” Marakas & Hornik (1996) Organizational Studies “a response to threats that an individual associates with a new system that diverges from ingrained user expectancies” Markus (1983) Management Information Systems “behavior intended to prevent the implementation and use of new systems, or to prevent system designers from achieving their objectives” Koerber (2006) Technical “resistance might initially Communication involve a form of rhetorical agency in which subjects simply occupy preexisting subject positions, but the effects of this agency-the acts of resistance-can disrupt the sense established by disciplinary rhetoric, exceeding the boundaries of these subject positions in unpredictable ways” 14 Howarth emphasizes the importance of resistance in the study of identity in communication studies arguing its inextricable link with representations of raced identities. Authors emphasize the rigidity and inflexibility of users to adapt to new systems through overt and covert means. Markus places resistance between system characteristics and the social context of technology use by describing different implementation systems. Koerber discusses how acts of resistance usher in ways to obtain rhetorical agency. She does this by presenting the resistant acts of women who breastfeed. Table 1 (cont’d) Biesecker (1992) Foucault (1976) Rhetoric “There exist “‘virtual break[s]’ or structure[s] of excess” (p. 357) within systems of intelligibility, wherein discursive and embodied practices might be performed in ways that do not correspond with established lines of making sense.” In his reading of Foucault, Biesecker discusses how resistance emerges from disruption of codified systems of power. Social Theory Resistant acts "can only exist in the strategic field of power relations," such acts do not have to be understood as just "a reaction or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat" (p. 95) As a way to understand human sexuality, Foucault discusses issues of power, which he breaks up into 5 proponents (one of which being resistance) Following closer to my aims in researching user resistance is Management Studies, which has considered resistance as a source of information, being useful in learning how to develop a more successful change process (Beer and Eisenstat, 1996; Goldstein, 1988; Lawrence, 1954; Piderit, 2000; Waddell & Sohal, 1998). In this way, resistance is not a negative concept in general because it could show change managers certain aspects that are not properly considered in the change process (Waddell & Sohal, 1998). As these scholars have shown, thinking about resistance as a mode of productivity is nothing new, and many see resistance as an important aspect of implementation success. However, few studies (e.g., Joshi 1991; Lapointe & Rivard 2005; Martinko et al. 1996) have proposed theoretical explanations of user resistance. 15 Among the theoretical explanations, Markus (1983) explains user resistance in terms of the interaction between system characteristics and the social context of its use. The interaction is mainly seen in the change in intra-organizational power distribution with the new system, where loss of power can lead to resistance by the group of users. Marakas and Hornik (1996) explain resistance behavior as a response to threats that an individual associates with a new system that diverges from ingrained user expectancies. Fear of change is described by Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) in their Status Quo Bias Theory, which aims to explain people’s preference for maintaining their current status or situation. Maintaining the status quo is achieved in three ways: rational decision-making, cognitive misperceptions, and psychological commitments. Rational decision-making refers to the cost-benefit analysis users undergo when making choices in the technologies they use. Cognitive misperceptions are closely tied to rational decision-making, but refers to the perceived loss aversion of new information systems, where the losses are perceived more harmful than gains. The third category of status quo bias theory refers to the effort of users to feel in control of their technology use. Although these theories do offer some insight into the motivations of user resistance, they do not encapsulate the relationships between users and the digital spaces they occupy outside of enterprise settings. Defining User-Resistance in Technical Communication and Related Fields Although user-resistance is a commonly researched subject in IT related fields, the term itself is completely absent from technical communication scholarship. As the goals of technical communication lie in understanding the relationship between users, technologies, communication and culture, I turn to the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology’s entry on cultural resistance, which is: “the practice of using meanings and 16 symbols, that is, culture, to contest and combat a dominant power, often constructing a different vision of the world in the process” (Duncombe, 2007). Duncombe’s entry on cultural resistance is useful in articulating my own definition of user resistance because it focuses less on failure and more on users and production. As such, it helps open the space for discussions of what resistance looks like from a humanities standpoint, and allows me to begin conceptualizing, defining, and describing what resistance can be through the data, text, and images users create in response to interface design changes. But, as of now, there exists little description of user-resistance in humanitiesbased fields. Instead, resistance-like behaviors are hidden under different terms, such as “griefing,” “participatory,” “disruption,” and “non-use” (Beale, McKittrick and Richards, 2016, Potts, 2013, Thoren & Kitzmann, 2015; Baumer et. al, 2015). All of these terms are useful in working toward a definition of user resistance in fields more central to technical communication and user experience, but they describe nuanced behaviors that I think diverge from the act of resisting in significant ways. Griefing Taking a closer look at the aforementioned terms, griefing refers to the intentional destruction of gameplay in games like Minecraft and points to the ways technical communicators see resistance manifesting in different arenas, such as game studies. According to Beale, McKittirck & Richards, “griefers often enter worlds under positive pretenses, cooperating at first and gaining trust before carrying out their grief to elicit an even greater reaction from their targets” (p. 192). As such, they do not destroy gameplay to ruin other gamer’s experiences. Rather, “griefers employ subversive, kairotic tactics that resist and/or circumvent strategies imposed by the game’s 17 designers” (p. 193). In this way, the purpose of greifing is to create a gaming experience that does not align with the developers intention, but instead for users to find their own meaning for the game. This kind of behavior is analogous with user resistance because it does not seek to troll, halt, or ruin spaces of collaboration and production. User Participation Participation, when applied to online spaces, is a term that describes the collaboration between user experience designers and experience architects and participants of the spaces they create to creating new technologies that promote social cohesion across multiple platforms (Potts, 2013,p. 98). This kind of participation extends the purpose of a technology or platform in ways that attend to the user’s needs. Potts, for example, uses social media as a lens for participatory culture in the wake of disaster. The use of hashtags and folksonomies are two examples of how everyday users extend—or resist—the given structures of an interface. These acts are resistant in the ways they bend or push the boundaries of how developers intended for hashtags to function. These acts, although not destructive, push against the “powers” of developers, which runs analogous to definitions of resistance that are inextricably linked with issues of power and dismantling power structures. Non-use Non-use signals “an individual’s attempt to regain (a sense of) self-control over their own technology use” (e.g., Ames, 2013; Baumer, et al., 2013; Schoenebeck, 2014). With other non-use cases, control is gained through resisting the temptation to use a particular technology. In both cases, non-use can act as a way for individuals or groups to perform a particular sociocultural ideology. For instance, Portwood-Stacer 18 (2013) discuss how the non-use of social media site Facebook represents a rejection of neoliberal values of commodification. Others see non-use as conspicuous nonconsumption and a way to opt out of certain information and communication technologies (Gomez et al, 2015). Non-use represents an act of deliberate avoidance of a technology, tool, or application. In this way, non-use offers a useful lens into the relationship between agency and technology and how users attempt to control their use and consumption of digital data. Naming Resistance as its Own Act Useful to this study is the way these definitions situate and underscore the contexts for specific user actions. Unlike the predominant definitions of user-resistance that emerge from fields like Human-Computer Interaction, definitions of user-resistance value the users and their individual or collective motivation for resisting a particular technology, application, software or interface. However useful these models are, they do not encompass the act of resisting fully. Instead, they describe outcomes of user resistance rather than the behaviors, or indicators of user resistance. As such, they do not attend to the theorization of user resistance. It is also important to note that my definition of user is not meant to denote passivity, as a term meant to strip away agency from the people who participate actively in technology consumption/design. Instead, my definition of user is more akin to what Liza Potts (2013) calls “participant” someone who is an active agent in their technology use. With users becoming more and more integral in the design process of technologies through things like usability testing and research, the relationship between users and designers/developers is becoming blurred. Because of this, users are not only consuming information, content, and data, they are also 19 producing it and actively shaping the development of technologies. This convergence of roles can be equated to the term prosumer, which a term coined by American futurist, Alvin Toffler (1980) in his book, The Third Wave. In it, he defined prosumerism as the blend between consumer and producer. Later, the term was adopted by marketing fields to mean professional consumer (Sharma, Patterson & Dawes, 1997), which later transformed into users becoming brand advocates. Dan Anderson (2013) introduced the term into computers and writing scholarship by taking a prosumer approach to teaching new media literacies. According to Anderson, “in computing, prosumer refers to the convergence of professional and consumer level equipment and software.” By combining professional and consumer level equipment, professionals are able to do things with less and for nonexperts to have access to tools that experts use. Because of this, prosumerism is a channel through which to teach new media literacy—by producing, one can be a more critical consumer. Students are able to understand the work of editing a video, the precision of evoking a mood through music, and the decisiveness of piecing video clips together. More importantly, the term prosumer grants agency to an individual in a traditionally passive role. Toward a Theory of User Resistance With the former definitions in mind, resistance functions more as a productive art in much the same way that Sullivan & Porter (2001) view rhetoric as a “productive art, one that is imbricated with the practical arts of politics and ethics.” Art, in this sense, works in much the same way as techne, or craft/skill. As such, successful acts of resistance require a certain skillset to produce a certain outcome (such as reform). Much of the work surveyed for this project casts user resistance as a problem to be 20 solved, or a phenomenon to overcome before it occurs to prevent losing money with the launch of new enterprise systems. As such, there has been a considerable lapse in the literature describing what user resistance looks like and how to attend to resistance in ways that honor its production and take into consideration the cultural and ideological reasons for resisting. My conceptualization sees resistance as an entry point for theorizing and understanding user behavior and digital cultural production. To do this, I draw from Vinthagen & Johnson’s (2013) analysis of “everyday resistance2” to position user resistance within the everyday practices of users in dynamic online spaces. Simply put, everyday resistance is “about how people act in their everyday lives in ways that might undermine power” (p. 2). The relationship between resistance and power is important in my analysis because everyday resistance, by definition, is mundane, dull, insignificant—it is often comprised of acts that might not even be defined as resistance to those resisting. Because of this, isolating and analyzing everyday, normalized practices as resistant can be a difficult task, which necessitates an attention to systems of power. The relationship between power and resistance is so enmeshed that, according to Michel Foucault, “where there is power, there is resistance” (1978, p. 76). Power, in this project, aligns with the Foucauldian understanding that power is a concept that is practiced in all areas by all people. That power is “diffused rather than concentrated, embodied and enacted rather than possessed, discursive rather than purely coercive, and constitutes agents rather than being deployed by them” (Gaventa, 2003, p. 1). In essense, “power is everywhere” and more importantly, it is not confined 2 The term “everyday resistance” was popularized by James Scott in 1985 in order to theorize the non-political, non-confrontational, and non-rebellious acts of resistance that often get overlooked by theorists in resistance studies. 21 to discussions about politics and revolutions, instead, power is an everyday phenomenon that is a highly social and embodied practice (Foucault, 1991). With this in mind, I can better understand the normalized, everyday acts that exist only in relation to structures of power. In this way, my theorization of resistance acts does not see acts of resistance as necessarily destructive to forward momentum in the use of technologies, but instead, productive points of entry to understanding how users create their own success in online spaces in their own terms. I do this by pivoting discussion of user-resistance from valuing stakeholders, businesses, and systems to valuing the people that use, create, share, and connect with different technologies and softwares. In chapters three and four, I discuss two examples of how users rhetorically construct their resistance. Recasting resistance as productive line of inquiry and investigation is useful for technical communicators and professional writers because it fits squarely into the pursuit of understanding the relationship between technology, users, communication, and culture (Kimme Hea, 2014, p. 2). Alongside that, attending to user resistance can enhance discussions of user-centered and ethical design principles by pointing toward new ways of thinking about and creating better, more sustainable digital experiences for users—experiences that attend to the dynamic nature of user needs and practices. In doing so, the field of technical communication—and analogous fields like user experience and information architecture—can contribute to the training of professionals that can create digital experiences that can effectively respond to and accommodate acts of user resistance. In the following chapters, I discuss both the actions and the settings of user resistance in order to point to areas of tension, to places where systems 22 and design processes overlook the global and local contexts of users and how to mediate it. I do this by offering a methodology of seeing and understanding user resistance in chapter two, which I then use to guide my analysis of two examples of user resistance in chapters three and four. I conclude my dissertation by offering implications for my study in the field of technical communication and beyond. 23 CHAPTER TWO: METHODS & METHODOLOGY Introduction In the previous chapter, I discussed the absence of scholarship surrounding issues of user resistance and resistance as it relates to technology in the field of technical communication. In my pursuit of situating, highlighting and connecting the term resistance to technical communication, I was led to three overarching research questions, which guide my project: 1) What does resistance look like in dynamic online spaces? (Or, how does user resistance manifest itself? Through images? Text? Both?) 2) Who are the actors involved in user resistance and what roles do they play? How do factors like identity, power, status, influence, and number of followers figure into these roles and their outcomes3? 3) What material, digital, and cultural tools do users employ to resist online? In this chapter, I outline my methodological approach to answering the questions listed above by defining and theorizing user resistance in two ways. The first is through the creation of a visualization that can help researchers better understand the connotations, terminology, and implications of the term resistance and how technical communication can contribute to re-defining user resistance in new and productive ways. A goal of this visualization is to provide an analytical tool on which to map resistance as it occurs on online spaces. The second approach, which I will discuss further in chapters three and 3 In the context of my analysis of Tumblr, status refers to title (users vs. developers). Influence and numbers refer to how users gain popularity (“tumblarity”) based on how many followers they have, which in turn, dictates their reach to wider audiences. 24 four, is the analysis of two case studies, which showcase how users articulate their resistance through narratives, pictures/images, memes, and support. Ultimately, these case studies can help illustrate to researchers what user resistance looks like in dynamic online spaces and the types of environments necessary to help support acts of user resistance. Building a Methodology of Mapping Resistance Taxonomies I will begin by addressing my process of constructing my user resistance visualization. To do this work, I conducted a rhetorical content analysis of the term “resistance” in nearly 5,000 journal articles within the field of technical communication4 from 1972 to present. I focused on these journals in particular because they were easily accessible and searchable on the database, Web of Science. I chose this particular database because it yielded the most exhaustive results when trying to isolate terms and topics. These search results include full text from articles, reviews, editorials, proceedings, citations, biographical information, notes, and corrections. Not only that, but Web of Science allows users to export all text data from search results as a tabdelimited file, which was necessary to import into Vosviewer, a data visualization tool. Choosing Vosviewer gave me an entire textual and bibliometric network of the different terms and words used in all 4,814 articles in the aforementioned journals. In my initial visualization (see Figure 1), I was able to get a birds-eye view of the most commonly used terms in technical communication journals as well as their connection to associated words and ideas. For instance, “teaching” was often linked to “student.” (see 4 Technical Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and Journal of Technical Writing and Communication. 25 figure 2). These kinds of connections offered a surface level opportunity for analysis and correlation, but my dataset was too large to draw any kind of meaning. Figure 1: Vosviewer data visualization of text from 4,814 technical communication articles. The generated visualization was also unhelpful when isolating the term “resistance,” which was met with only 11 occurrences in all of the journal articles searched. Of those 11 occurrences, resistance was only used in relationship to technology twice (Coggio, 2015) and each of those times was in regards to user-adoption of a technology— focusing more on outcomes of resistance, not necessarily processes of resistance. Additionally, when located on the Vosviewer network (see Figure 2), resistance was such an insignificant term that it did not have any meaningful connections to other, more commonly used terms. That is, the resistance “node” did not have any links to other 26 terms at all. This was interesting because it highlighted how little the field discussed “resistance” and it also gave impetus to create a more meaningful depiction of its use and definitions. To further explore how connotations of resistance is constructed by a field, I sought to make a new visualization that took my Vosviewer network one step further. Figure 2: “Resistance” on Vosviewer visualization As noted in the previous chapter, definitions of resistance (from fields like Information Technology) value the systems and not the users. As such, I wanted to create a visual to illustrate this imbalance of “power”—a word so often used to anchor most discussions of resistance in both humanities-based fields and non-humanities based fields (see Figure 3). To do this, I read and synthesized definitions of resistance in fields like Information Technology, Information Science, Psychology, Technical communication, Sociology, etc to gauge how different fields situate resistance. A table of my findings can be found in chapter one. My goal in doing this would be to depict and 27 articulate a taxonomy of resistance that can be used to pivot the attitudes toward resistance in productive ways. My first attempt to visualize the different keywords used to define resistance took the idea of a scatterplot and situated each keyword with the field in which it was used. Highlighted keywords were picked based on their proximity to the word resistance in definitions and based on their strength or ability to move a definition forward. For instance, common words like “because” and “the” were coded as “weak” words as they did not add anything meaningful to the definition. My method for analyzing the strength of each word was not robust, but it did help me see the major takeaways from each definition. Each keyword took on a different color bubble to distinguish between unique words. The size of each bubble was dependent on how often the word was used and the frequency with which resistance was defined in respective fields. For instance, the biggest bubble, “power” is seen in the middle because it was used in all fields and was the most commonly used word to define and contextualize resistance. Other words like “sabotage,” “prevent,” and “error” occupy bigger bubbles on the bottom right side because these words were more often referenced than words like “agency,” “identity,” and “culture.” The goal in creating this visualization was to map the taxonomy of resistance on a semi-linear scale which allowed me to see the imbalances in how resistance was characterized. Of most importance in my visualization is how the keywords associated with humanities based fields were much more invested in the subjectivities of users, or agents of resistance. That is, humanities-based fields deployed a user-centered approach to define resistance, whereas non-humanities based fields used much more destructive language to describe users. In other words, these definitions were systems- 28 centered. By visually mapping out these discrepancies, my aim was to showcase the imbalances in how resistance is perceived. Figure 3: First data visualization of resistance definition keywords found in TC, IT, IS, MS, etc. Although my first visualization was a good start to understanding the attitudes toward resistance, it did not effectively portray the imbalances of both frequency of use and connotation of the keywords found in the definitions. To mitigate this, I decided to create a matrix (see Figure 4) using the same data used for the first visualization to better portray the relationships between the keywords I isolated. Using a matrix type grid helped me more accurately place each keyword within the field they originated in a way that represented more clearly the connotation, attitude and implication of the 29 definition. The matrix also helps illustrate more strongly how often technology and science based fields discuss user resistance vs humanities based fields like rhetoric and composition. Figure 4: Revised data visualization of resistance keywords Reading the Taxonomies: Understanding Tensions in Definitions As seen in Figure 4, humanities-based fields value the user and define resistance in terms that empower users and make space for agency. On the other end of the spectrum, IT-related fields value the system and cast resistance as an issue of user error or failure. What’s interesting is that while “user resistance” is not explicitly 30 defined in fields that comprise the left quadrants, they place emphasis on the users, whereas fields that comprise the right quadrants use and deploy the term “user resistance” with very little concern for the identities, cultures, and contexts of those users. Because of this, focusing on and theorizing articulations of user resistance can help designers and developers understand the local contexts of users and the “everyday resistance” they encounter and articulate (Vinthagen & Johanssen, 2013 via Scott, 1985). These everyday resistances can be mundane acts of subversion or subtle ways users undermine the systems put in place by designers and developers. Important also is how prominent the word power was to all definitions across all disciplines. Whether it was explicitly stated or not, most conceptualizations of resistance function around issues of power—either as a way to dismantle it or as a way to reinforce power differentials. I believe that this map allows researchers to see, more specifically, the existing asymmetry in approaches to understanding and theorizing resistance and opens the space for inquiry. Where there is white space, there is room for challenging, re-orienting, and redefining. With this map in mind, technical communication researchers and practitioners can attend to user resistance, which can help alleviate this imbalance. Building a Methodology of Identifying Resistance My dissertation project relies on qualitative methods to collect, interpret, and present my data. For the purposes of this dissertation project, qualitative research methods were used to ensure flexibility within the research plan since my data is culled from a sometimes tenuous social media space. As Alice Daer and Liza Potts (2014) pointed out, “in the world of measuring social media use, variety is constant” (p.24). A qualitative methodology provides me with the tools necessary to respond to moments of 31 change and dynamism. Similarly, my methodology is informed by Sun’s (2012) Culturally Located User Experience (CLUE), which allows me to account for experiences and articulations of resistance in a way that embraces and illuminates the contexts in which they are constructed and situated. Localizing my research in this way adheres to a “design philosophy that integrates action and meaning in technology design in order to make a technology usable and meaningful to culturally diverse users” (Sun, 2012, p. 267). Localization also helps break a monolithic understanding of “users” and how they engage with technology, which is key to understanding how and why users resist online. Ultimately, my methodology is informed by my own experiences as a marginalized user—someone who does not often see their identity as a woman of color represented and celebrated in westernized, mainstream media. Data Collection In order to see and trace the everyday user resistances that manifest in online spaces, I chose to analyze two case studies from the social medial platform Tumblr to investigate the exigency—the need for resisting, processes—the acts of resisting, and outcomes—the results of resisting, of two examples. Each case has given me a robust picture of how everyday resistance is enacted by users of the site in two distinct ways. The first of which chronicles the reaction to the removal of the reply function on the site. The second of which is the #Blackout movement, a networked act of resistance to the hegemonic powers that Tumblr staff reinforced through their official blog and featured content on that blog. Together, these examples present a range of how resistance can be identified: as a way of undermining interface design changes that defy user needs and a way of subverting systematic racial oppression. Tumblr offers an interesting and 32 rich environment in which to situate my analysis because of the complex ways users create and share content and connect with each other. It is at once a social networking site and a blogging platform that houses a variety of textual, visual and audio discourse. It is a site where I believe “everyday resistance” is made public in interesting ways. My choice to situate my analysis within Tumblr will be explore in more depth in chapter three. Data Analysis As such, I sought to use public displays of—what I deemed—resistance as points of analysis in my project. I wanted to see how users created, composed, and shared their resistance as it occurred and in situ. More importantly, I wanted to see how users constructed their resistance rhetorically—what rhetorical moves signify resistance? How is resistance articulated? To do this, I used Tumblr’s tracked tagging function to track and collect material—both visual and textual—as it pertained to both the reply function removal, henceforth referred to as #replybutton, and the #blackout movement. The data consisted of 6005 public blog posts with more than 50 notes (points of sharing) on each post. I chose these particular blog posts for two reasons 1) they had a range wide range of exposure and 2) they contained both images and text to help amplify acts of resistance. That is, posts with just images (but thousands of notes) did not offer as much content for my rhetorical content analysis. The amount of notes is significant because it signifies how popular a post is by quantifying how many people liked, shared, and commented on a blog post. 5 I split my data up into two distinct sections: #replybutton and #blackout. I gathered and analyzed 300 public posts categorized as #replybutton and 300 public posts categorized as #blackout. Each containing ~400,000 notes between them. 33 Although the posts I will be analyzing are all public, highly visible, and easily accessible, it is important to consider the ethical use of digital data, both in gathering and interpreting. To do this, I adopted Accenture Lab’s (2016) Universal Principles for Data Ethics, which helps set boundaries and guidelines for using digital data in ways that attend to the intent of the data creator. Below is a selection of principles that will drive my ethical digital data collection: 1. The highest priority is to respect the persons behind the data. When dealing with digital artifacts, it is easy to take comments, posts and images and place our own (i.e. the researcher’s) assumptions on it because the author of that data is not present to speak on behalf of it. As such, researcher bias, subjectivity, and research goals could potentially misalign with the original intent of the artifact. Because of this, it is important to respect the context in which the data was presented in situ. 2. Seek to match privacy and security safeguards with privacy and security expectations. Most people creating digital content for public consumption understand the reach and audience of their work. However, it isn’t always the case where privacy safeguards are made clear to the user and posts that were made under the assumption of privacy can be accessed through convoluted channels. This is especially true on a site like tumblr, where anyone can view a public blog—not just their followers. As such, it is important to work with data that is meant for public consumption and easily and highly visible. 3. Be wary of collecting data just for the sake of having more data. Because of the sheer volume of digital data being created everyday and the ease with which 34 to access and mine data, it is important to take a quality over quantity approach to research. 4. Data can be a tool of both inclusion and exclusion. Related to the first list item, digital data can be used to meet the needs of the researcher and not necessarily the producer of that data. As such, it can be easy succumb to researcher privilege and overlook the different ways people are affected by the processes of data collection, correlation, and analysis. 5. Aspire to design practices that incorporate transparency, configurability, accountability, and auditability. Overall, it is important to be deliberate and thoughtful in the ways digital data is used with the underlying goal of transparency—make users and content creators aware of how their words and images are being used in research. With these principles in mind, I will use qualitative empirical observation and rhetorical content analysis to attempt to both see and understand user resistance, which I will discuss in further detail in chapters three and four. Rhetorical Content Analysis To do the work of understanding where and how user resistance occurs, I employed a rhetorical content analysis to all my data. At its core, content analysis is a systematic analysis of specific informational elements (i.e., individual characteristics within a message that show the way a specific keyword is used). Though sometimes defined as a sub-set of thematic analysis (Guest, MacQueen & Namey, 2012; Braun and Clarke, 2006), content analysis is a distinct interpretation method that makes inferences based on the context in which a unit of data is used (Krippendorff, 2013). 35 Klaus Krippendorff (2013), in his book Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology, argues that while content analysis has its roots in engineering and the sciences, when used to examine textual information it is inherently qualitative. He points out that texts themselves are interpreted by the reader, and it is the burden of the content analyst to be explicitly clear in the coding scheme being used to present replicable data. Moreover, content analysis allows the researcher to categorize data, but in content analysis categorizations are based on the content (ERSC, 2015). This provides researchers with a means of interpretation similar to the themes utilized in thematic analysis, but presents a more observable picture of the data unit. Employing a rhetorical content analysis allows me to better understand the articulations of user resistance in a way that honors its place of utterance—the actors involved, and the digital space it occupies. My data analysis included both the content from the blog posts (images, visuals, text) as well as the type of notes it received (reblog, like, comments). Because of the sheer volume of notes each post gets, it would be too large of a task to analyze the content of each individual note a post receives. Instead, focusing on the kinds of interaction and sharing that happens helped me better understand the nature of the circulation of these posts. Although my case studies reveal two different kinds of resistance, I initially used the same coding scheme for each—in the hopes of showcasing how resistance can manifest itself in multiple venues for multiple reasons and still be traceable and identified by researchers. However, this seemed too difficult of a task since the data set for each example of resistance was too distinct and illustrated different ways that users employed tactics of resistance and responded to power 36 imbalances. My creation of two separate coding schemes also aligns with Vinthagen’s (2013) assertion that articulations of everyday resistance are “heterogenic and contingent due to changing contexts and situations (not a universal strategy or coherent action form)” (p. 49). Because I am concerned with everyday resistance (i.e., my aim to to analyze acts that were not overtly rebellious or politically charged), it is important to situate each example in its own contexts, discourses, and outcomes. I outline my coding schemes in fuller detail in chapters three and four. As I developed and applied my coding schemes, I used DePew’s (2007) call for the triangulation of data and a modified grounded theory to look not just at texts but at contexts and users as well. According to DePew, “By designing such methodological strategies, researchers insert communicative participants into the process, which gives researchers the opportunity to see both the complex nature of the research site and apertures in the field’s tropes” (52). This methodological framework, in conjunction with my adherence to CLUE (Sun, 2012), helped guide my data analysis for my dissertation, which I will explain in detail in chapters three and four. Specifically, my adherence to CLUE informs how I approach the heterogeneity of resistance articulations and how they are culturally situated and highly contextualized. 37 CHAPTER THREE: RESISTING WITHIN A SYSTEM: THE CASE OF THE MISSING #REPLYBUTTON Introduction In chapter 2, I discussed my methodology for seeing and understanding user resistance. In this chapter, I will go into more detail about how I employed my methods to answer the research questions that drive my study. Namely, I was interested in understanding my first two questions: 1) what does resistance look like in dynamic online spaces, and 2) who are the actors involved in the act of resistance? In the pursuit of uncovering what user resistance looks like, I will discuss an example of how users resist within a system. In this chapter, I discuss how my conceptualization of user resistance can be applied to dynamic online spaces by making the argument for social media as a prime site of inquiry. I extend this discussion by placing my analysis within the micro-blogging and social media site, Tumblr. In the remainder of the chapter, I discuss how I collected and analyzed my data by offering examples and implications from my data set. Social Media and Technical Communication With much of the literature surrounding resistance taking place in enterprise settings, I am led to social media and the ways these sites facilitate platforms for acts of user resistance. Because I am focusing more so on the contexts, cultures, and communities of individual users, enterprise settings do little to reveal user resistance, as it presents a homogenized and linear view of technology use (users ascribing to company rules and guidelines, codes of conduct, company goals, etc). Social media, then, offers a better vantage point to explore what user-resistance can look like and how everyday resistances are made public in dynamic, networked, online spaces. Per danah 38 boyd and Nicole Ellison (2007), social media platforms (or social network sites) can be defined as “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semipublic profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.” Common examples include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Social media foster social interaction and, as Elise Verzosa Hurley and Amy Kimme Hea (2014) note, allow users to directly interact with content: social media are shifting users' expectations for how they interact with information, technology, and each other. Loosely defined as media that exploit Web 2.0 technologies to allow for more user interaction, especially opportunities for user-generated content, social media are often explicitly designed to foster social interactions (p. 57). Social media platforms and applications offer a different venue for the technical communicator, enabling audiences to have direct access to companies and organizations. Social media coordination has become an important position for organizations seeking to capitalize on this connection to their audience. Audiences are gravitating toward social media with over three billion people maintaining active social media accounts globally. Too, the role of social media has long since been studied by scholars of technical communication, with scholars investigating its relationship to participatory culture (Potts & Jones, 2011; Shaikh, 2009), professional engagement (Longo, 2014; Kaplan and Haenlin, 2010), and its application to traditional modes of technical communication through collaboration (e.g., moving from the press release to the social media release) 39 (Pitt, Parent, Steyn, Berthon, & Money, 2011). Other scholars have discussed social media as it relates to distributed work—both in educational and work settings, with many scholars addressing social media’s role in knowledge work (Spinuzzi, 2014; Zhou & Rosson, 2009). For example, Stacey Pigg (2014) asserts that social media allow technical communicators to ‘‘gain access to existing communities of practice, maintain a presence within them, and leverage community norms to circulate texts through them’’ (p. 70). In this way, the use of social media is a key practice for the success of distributed, collaborative work (allows employees to reach out, stay in touch, and vent about frustration instantaneously). Along with that, many like-minded scholars focus on social media and its role in the classroom with varying applications of its use. For some, social media is used as a pedagogical tool—a way to increase modes of communication along student-to-student and student-to-teacher lines (Fleckenstein, 2005; Kelm, 2011; Vie, 2008). In particular, Stephanie Vie (2008) maintained that composition instructors should feature social media sites like Facebook in classroom discussions and activities as a means of helping students attain critical media literacy in relation to formal learning goals and contexts. For others, social media use in the classroom endeavored to make students more critically aware and prepared for their futures as professionals in an increasingly networked world (Hurley & Kimme Hea, 2014; Melton & Hicks, 2011). Instructors of technical communication especially are well equipped to teach students how to mindfully traverse different social mediascapes (Meredith, 2012) because they understand how to navigate these spaces successfully, but also because they can effectively “demystify the current rhetorics of fear and illegitimacy about social media 40 [and professionalism]” (Hurley & Kimme Hea, 2014, p. 56). In both uses of social media—as a communication and teaching tool, and as a subject on which to teach, it is clear that classroom spaces are an ideal place to explore the intersections of technology, communication, and teaching. Despite the setting in which social media is used, the opportunities it provides for instant connection with one another is what unites much of the literature in the field. The ease of access and the abundance of channels users can take to network, interact, and communicate with one another has been enhanced through social media sites, technologies, and services. According to Kimme Hea, scholars in “technical communication know [social media] to be media that define, and are defined by, cultural, political, and rhetorical contexts; that change, and are changed by, human relationships; that reveal, and are revelatory of, power relations; and that articulate meaning, even as those media may renegotiate how those meanings are made and exchanged” (p. 5). In this way, social media is crucial for understanding the complex relationship between users and technologies. As Maggiani (2009) suggests, ‘‘in a social media setting, the skill set of the technical communicator grows’’ (p. 20). Not only do technical communicators need to be content experts, creating material that users will understand, social media necessitates the need for technical communicators to be a moderator, a collaborator, and most importantly, an advocate for user needs. Importantly, with the increasing globalization of social media use, technical communicator’s ability to gather, mediate, and act on user feedback needs to be mindful of the different contexts that comprise a growing population of users. 41 Potts (2014) follows up with this sentiment by advocating for the importance of technical communication in the wake of disasters. By analyzing the use of social networking sites as modes for transmitting information about disasters, Potts calls for an attention to user needs to create better, more intuitive interfaces for users. Essentially, technical communicators are tasked with the not only understanding how users share and consume media, but also how to help design and create spaces that can improve not only the experiences, but the lives, of users. In doing so, technical communicators can have a hand in enacting truly user-centered collaborative content. User Resistance and Social Media Situating the topic of user resistance in such a digital landscape aligns with much of the claims made about the importance of social media in technical communication. Through the open channels of communication that social media affords users, articulations of resistance are no longer between just users through covert channels— they are public, open, and direct. Because of this, listening to resistance articulations can be useful in the design of technology—if developers truly adopt a user-centered design philosophy and take heed of Sullivan’s (1989) call to make user feedback an iterative design moment. As technical communicators begin to expand their social media literacies in both work and educational settings, they can begin to identify where user resistance occurs, how it occurs, and how to intervene. For the purpose of my study, I am less concerned with the site itself, and more so with the functions and services it offers (Ferro & Zachry, 2014). Creating a distinction between sites and services was in response to the call by many scholars (boyd & Ellison, 2007; Beer, 2008) to develop meaningful categorizations between the terms 42 often associated with social media such as social networking sites (SNS) and Web 2.0 to ensure more descriptive analyses. By delineating sites (connected web pages, typically under one domain) and services (functions such as networking, blogging, media sharing, a/synchronous interaction, liking, etc), the study of social media can bypass the rapidly changing online landscape and the frequency with which certain sites fall in and out of favor. This distinction is especially useful with the advent and use of multi-purpose tools (such as Slack and Zapier) that automate and assemble tasks from multiple social media sites on one platform. For instance, Slack allows integrations from Twitter, Trello, and other social media sites6, which illustrates just how important user actions are (receiving alerts, staying up to date, instant messaging across multiple venues) rather than the service/setting that provides them. With this in mind, the actions of users sit at the forefront of my research and the sites in which they occur provides only context to the actions. This is not to undermine the contexts, as they very much have influence over the ways users interact with and produce content, this distinction is to emphasize the actions and behaviors and outcomes of user resistance. Why Tumblr? For the purpose of my study, system refers to the micro-blogging site, Tumblr. Founded in 2007, Tumblr, has grown at a rapid pace, boasting over 350 million blogs with over 150 billion posts made to date7. According to site co-creator David Karp, Tumblr was created for people to “post anything and customize everything.” Although many blogging platforms existed before the inception of Tumblr, Karp felt that many of 6 When doing a search of social media integrations for Slack, I was met with 25 different integrations that allow users to streamline various site services all on the Slack client. 7 Information is updated daily on their official website (tumblr.com/about). 43 these platforms (e.g. Blogger, Blogspot, etc.) did not allow users to take full control of the presentation of their content. With much of the existing blogging platforms controlled by engineers and developers, Karp and fellow web designer Marco Arment set to create a less restrictive blogging space, where users could have more agency in the design of information they create, share, and consume. Inspired by a niche group of bloggers called “tumbleloggers” and “tumblelogs,” Tumblr found its footing in users’ ability to post short-form content including images, text, quotes, videos, sound clips, links, etc. Tumblelogs, (an amalgam of “tumble” and “weblogger”) were created in 2005 by 17-year old German web developer, Chris Neukirchen, in an effort to transform traditional blogging practices. Tumblelogs are marked by their brevity and are distinctive from their traditional blogging counterparts because of their restriction to short bursts of information (text should be no more than a paragraph). Because of this, tumblelogging allowed users to post images, quotes, and links with little to no context, giving them the ability to produce posts with much higher frequency and much less aim (i.e., users could post random things they find interesting without providing a connective thread between the previous posts). With this short-form blogging foundation already in place, Tumblr decided to take the simplicity of tumblelogs and widen its audience by giving users the platform to register and create their own tumblelog—their own Tumblr—through the site. Many users flocked to the site, as it became “a global platform for creativity and self-expression” (tumblr.com/about) and a hub for creatives and artists wanting a place to share their work and get inspired by peers—and to do so in a way that gives them control over the customization of their content. Users are equipped with an HTML editor, 44 where they can craft the layout of their blog and how it is presented to followers or the public. Not only that, but Tumblr became a place where users could create and share content about anything they wanted—however random, obscure, or nonsensical8. On Tumblr, users have access to a dashboard—their own personalized feed that displays content produced and shared by the blogs they follow. Users can reblog (share with their followers), like, and comment on posts that appear on their dashboard (see Figure 5). Each of these actions constitutes a post’s notes. For example, if a post receives a reblog, a like, and a comment, it would have three notes even if those three actions were taken by the same user. Not only can users consume content from the dashboard, but they can also produce content by uploading text, images, gifs, videos, audio clips, quotes, links, etc. to share to their followers (see Figure 6). When uploading content for followers, users can tag posts with different keywords that allow for higher visibility and connectivity—this system of tagging is one way to make sense of the multitudes of posts being created every second. By streamlining and indexing posts, users can target their searches in meaningful ways. Figure 5: Screenshot of Tumblr’s methods for interaction between users. From left to right, users can share (to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or other social media sites), reply, reblog, and like content on their dashboards. 8 Popular blogs include: “If paintings could text” and “White men wearing Google Glass” 45 Figure 6: Screenshot of posting options that users can choose from to create a blog post. From left to right, users can: “Text; Photo; Quote; Link; Chat; Audio; Video” The Role of Social Media, Design Changes, and Resistance These features give users a full scope of control over their content production as well as their content consumption, making Tumblr one of the most visited websites in the US and the world9. Although the site continues to grow in popularity, and despite its ability for customization, users began to see some of the pitfalls that occur when engineers and developers change the design of the interface in the name of improvement. One such improvement came in the redesign of the way the act of rebloggging displayed on a single post. As Figure 7 depicts, the older version was a bit more chaotic and disjointed—it follows a nested, comment-tree system where interactions were hierarchical, non-linear, and followed a sometimes convoluted path between commenters. However messy the comment tree system was, users became accustomed to it, relying on the nested comments’ ability to tell a story. 9 As of June 2017, Tumblr falls at number 17 in the most popular sites in the US and 46 globally according to web analytics website, alexa.com. 46 Figure 7: Screenshot of Tumblr’s old comment-tree reblogging interface (left) and the new, streamlined, reblogging interface (right). By tracing the lines between comments, users could identify who was commenting to who and what user was responding to/reblogging from another user. With the new system in place, users lamented the fact that all text conversation were now streamlined with little visual indication of conversations. In this way, Tumbr staff chose a clean aesthetic over the established online conversational norms the Tumblr community had built. As these examples point out, social media spaces like Tumblr are rich landscapes to analyze resistance because they are constantly in-flux and 47 constantly renegotiating the value of different features and functions. As the commenting system shows, there is a complete disconnect between the value placed on commenting by users and developers. Users valued the nested comments ability to visually tell a story, whereas developers valued the streamlined and clean aesthetics that the new commenting system provided. This disconnect is carried through into my discussion of the missing #replybutton. Defining the Problem: Removing the #Replybutton On October 26, 2015, Tumblr staff posted a statement to their official blog10 announcing the removal of the reply function (henceforth referred to as #replybutton). The original post, which is the foundation of the data collected for this study, was titled “Pardon our dust” and read: “Hey, you know the reply feature? That little speech bubble icon at the bottom of some posts? That’s going away for a little while. We’re making room for something bigger and better coming down the pike. Stay tuned.” (staff blog post, Oct 26, 2015). After getting notes and attention from users, including questions about the reasoning behind their decision, the post was then edited with an addendum reading: “[Edit: our boss-man confirmed that replies are indeed coming back at some point.]” This blog post, like much of the announcements made through the official staff blog, was meant to create a sense of transparency between the people using the site and the people 10 The official Tumblr staff blog (staff.tumblr.com) is one way that users can gain access to news about the site first-hand. Much of the posts made by tumbr staff fall under their “commitment to making Tumblr an open and transparent platform for self-expression” (Tumblr Transparency Report). 48 creating the site. Although it was useful in preparing users for the removal of the #replybutton, it did not offer users any kind of explanation beyond a vague promise of a newer, more exciting feature. The opaque, veiled language used by Tumblr staff to explain design changes is the basis for backlash received by users. This backlash—or resistance—is comprised and articulated through the data collected for this chapter, which I will discuss in more detail further down. Although the #replybutton serves as my entry point into examining how users resist within a system, this chapter will also explore how other, similar design changes and site integrations incite or evoke what I believe to be user resistance. It is my hope to showcase, through these examples, how resistance is articulated within spaces—interfaces—and how resistance acts as a way of recovering lost or modified user action. A Tool for Creating Connectivity The #replybutton on tumblr—much like on other social networking sites—allowed users to directly engage with specific posts in ways that diverged from other messaging/conversational functions. For instance, replying differs from reblogging with commentary because replies are not added to the original post. Figure 3.2 showcases reblogging with commentary. When a person reblogs a post, they have the opportunity to add in their own text, images, video clips, etc as a way to publically continue a conversation or a way of reacting to a post’s content. Replying appealed to users because it allowed for a more direct mode of connectivity by targeting interaction between two people, centering on specific content. For instance, someone may create a blog post asking their followers for book recommendations. Any follower could respond through the reply button, which would make their responses visible in the notes section 49 of a post for anyone to see. In many ways, the #replybutton was a tool for discovery. It aggregated information for users to learn more about certain topics (e.g. books to read) and to do so in a way that did not change the integrity of the original post. Removing the reply function no longer gave users the ability to comment or communicate directly with the content of a specific post. Instead, users needed to send each other private messages about specific posts if they wanted to reach out. To many, the reply function allowed users to show appreciation for a post in ways that went beyond just liking it. According to one user, the ability to reply to someone’s post was “more than just a ‘like.’ They’re a way to fully express your feelings about something with the expectation of nothing in return. A gift.” (sukiyaza, 2015). Many users echoed this sentiment and sent Tumblr staff messages of frustration over their decision to remove the #replybutton with little explanation. Analysis of Power When discussing resistance, it is also important to interrogate the sources of power that incite such a response. As I discussed earlier in my dissertation, the relationship between power and resistance is so enmeshed that, according to Michel Foucault, “where there is power, there is resistance” (1978, p. 76). Power, in this project, aligns with the Foucauldian understanding that power is a concept that is practiced in all areas by all people. That power is “diffused rather than concentrated, embodied and enacted rather than possessed, discursive rather than purely coercive, and constitutes agents rather than being deployed by them” (Gaventa, 2003, p. 1). In essense, “power is everywhere” and more importantly, it is not confined to discussions about politics and revolutions, instead, power is an everyday phenomenon that is a 50 highly social and embodied practice (Foucault, 1991). For my analysis of power, I return to the original blog post that started the #bring-back-reply movement. In it, Tumblr Staff use coded language to keep users in the dark about 1) their reasons behind removing the feature and 2) if and when it will be coming back. In fact, the post did not indicate any specific reason for the removal of the function aside from introducing a new and improved feature. Not only did Tumblr staff leave users in the dark about the motivations behind this design change, but they did not offer any timeframe for when the #replybutton would be back—only a veiled promise of something “bigger and better.” This vague language persisted even after they edited the post to confirm that the #replybutton would be back “at some point.” As mentioned earlier, Tumblr staff used their official blog to keep users up to date about official site news, various updates, and miscellanea. To do this, the staff’s blog employed an informal and personable tone (exemplified in their use of informal salutation, “hey”). This writing style is a strategy for Tumblr staff to connect to users more directly, building trust between developer and user—trust that they broke through their vague language, and the moment that ushered in user resistance. Data Collection To investigate the everyday resistance that underlies the moments that occur after design changes, I sought to use public displays of, what I deemed as, user resistance, as points of analysis in my project. As I argued in an earlier chapter, resistance is the response to imbalances of power. With this in mind, I wanted to see how users created, composed, and shared their resistance as it occurred and in situ. To do this, I used Tumblr’s tracked tagging function to track and collect material—both 51 visual and textual—as it pertained to the #replybutton. For this chapter, I chose to analyze 300 public posts that chronicled the removal of the reply button, including blog posts made by the official tumblr staff and support blogs. The bulk of my data was collected via the popular hashtag #bring-back-replies. Many of these posts spawned from the original staff blog post announcing the removal of the feature and range from users that have large and small followings. Each post gathered notes that ranged from <50-90,000 notes, giving my data set a wider range of voices and circulation. As I mentioned in chapter two, I will not be analyzing the content of the notes, but rather, use them as an indicator of a posts success, distribution, and commonality between users. From the data set, I wanted to answer my initial research question: “what does user resistance look like?” To do this, I started out by creating a timeline of events on which I plotted each post. Doing this helped me see the scope of resistance, and how collective resistance is created (see Table 2). The #replybutton’s removal deeply upset users of Tumblr since its announcement, with many users not understanding the decision to eliminate the function entirely. Looking specifically at timeline of design changes, most users began expressing their disapproval of the removal of #replybutton when Tumblr staff announced they were rolling out a new feature to replace it. Instead of allowing users to reply to different posts, Tumblr introduced the instant messaging feature, which offered users a way to more directly interact with others through synchronous communication. 52 Table 2: Timeline of Tumblr’s design changes and announcements Date Event October 26, 2015 #replybutton is removed November 10, 2015 #replybutton is temporarily replaced with instant messaging February 9, 2016 Staff announces #replybutton will return March 28, 2016 #replybutton is reinstated However useful this might have seemed to Tumbr staff, many users were left confused about the elimination of one feature in favor of another. As one Tumblr user asked, “What if I don’t want to commit to a private conversation, I just want to leave an open response that others can also acknowledge?” (sleep-wizard, 2015). The user also pointed out that other social networks, like Facebook, offer both replies and commenting. In response to why the #replybutton was removed, site creator David Karp emphasized that the reply feature was “way too limited and barely used. (Only a few thousand blogs a month were even receiving them.)” (david, 2015). The company explained that it had pulled the #replybutton to accommodate the various overlapping message-like systems, including “asks” (where users can submit an “ask” to another person’s blog, which, when answered, would be published on their blog for their followers to see), fan mail (the ability to send compliments, accolades, or otherwise positive feedback and inspiration to any other blog), and reblogging with commentary. The disconnect in perceived value is where user resistance lies—with the #replybutton, users created a very niche and important discourse practice that deviated from what Tumblr staff believed it to have (“only a few thousand blogs receiving them a month”). 53 To the staff, replies were “limited,” but to users, replies were an important tool for building and sustaining relationships. The user resistance in the case of the missing #replybutton showcases Tumbr’s oversight on a crucial conversational feature. Data Analysis With the creation of this timeline, I was able to map each post chronologically and make my first of three analytical passes. One of the limitations of my data set was how much of the content on Tumblr aligned with the micro-blogging structure. That is, many of the posts are no more than a small paragraph long. However, I believe that the data presented in this chapter did allow me to see how users articulated and shared their resistance in interesting ways—in ways that were consistent and deliberate. With this in mind, my first pass allowed me to see more holistically what was happening in these posts as they related to the timeline of events. I then did what Miles, Huberman and Saldana (2013) call “clustering” to make sense of my data—to compartmentalize the different kinds of discourse happening, which can be seen in my coding scheme below (Table 3). In my scheme, I identified three overarching rhetorical moves that characterize the different rhetorical moves being made by the users in response to the removal of the #replybutton. In my second interpretive pass, I developed the nine different codes that encompassed the resistance occurring in the #bring-back-reply hashtag. I believe these codes helped me in identifying what user resistance looks like, but also the different actors involved and how resistance is viewed by both sides (users and developers). With these codes in place, I identified all of the t-units (smallest unit of meaning) in each post and conducted my last interpretative pass, which involved two 54 rounds of analysis. Doing this helped me identify patterns in resistance articulations that resulted from the removal of the #replybutton. Table 3: Coding scheme for #replybutton Code Description # of occurrences Community-building moves: Bids to preserve or establish community SE: Shared experience (e.g. “we” “us” Articulating a sense of community or shared relationship 73 (300)11 CTA: Calls to action (let’s do this” “share, reblog, like”) Tasking users with sharing information, learning more, etc to sustain community 166 MSQ: Maintaining status quo (“remember when?” “I miss when…”) References to how things used to be 206 Identity-building moves: Bids to assert one’s place in the system A: Affect Use of humor, memes, emoticons 197 S: Story Using narrative to underscore experience, identity, etc; use of metaphor to describe value 178 NE: Negative emotion (“frustrating,” “annoyed”) Use of language that connotes anger or annoyance 220 Audience-building moves: Bids to power structures R: Requests (“Please” “I’m begging you”) Appeals for action 203 C: Call outs (@staff, @david, @support) Direct interaction with those in power 194 Q: Questioning (“why did you do this?” “when will you listen?”) Rhetorical and explicit interrogation 183 11 Everything that was posted using the hashtag #bring-back-reply was secondarily coded as articulating a shared experience. 55 Results and Findings In this section, I will discuss the overarching moves (community, identity, and audience building moves) and then offer examples of how users enacted each second level code. As evidenced by my coding scheme, the everyday resistance that I am concerned with is nuanced—it is varied and mundane. Many of the moves being made by the users of my data set would likely not categorize each rhetorical move as being an overt act of resistance, which underscores the nebulous nature of identifying user resistance as a significant and worthwhile phenomenon. As Vinthagen (2013) argues, “the existence of mundane or non-dramatic resistance shows that resistance could be understood as a continuum between public confrontations and hidden subversion” (p.3). It was my goal in creating this coding scheme to identify both the public confrontations (the bids to audience) and the hidden subversions (bids for preserving community) that took place on Tumblr. By splitting my codes into three categories—or clusters—I can see the major components that comprise resistance articulations: community-building moves, identity-building moves, and audience-building moves. These three categories also help me address my second research question: who are the actors involved in user resistance. Through my coding scheme, I can see where issues of power come into play and to whom resistance is targeted. It is important to note that the categories listed in my scheme are not mutually exclusive—that is, there exist moments in the articulations of resistance where users were displaying tactics that embodied more than one category. Categorizing the codes in this way helped me organize my data to illustrate a slice of user resistance—a phenomenon that is bound by the specific system (the Tumblr interface) and by specific 56 cultures (the Tumblr community). In the sections that follow, I address each major category and the rhetorical moves that comprise it. Community-Building Moves Preserving an existing community was fundamental to the resistance enacted by the users of my data. From the data, I saw community-building evidenced in three ways: 1) articulating shared experiences (SE), 2) calls to action (CTA), and 3) Maintaining the status quo (MSQ). Articulation of a shared experience (SE). This code was evidenced through the use of collective terminology including “we,” “us,” and “y’all.” Figure 8 is an example of how one user, hazelcat13, discusses the shared value of the #replybutton and how, collectively, users depended on it to strengthen or create bonds between users. In their post, they mention how “we like to comment on the creative work and posts of those we follow, love and support” (hazelcat13, 2015). “We,” in this instance, refers to the tumblr community, a place where, despite the differences in the topics and purposes of the content circulated, users could denote the same kind of appreciation through a simple reply. 57 Figure 8: Screenshot of user hazelcat13 articulating a shared experience (SE). During my initial coding, I expected there to be more explicit articulations of a shared experience through linguistic markers (“we” and “us”) because users were gathering to discuss a loss that affected many—a collective. However, because users were directing their resistance to a specific source (namely, site creator, David Karp, Tumblr Support, and Tumblr Staff), the subject of the posts shifted outside the community—as a way to reach outward and discuss the things that were valuable inward. This lack of explicit references to a shared experience does not negate that user resistance—resisting within the system—is communal and shared. In fact, I argue that the use of the hashtag alone signals a bonding, a shared frustration and a solidarity in recovering the functionality of the #replybutton. It is also a way for users to make public their frustrations in the hopes that others will find and populate the tag to increase traffic and visibility. Because of this, my code of a shared experience (SE) entails the use of the #bring-back-replies hashtag in general. Hashtags are recognized as a method 58 categorizing information within social media platforms, however, it can also be used as a linguistic tool to build communities (Zappavigna, 2011). In the case of the missing #replybutton, users created hashtags to not only convene and build a structure for resistance, but also to increase visibility to their resistance. Calls to action (CTA). Building community also required engagement. In Figure 9, user ifthecreekdontrise displays an interesting way to build community through a call to action (CTA). In this instance, they make an explicit bid to the community by using words like “we” but combined it with a suggestion for users to make their frustrations public on another interface—the review section of the Tumblr mobile app. By rating Tumblr with 1 star, users were articulating their resistance in multiple places and for multiple audiences. This response is similar to how Hirshheim & Newman (1988) conceptualize user resistance—as an “adverse reaction to a proposed change which may manifest itself in a visible, overt fashion (such as through sabotage or direct opposition) or it may be less overt (such as relying on inertia to stall and ultimately kill a project.” However, in the case of the #replybutton, user resistance is not meant to sabotage or kill a project, instead articulations of resistance serve to enact change and engender an outcome that is amenable to the users of the platform. This doesn’t necessarily mean reverting to the “old way,” but it does demand attention from developers to take user feedback and stories more seriously in the design process. Disseminating a call to action via the community affords user resistance the organization and control necessary to gain traction. 59 Figure 9: Screenshot of user ifthecreekdontrise articulating a call to action (CTA) Maintaining the status quo (MSQ). More than just calls to action, user resistance exemplified an adherence to past norms. This was coded in my data as maintaining the status quo (coded as MSQ). Circling back to fields like Management Studies and Information Technology, user resistance has been traditionally theorized from the perspective of the system—the stakeholders of the technologies that users resist (see table 1.1). One such theory developed to understand the rationale behind user resistance was the Status Quo Bias theory (Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988), discussed in chapter one. In decision-making, users tend to see any change as a loss and that derivation from the status quo is undesirable. This is true of the resistance displayed regarding the #replybutton. Many of the posts in the #bring-back-reply hashtag made references to the past—allusions to existing conversational norms, 60 practices and functionalities. In many cases, these past norms were central to the way they interacted with each other on the site. In Figure 10, user totaldrivel uses nostalgic language to discuss how useful the reply function was to users prior to its removal. This rhetorical move established the value for the reply function in general (and specifically toward Tumblr staff and support). Figure 10: Screenshot of user totaldrivel referencing past norms (MSQ). Identity-Building Moves Coding also revealed the importance of positioning oneself into the articulations of resistance. In many ways, the use of personal experience or disposition was used as a way to supplement the community moves being made. By articulating one’s own 61 identity, others can connect with one another in a more intimate and personal way. In my coding scheme, I isolated three types of identity building moves: 1) use of affect (A), 2) story/narrative (S), and projection of emotion, namely negative (NE). Together, these codes shed a light on how the individual drives the collective. Use of affect (A). In Figure 11, a user employs what I classified as affect through the use of humor. By taking an otherwise frustrating moment, this user was able to make light of a situation and bring attention the discrepancies in perceived value (i.e., Tumblr users held a higher regard for the reply function than Tumblr staff). The use of humor is significant because, as Johansson (2009) argues, jokes are part of an ongoing creation of identities that center on pride and independence. Use of humor or affect is also an attempt to undermine those in power positions, as they may not be “in” on the joke. Figure 11: Screenshot of user wargaymon employing affect (A). Negative emotion (NE). Similar to the use of affect, the use of negative emotion was an important finding in my data set. My choice to distinguish between use of affect and displays of negative emotion was because there were such strong displays of anger, frustration and annoyance that it merited its own category. The overwhelming 62 and overt disapproval of the decision to remove the #replybutton can be seen in Figure 12, with users making no reservations about their feelings of anger, frustration and betrayal. Figure 12: Screenshot of user carryonmywaywardstirrup expressing negative emotion (NE) Storytelling (S). The use of personal experience to articulate resistance was a strong discursive move in my data, as it encapsulated much of the other rhetorical moves being made by users across my coding scheme. It underscored that personal experience was important not only in relation to the functionality of the #replybutton, but also that these user’s personal lives have a stake in the ways they communicate, interact, and participate in the online space created by Tumblr. Figure 13 showcases how one user tells a story about their origins on Tumbr and how the reply feature was integral to their dedication to the site. Replies helped them forge bonds and sustain those bonds in ways that other features (like reblogs or likes) did not. These stories were common among users in the #bring-back-reply hashtag and help showcase how important a small feature can be in creating lasting relationships. 63 Figure 13: Screenshot of user delladilly-delladilly sharing a story (S). Audience-Building Moves Due to the nature of the hashtag and the subject of the resistance, much of the rhetorical work being done in my data set were bids or appeals to an audience. As I mentioned earlier, the audience for these resistance articulations was mainly stakeholders—Tumblr staff and Tumblr creator, David Karp. The hashtag functioned in a way to gain solidarity and share experiences and frustrations, but more importantly, the use of #bring-back-reply was a way to make a direct request (or in many cases, a plea) to Tumblr staff. In my coding scheme, I identified three ways that tumblr users were appealing to an audience: 1) requests (R), 2) call outs (CO), and questioning (Q). These moves were one of the most salient ways Tumblr users responded to and imbalance of power structures. In this way, users were not covert in their resistance— they were bold and direct. Requests (R), callouts (C), and questioning (Q). Figures 8 and 10 show how users directly mentioned others. In the case of user resistance, callouts were made in 64 an attempt to reach those in power—to make their voices heard, as seen by the “@” symbol next to various stakeholder accounts. Figure 14 showcases how one user articulated a request and Figure 15 showcases one user’s questioning of the current situation. Questioning and requesting encompass the majority of how users respond to design changes and call attention to the lack of user voices in the design process. The questions asked by users were both rhetorical and explicit in nature. By that I mean questions were asked to emphasize a point and to also get answers from Tumblr staff and support. Figure 14: Screenshot of user bithedreadwolf making a request (R). 65 Figure 15: Screenshot of user allisas asking a rhetorical and explicit question (Q) The Tools of Articulating Resistance What was not made visible by my coding scheme were the tools used—both material and digital—to resist. Although this was one of the questions driving my research, my data showed that much of the posts in the #bring-back-replies tag were text only. In fact, only 17 posts contained images and many of the images used were backdrops for the words “Bring back reply” (see Figure 16). Aside from the use of hashtags and directly mentioning someone through use of the “@,” the tools used for demonstrating resistance were not significant to my analysis. Because of this, I am much less interested in the tools used to enact resistance, and more so on the ways resistance is articulated, shared, and consumed. 66 Figure 16: Screenshots of images used to supplement acts of resistance. From left to right, the images read: “BRING BACK REPLY” and “PLEASE BRING BACK REPLY” Outcomes of User Resistance As people populated the tag with suggestions on what to do (“let’s leave this place”) and articulating new interactive norms (“my “likes” will now replace the reply”), Tumblr staff publicly responded to the users who articulated their resistance with a blog post on the official support blog on February 9, 2015—four months after the initial announcement to remove the #replybutton. In the blog post, the support team addressed the frustration of the removal by stating: ‘Why did they go away? Why, staff, whyyyy?’ Fair question. We had a gaggle of overlapping message-like systems. When we finally introduced actual instant messaging a couple months ago, we had a lot of untangling to do. In order to make all these systems work together, we had to do some back-end retooling, which meant taking down replies for a bit. For longer than we expected. Sorry 67 about that. And we get it—replies fill a very particular need (and you were very clear about expressing that need) More to come, soon enough. We know you all miss replies. We hope you enjoy their imminent return. (support, 2016) This blog post makes very clear that Tumblr staff and support did eventually listen to the users, as evidenced by their reference to the questions that users inundated the hashtag. Although staff did take user feedback into consideration as they re-introduced the feature, it is important to note that the language used in this post still exemplifies vague language in regard to future updates and changes (“More to come, soon enough”). Through the use of veiled language, Tumblr staff continues to exert their power over users by keeping them suspended about any new features. Significance As evidenced by my data, resisting within the system has three driving factors— strengthening community, expressing one’s identity, and making appeals to a specific audience. Important also in my examination of these three categories is how power plays into the ways users enact their resistance. One way to make sense of the relationship between power and resistance is through a discussion of strategies and tactics. It is important to note that my use of strategies and tactics does not adhere to the militaristic foundations from which they originated. I do not wish to cast the user resistance displayed in response to the #replybutton as political or revolutionary. Instead, strategies and tactics are a useful framework to understand the actions of power structures and the response they illicit from those who lack power. 68 In the beginning of this chapter, I analyzed the source of power—the original blog post announcing the removal of the #replybutton. This display of power was akin to what Michel deCerteau describes as a strategy. According to deCerteau: I call a "strategy" the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an "environment." A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, "clienteles," "targets," or "objects" of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model (1984, p. 17). In this way, strategies are the ways designers—the proprietors—create interfaces that reinforce the power spaces that they create. With the #replybutton, Tumblr staff deployed a strategy of creating a “bigger, better” Tumblr. A space that—in its present state—allowed users to forge relationships with one another, interact in nuanced and niche ways, and cultivate conversational norms that transcend the vast and varied blogs that comprise the tumblr community. Whereas tumblr users saw a environment rich with interaction, Tumblr Staff saw a space in need of change. In this disconnect, users began deploying tactics in response to the strategic actions of Tumblr Staff. According to deCerteau, a tactic “…depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing.’ Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities.’” (p. 17). In other words, tactics are not finite or prescribed by users. Instead, they are highly contingent on the 69 time, space, and social structure and are in a constant state of flux. With the #replybutton, user resistance was tethered to the dynamic nature of the Tumblr space. Importantly, the tactics employed by users in the #bring-back-reply hashtag showcase how resistance is not a singular act. User resistance is multiple. It was corroborated by numbers—the sheer volume of posts in the hashtag as well as the amount of notes that each post had amassed (some reaching over 100,000 notes— unique points of sharing/interaction). These numbers did not get past Tumbr staff and support, as they finally reinstated the feature after five months. Clearly articulating resistance through the use of community, identity, and audience building moves can help ground the work of user resistance that is versatile and productive. 70 CHAPTER FOUR: RESISTING THE SYSTEM: THE CASE OF A TUMBLR #BLACKOUT Introduction In the previous chapter, I discussed how users of Tumblr resisted within the system as they responded to the removal of the #replybutton. In that example, I outlined several ways that resistance can be characterized. In this chapter, I explore resistance in a similar manner, but through the analysis of a more diffuse enactment resistance by examining the case of the Tumblr #blackout. Whereas the previous chapter outlines how users were working within the system to articulate their resistance, this chapter discusses how users composed their resistance to systemic oppression. To do this, I first offer an analysis of power, which firmly places the articulations displayed in my data as acts of resistance. I will then discuss the exigence and the formation of the #blackout movement and its significance. From there, I will discuss the data collected from my research into this phenomenon and how I constructed a coding scheme to understand the rhetorical moves associated with acts of resistance. I end the chapter by presenting my findings and the significance of how users resist systems of oppression. Analysis of Power Instead of defining the problem that I am analyzing first, I think it’s important to back up and discuss how power structures influenced the genesis and development of the “problem.” Much like my analysis of the #replybutton, the user resistance that #blackout exemplified was in direct response to the official Tumblr staff blog. Not only was the blog useful in sharing announcements and updates to the site, but it also served as a hub for highlighting social and historical events by “featuring” different holidays and occasions not just on the official staff blog, but also in the design of the 71 logo which sits at the top of every user’s dashboard. Figure 17 showcases some of the logo designs that adorned the site throughout 201512, which include holidays (both national and international), current events (like the election) and other ephemera (World UFO Day). User could then click on the themed icons next to the logo to learn more about whatever holiday, current event, or news story was deemed important on that day. Figure 17: Example holiday/event themed logos in 2015. From left to right, top to bottom, the logos correspond to: Valentine’s Day, New Years Eve, Halloween, US Election Day, Stop Internet Slowness Day, National Literacy Day, World UFO Day, LGBTQ+ Pride, National Donut Day, Earth Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and World Cup Kick-off Day. Figure 18: Screenshot of Tumblr staff’s official blog. The heading reads “It’s Women’s History Month, Tumblr.” 12 Themed logos were introduced in 2015 and ran throughout the entire year until Tumblr abandoned this practice in 2016. Featured content and updates about holidays and current events on the official Tumblr staff blog continue to be posted. 72 As seen in the examples above, the holidays and events spotlighted were meant to be playful and light-hearted ways for the staff to create content that different users on the site would appreciate. However, many of the holidays or events featured were not representative of all the users who encompassed the site, with most of the featured content rooted in Western tradition. By highlighting different holidays on the main page of the site and through their official blog (see Figure 18), Tumblr staff was essentially curating important narratives to users. Because of this, many of the users began to feel overlooked and unrecognized by the site (more on this later). This was especially true when Tumblr began shifting focus from “popular” holidays/events to sponsored brand deals masquerading as holidays (see Figure 19). Tumblr staff was no longer just revealing biases in the selection of holidays and content to share, but they were now commercializing the content they created through sponsored posts. Figure 19: Screenshot of sponsored brand deals as themed holiday content across Tumblr. Festivus sponsored by Seinfeld and National Coffee Day sponsored by Starbucks). Brand deals, and the increase in advertisements on the site, was a byproduct of Tumblr’s 1.1 billion dollar acquisition by search engine company, Yahoo—a deal that did not sit well with many long-time users. Many believed that Yahoo would hinder the 73 content, with many specifically concerned about the loss of fandoms with Yahoo at the helm (“Please do not kill fandoms” one user pleads (brihappi, 2013).While many were concerned with a censorship or stifling of content, others expressed their distate of being sold. One user, pink-sunglasses-and-deerstalkers lamented, “I feel like we’ve been sold into some sort of arranged marriage” (2013). In many ways, the Yahoo acquisition marked an interesting discrepancy between large corporations and smaller, innovative projects like Tumblr. Defining the Problem In February of 2015, black-identifying users of Tumblr took issue to the ways that Tumblr staff would regularly overlook historical and current events important to the black community. Since the site would routinely spotlight popular holidays and events, black users of Tumblr started to notice a lack of representation for the holidays and events that mattered to them. By constantly bypassing and overlooking holidays or events tied to non-dominant cultures, users began to feel underrepresented, unappreciated, and unseen. Namely, these users were responding to the lack of coverage related to Black History Month and other important issues regarding race. In many ways, Tumblr’s decision to routinely showcase made up or nonsense holidays (Festivus and national coffee day) instead of actual events that resonates with many users of the site (Black History Month, MLK day, etc), black users started reacting to—resisting—the dominant narratives that Tumblr reinforced by creating the #blackout movement. This act of resistance, explained below, is still happening at the time of this writing, although initial fervor has died down. 74 #Blackout As a sign of frustration among the black community, the #blackout movement was created not to exclude users that identified as other races, instead it allowed marginalized users to carve a space to vent—and most importantly—resist the power structures that were reinforced by Tumblr staff. In response to the lack of representation on the site, Tumblr user “expect-the-greatest” wrote in his inaugural #blackout post: “In a show of community and solidarity, for 24 hours, we are exclusively posting and reblogging pics, gifs, videos, selfies, etc. of Black people. We want to show that Black History is happening today, right now. That we are all Black History” (expect-thegreatest, 2015). By posting selfies, art, poems, and other media, users could “flood” the dashboards of their followers in an attempt to stake a claim over a digital space that systematically overlooked black culture. The intent to post selfies was political in nature—a response to systemized oppression, a deliberate declaration of self-love amidst a system that does not value marginalized individuals. However, the act of posting selfies crosses into the realm of everyday resistance because of its mundane nature. A selfie in and of itself is not revolutionary, but the effects of being confident to share in a space that leaves you vulnerable is one way that users enacted resistance. Sharing images—specifically selfies—with one another through the platform of a hashtag can be daunting for users who see themselves as flawed or marginalized, and with little rules to follow (post and share images and art of black people), users began to shape the movement into an inclusive, safe space where differences were celebrated and users of all walks of life can feel comfortable sharing and participating. 75 The #blackout movement was one way for users to create solidarity amongst each other, instill confidence in one another, and gain agency in the content that is produced and shared on the site. The sharing of selfies, videos, and gifs were meant to give visibility to the many users left feeling invisible by the systemic oppression, which was reinforced by the infrastructure of the site. Through the act of posting and sharing pictures of themselves, users to create a platform to unite, uplift, and resist the structures put in place by Tumblr staff. To do this, creators of the #blackout movement encouraged the black community to post and reblog only selfies of black-identifying users every first Friday of the month. This schedule soon changed to a seasonal #blackout, with specific dates posted on the official #blackout tumblr13. When thinking about the resistance matrix I created in chapter two, the #blackout movement aligned with issues of identity, culture, and agency—all terms used in humanities based fields— in order to combat power. Thinking of the movement in these terms presents an infrastructure (limits on what to post, when to post, where to post) of everyday resistance that can be replicated and sustained through time. The choice to focus, initially, on posting selfies was important to the creators of the movement to go beyond just gaining visibility on a site that doesn’t value the difference that makes up its users. The act of posting selfies challenges the perceptions of blackness in a community where identity representation and construction is under constant scrutiny. In a post meant to explain his motivations behind the #blackout movement further, “expect-the-greatest” stated: 13 www.theblackout.org 76 All my life I have heard my grandma tell me stories of how her own people [treated] her because she was lighter than most. She told me some awful stories that will make anybody tear up and its these stories that make me wish that there wasn’t such a divide in skin tones. We need a unified agreeance that ALL black people are beautiful and worthy of praise and admiration, and Blackout day is a step towards that.” By allowing anyone that identifies as black to participate in a movement that works together to dismantle power structures, users gained the power to claim blackness on their own terms through the act of posting selfies. The hashtag brought visibility to marginalized groups within the black community, including queer and trans black people, disabled black people, black Muslims, and black people with a vast range of body types and skin tones. These voices are what make up the bulk of my data set, which will be discussed in detail later in this chapter. Not Just Tumblr The oppression felt by black users on Tumblr is not unique to this platform. Much of my analysis of the #blackout case is informed by the work done by rhetoric and writing scholars on the power of interface design and how interfaces are agents of oppression and exclusion (Selfe & Selfe, 1994; Wysocki & Jasken, 2003; Walls et al, 2009). To Selfe & Selfe (1992) interfaces do not provide evidence of different cultures, races, linguistic groups, or economic statuses. Interfaces exclude and marginalize Other perspectives, and in so doing, endorse a gesture of colonialism. Interfaces, therefore, operate as a grand narrative where users must abandon their “own culture or gender to acknowledge the dominance of other groups” (p. 494). Although situated within a 77 classroom setting, Self & Selfe’s description of interfaces still holds true today, as the recent events at Tumblr suggest. More recently, Selber (2004) has emphasized that the interface "is where the communication process is centered," and, consequently, that concerns with interface design "transcend the design of functional screen elements into psychological and emotional considerations” (p. 141). These psychological and emotional considerations are worth extending to the act of user resistance and its role on user-centered design and user experience (UX). This is especially true since fields like UX have historically been complicit in both creating and reinforcing power structures. Because the actions of UX designers are motivated by the goals and needs of two distinct audiences—users and stakeholders—it is difficult to strike a balance that can attend to everyone’s desires. According to UX professional Dashiel Niemark, “while it is still of the utmost importance to remain true to the practice of being a user advocate, suddenly there is another force at play, one that influences information architecture, interaction design, and transitively the product you ultimately deliver: profitability” (2016). The mindset of profitability has underscored the field of UX since its inception, which has been traced all the way back to the industrial revolution. Advances in machine technology motivated industry to test the limits of human labor, which can be attributed to the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford, both of whom endeavored to make human labor more routinized, productive, and efficient—however dehumanizing. Studying the relationship between workers and their tools laid the groundwork to much of the work UX professionals do today. Although the field of UX has grown since its inception, the interfaces and 78 platforms that UX professionals have a hand in building can both shape and maintain imbalances in power. Data Collection I collected data in the same manner as the #replybutton analysis, where I tracked the hashtag #blackout using the search feature on Tumblr. I then traced the hashtag back to the very first #blackout movement, which provided me with the bulk of my data set. Much like #reply button, I chose 300 public posts with a varying degree of notes between each post (<50-100,000). My interest in notes gave me a wide range of the voices broadcast and shared during the various #blackout movements and the number of notes was a good indicator of how successful and widely shared a post was. Before collecting data and using it in my study, I reached out to the leaders and contributors of the movement asking for permission to use their work to support my investigation of user resistance. I made clear that I did not wish to appropriate their struggles, stories, and acts of resistance and make them my own. Instead, I wanted to highlight and value their experiences, images, and words as transformative and necessary contributions to the field—not just for users, but for site developers too. By establishing myself as an ally in their struggle and fight for recognition, I made my positionality as a researcher clear. With this approach in mind, I continued forward making use of the stories of resistance that circulated across the site. However, because the focus of my study is in the ways articulations of user resistance is constructed, I will only be analyzing the text that accompanied the photos that were shared in the tag. This is not to say that images themselves are not harbingers of 79 resistance themselves, but that deploying a visual rhetorical analysis is beyond the scope of my project. Data Analysis By focusing mainly on the text, and because I argued earlier in this study that resistance is not universal, I refined the coding scheme I developed for my #replybutton analysis, in order to see how resistance functioned when applied to #blackout. To do this, I made three interpretive passes, the first was an attempt to make sense of the overarching moves made during the #blackout. My initial analytical reading of my data resulted in the removal of the audience-building moves category from my first coding scheme. Users in the #blackout movement did not make any direct appeals to Tumblr staff or site creator, David Karp, with much of the content directed to and within the black community. Because of this, I decided to focus only on community-building moves and identity-building moves as vessels for resisting the system. My second interpretive pass allowed me to categorize three second level codes for each major rhetorical move, while my third pass allowed me to identify how users were demonstrating these moves more discretely. Below is my revised coding scheme, which reveals the rhetorical moves that comprise resistance to a system of power. Table 4: Coding scheme developed for #blackout Code Description # of occurrences Community-building moves: Bids to preserve or establish community SE: Shared experience (e.g. “we” “us” Articulating a sense of community 192 (300) CTA: Calls to action (let’s do this” “share, reblog, like”) Tasking users with sharing information, learning more, etc to sustain community 187 80 Table 4 (cont’d) WE: Words of encouragement Use of language that denotes support or inspiration for other users 106 Identity-building moves: Asserting one’s place in the system IM: Identity markers (e.g. “I am ___”) Articulation of a role 219 S: Story Using narrative to underscore experience, identity, etc 232 SA: Self-Affirmation Use of language that denotes selfworth 180 Results and Findings In this section, I will address the overarching categories developed in my coding scheme (community and identity building moves) and then offer examples of how users enacted each second level code (the rhetorical moves). Community-Building Moves Users in the #blackout movement used the hashtag to create a sense of community. In the case of the #blackout, I saw community building happening in three ways: through the 1) articulation of a shared experience (SE), 2) calls to action (CTA), and 3) words of encouragement (WE). Many users saw the hashtag functioning as a tool for uplifting one another and sharing stories and images that were motivational, inspirational, and encouraging—as a way to resist the (direct and indirect) systematic oppression reinforced by the site. These community-building moves were often used in conjunction with one another, suggesting that the work of building community is layered and complex. Below, I will go through each of the rhetorical moves that comprise user resistance. 81 Shared experience (SE). A prevalent theme in much of my data set was the explicit articulation of a shared experience. Unlike my analysis of the #replybutton, invoking collective terminology (we, our, and us) was very common in the posts analyzed for the #blackout. Although users came from all over the world, the #blackout hashtag acted as a uniting force that brought everyone together despite the differences that makes everyone unique. Figure 20 showcases an example of how one user articulated a shared experience through their use of words like “our” and “us.” In their post, user chiraqi-warlord references the #blackout movement as a collective and outlines the different ways that resistance needs to be shared and how the success of the movement is based on “our collective love, respect, and strength” Figure 20: Screenshot of user chiraqi-warlord articulating a shared experience (SE). 82 Others echoed this sentiment through posts with the words “This is our #blackout”(kingryjustin, 2015) punctuating their selfies, emphasizing how the #blackout movement had encompassed a thing of value that was shared across different users. Other users commented on how successful the #blackout movement was due to the overwhelming support shown to everyone partaking—not just those contributing pictures and words, but also users scrolling through the tag. One user took to thoughtremixer, one of the founders of the movement’s blog to post a message about how important black representation was: “Scrolling down the blackout tag with my little sister this morning […] and she said, for the first time in her life ‘Look! She has hair like mine, and she looks so pretty’ and started smiling as she felt her curls. We try out best to always celebrate her culture and her race, but she’s never liked her hair even a bit before today. Just wanted to share that #blackout helped out a beautiful black princess finally feel like one” (tyedyetyier, 2015). This message was reblogged and liked 592 times and epitomizes how important #blackout is for black people to resist westernized standards of beauty to see their own worth. In response to this message, user denyandfollow wrote: “This is why we need BlackOut Day. For that little girl and all the others like her who are surrounded by eurocentric standards of beauty and feeling like they aren’t beautiful because they don’t measure up” (2015). Again, users employ certain terminology (we, us) to denote a groupness, a collective, and a shared mission in creating posts and sharing them for the #blackout movement. 83 Calls to action (CTA). In my analysis, I found many users suggesting certain actions to be taken by the whole group in order to make the #blackout movement more successful and inclusive. Figure 21 showcases how one user makes a call to action amongst the #blackout movement by asking users to reblog and share pictures of those will little recognition (having few notes). The post mentions how tagged posts can be filtered: by popular posts and recent posts. On Tumblr, the default view when searching a tag is to show the most popular (posts with the most notes) at the top of the feed. This makes it easier to continually show support to those that are already in the spotlight. Many users found this to be limiting, and implored other users to filter posts to give attention to those who may get overlooked by the popular bloggers. Doing so created a more open and welcoming environment for all users. Other, more simplified calls to action were evidenced by the request for users to “share,” “reblog” and “like” their individual posts to enhance engagement and interactivity in the hashtag and to keep a forward momentum of the tag. User resistance, as a phenomenon, would not be an identifiable “thing” without a dedicated user-base contributing to the #blackout movement, sharing stories and images. I saw calls to action acting as a tactic for preserving the movement and cultivating its success. 84 Figure 21: Screenshot of user watermelioness urging users to action (CTA). As the movement grew, other users took to the #blackout hashtag to share not only selfies, but also links to black own businesses and black artists works. As one of the #blackout creators wrote: “In an effort to broaden the impact of the #blackout movement, we ask that participants submit and share the work of black businesses, black art, black music, black authors, etc. You can still submit selfies, but we want to use these dedicated days to highlight the work of our black entrepreneurs and artists” (marsincharge, 2016). This reshaping of the movement illustrates that resistance is elastic—that it is bound up in the cultural and temporal spaces that dictate the needs of users and the means of resisting. With the case of the tumblr #blackout, users were first tasked with just sharing 85 selfies with the hashtag. Users then shaped the movement to make the space for the stories and personal histories that lie beneath the selfies. Soon, the movement became a space where users could gain exposure for their work, which is often underrepresented in mainstream media. Words of encouragement (WE). Not only were users suggesting actions that would make the movement more inclusive and successful, but they were also steeped in empathy and understanding. Not everyone was comfortable sharing their pictures for millions of strangers to see, and the #blackout movement did its part in making sure the hashtag was a safe space to share vulnerable aspects of themselves in an effort to connect and spread positivity. Figure 22 showcases how one user expresses words of encouragement to anyone following the movement. In this post, hanaibrahim lets users know that they shouldn’t be ashamed of their skin color offering words of support and encouragement to build the confidence in users who may be feeling unworthy of appreciation and recognition based on their skin color. Figure 22: Screenshot of user hanaibraham expressing words of encouragement (WE). 86 Identity-Building Moves From my data set, I saw identity happening in three ways: explicit identity markers (IM), storytelling (S), and self-affirmations (SA). Although I categorized these rhetorical moves as their own codes, many of the posts in the hashtag displayed evidence of more than one identity building move. In fact, much of the data I collected for this chapter illustrated an overlap in rhetorical moves both in a bid to strengthen the community and to uplift oneself. Identity markers (IM). Figure 23 showcases how one user explicitly articulates her identity as she proudly claims her disability and blackness. “I am” statements flooded the tag are evidence of what I think are important identity building moves— moves that are direct representations of the self in a space where identity can be difficult to articulate. Users claiming aspects about themselves (“I am a disabled, bisexual black man,” “I am a nerdy black girl,” etc.) helped others stake a claim in their own, similar identities. Doing so highlighted the complex subjectivities that make up a collective community. As the notes on rampyourvoice’s post show (104,111 notes), many users connected to their proud self-identifying proclamation. 87 Figure 23: Screenshot of user rampyourvoice articulating an identity marker (IM). Storytelling (S). Not only did the selfies alone gain traction on the site, but so, too, did the stories that accompanied the pictures. Sharing personal stories was common amongst the users in my data set, which highlighted how important personal experiences are in the formation of one’s identity. The black community found that the use of the hashtag created a safe space—a space to share stories of oppression and to find solace and healing in these stories. A space where participation was encouraged and rewarded through the countless number of “likes” and reblogs of posts. Figure 24 showcases how one user opened up about their personal life and how the #blackout movement mattered to their lived experiences outside of Tumblr. In her post, lareinadecorazones shares about the death of her grandfather and how sharing this vulnerable moment was important to the work of #blackout movement. 88 Figure 24: Screenshot of user lareinadecorazones sharing a story (S). Self-affirmations (SA). Along with sharing stories and articulating identity markers, another important identity-building rhetorical move that comprised the resistance in the #blackout movement was the use of self-affirmations. Self-affirmations are a practice of positive thinking and articulations of self-empowering statements. For users in the #blackout movement, it was important to find value in themselves and express their self-worth as strong individuals in a movement aimed at celebrating black visibility. Figure 25 showcases how one user expresses self-affirmations by making it clear that “[they are] here. [They] exist. [They] matter.” More than that, self affirmations were often used in relation to the entire community of users in the #blackout hashtag. 89 Users did not just uplift themselves through their self-affirmations, but they did so as a way to uplift the community as well. Stating one’s self-worth directly impacts the selfworth of the community, as individual identities are so entrenched in the collective identity. Figure 25: Screenshot of user night—skyy articulating a self-affirmation (SA). Outcomes of User Resistance Because of the overwhelming support and the volume of content posted in the #blackout hashtag, the movement became largely successful beyond the black community. Scheduled #blackouts routinely topped the popular tags list every time a #blackout occurred (see Figure 26) and the official Tumblr staff blog routinely features and shares posts regarding #blackout to commemorate and celebrate alongside the movement. Not only did #blackout gain traction within Tumblr itself, but it spread beyond the site, with users celebrating #blackout on other social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. As the #blackout movement cross-pollinated different platforms, the audiences for the movement grew alongside it. Because of this, other movements, such as #whiteout, #brownout, and #yellowout day were spawned by non 90 black identifying users, borrowing from the structure and organization of the original movement. These movements, although important in my analysis of the impact of the #blackout movement, are not investigated in depth for this project because they were reactionary—not deliberate acts of resistance that sought to dismantle structures of power. Instead, they co-opted a movement without being critical of the origins, exigence, and necessity for resisting. Although the creation of spin-off movements run counter to the intent and purpose of the original #blackout movement (to create a deliberate space dedicated to black visibility and recognition), they are a testament to how influential collective acts of user resistance can be. Figure 26: Screenshot of the trending searches on Tumblr during a scheduled #blackout. Significance The data collected for this chapter underscores the importance of both community and identity building moves as vehicles for users to resist power structures and create a movement that empowers users to make artifacts (selfies, art, videos, poems, etc) of their culture visible. To do this, users needed to leverage the space and infrastructure of the platforms that housed resistance. According to Bijan Stephens, “Any large social movement is shaped by the technology available to it and tailors its 91 goals, tactics, and rhetoric to the media of its time” (Stephen, 2015, p. 3). In the case of the Tumblr #blackout, users leveraged the hashtag to gain visibility, prominence, and solidarity among other users. This tactic is not new. Similar to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the hashtag became a vehicle for rhetorical action. Activist DeRay McKesson outlines the transformative nature of technology in his assessment of the Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter: “the tools that we have to organize and to resist are fundamentally different than anything that’s existed before in Black struggle” (Stephen, 2015, p. 4). By using technologies like hashtags and social media, the #blackout movement was successful in creating visibility for marginalized users to not just share their images, but to also share their stories and experiences. Important, also, is how the movement was organized—it was deliberate, purposeful, and persistent. As mentioned earlier, #blackout continues to happen seasonally14, which illustrates how critical it is to create an infrastructure for sustained resistance. By creating a calendar for resistance, users can more easily contribute to the movement and provide the numbers necessary to gain visibility among users. Much like the #replybutton, #blackout relies on the volume of posts dedicated to the hashtag to make an impact on its goals and mission. Important in my findings was the different ways users attended to matters of identity—as both an inward (as an individual) and outward (toward the community) tool for connection. Broad definitions of identity have been forwarded by scholars like Vygotsky (1978), Mead (1934) and Anzaldúa (1999), who claim that identities are made up of the stories we tell about ourselves and that are told about us. Some believe that identity is constantly in flux, and others believe that identities change based on context 14 Dates are usually scheduled every 3 months, and a calendar is posted and circulated widely before each #blackout day. 92 and situation (Mishler 2004). Still, others have argued that identities are the outward, visible manifestation of the self and are always fragmented, partial, and often in conflict, particularly with the subjectivity that one builds over time (e.g., Davies, 2000; Hagood, 2002). Within current digital rhetoric scholarship, digital identity is increasingly understood as distributed and embedded in complexly mediated dialogical activity. Carolyn Miller, in particular, suggests that building social relationships is an integral part of the work people do online, and that creating identity takes place within a context of building and maintaining different kinds of relationships (Grabill & Pigg, p. 103). Because there are many agents and actors that live across time and space, people need to “perform” and enact their identity, through text, video, images, sound, etc, to gain entry into and control over the digital discourse. One important way that users of the #blackout movement enacted identity was to tell stories—as it breathes life into the pictures that users posted. The stories users shared illustrate how valuable personal experiences are as a method of gaining credibility in a space that does not necessarily rely on expertise to build ethos. As Grabill and Pigg point out, identity is “performed and leveraged in small, momentary, and fleeting acts. These identity performances work productively as non-rational argumentative moves within online discussions. Those who do not hold traditional forms of expertise participate by performing identity in ways that extend beyond establishing individual credibility. These performances create argumentative space by shaping how the conversation unfolds and enables the exchange of information and knowledge. (101) 93 Storytelling, then, became a prevalent way for users to leverage their experiences to open the space for dialog within the hashtag. The stories that accompanied posts became so important to users that eventually the #blackout phenomenon moved away from focusing solely on selfies and instead became a platform for black entrepreneurs and creatives to promote their work and businesses. From authors to clothing lines, the #blackout movement was no longer just a place to gain visibility in a space where none was given, but to make forward progress for black business owners and artists. Ultimately, #blackout shows researchers how users resist systems of power by creating a safe, welcoming, and open space for users to share stories about their lives, frustrations, motivations, and inspirations to users all over the world. 94 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION & IMPLICATIONS Introduction My goal in the previous chapters of this dissertation was to establish the importance of attending to user resistance as it relates to the field of technical communication and other analogous fields. In my first chapter, I outline the lack of scholarship invested in the topic of user resistance and make an argument for its relevance to topics important to technical communication, including user-centered design, participatory design and ethical design principles. I illustrate this by analyzing two examples of user resistance on the social media site, Tumblr. As evidenced by my results in chapters three and four, my data illustrates how resistance is constructed by users in multiple ways: through identity, community, and audience building moves. Together, these moves work to position users as agents of resistance as they seek to undermine power in some way. In examining these cases of resistance, I do not wish to simply name specific user actions as definitively “user resistance,” but instead offer user resistance a way of understanding the complexities of user responses to interface design—both in the wake of design change and in response to structures of power. Resistance in Two Ways Although both the #replybutton and #blackout examples that I examined showcase user resistance within and against power structures enforced by Tumblr, they do so in fundamentally different ways. Through my data, I found that the biggest difference was that resisting within the system (#replybutton) aims to recover past actions and norms, whereas resisting the system (#blackout) aims to create new actions and engagement with the formation of a social movement. This directly correlates to 95 how users contended with power. When resistance is situated within a system, as I argue in chapter three, users take a more direct route to undermine systems of power. This is evidenced by the almost formulaic addressing of Tumblr staff, support, and site creator (@staff, @support, @david) in their resistance articulations, with 194 occurrences of what I characterized as “call-outs.” For users wishing to affect change as they articulated their resistance, mentioning stakeholders was a direct way of confronting the imbalances of power to recover past actions, namely the ability to reply to user’s posts. By contrast, users in the #blackout movement did not address those in positions of power, and instead directed their resistance within the community to strengthen bonds between community members and to make their stories heard by larger audiences. Instead of articulating the value of a lost function, users in the #blackout movement created their own practices and actions in order to articulate the value they bring to the system that did not previously represent them. These differences underscore how everyday resistance is “heterogenic and contingent due to changing contexts and situations. That is, resistance is not a universal strategy or coherent action form” (Vinthagen & Johnson, 2013, p. 39). Everyday resistance is further theorized as being: (1) done in a regular way, occasionally politically intended but typically habitual or semi-conscious; (2) [done] in a non-dramatic, non-confrontational or nonrecognized way that (has the potential to) undermine some power, without revealing itself (concealing or disguising either the actor or the act), or by being defined by hegemonic discourse as “non-political” or otherwise not relevant to resistance; and is (3) done by individuals or small groupings without a formal 96 leadership or organization, but typically encouraged by some subcultural attitude or “hidden transcript” (p. 40). Although a useful framework to understand the “everyday” actions that can propel resistance, I believe user resistance differs in that there is some form of organization and coalition around a particular topic or movement (as evidenced most explicitly by the #blackout movement). Both cases utilized a hashtag to signal solidarity around a cause, which I argue is an everyday (i.e., normalized practice on Tumblr and other social media sites) tactic to help organize information for both archival purposes and to articulate a shared experience/find others with similar experiences. The use of hashtags alone is one way to create a sense of organization, which is necessary to understand user resistance as a phenomenon and not individual, discrete acts that would be too difficult to identify and understand as a “thing” of value. Without a routinized or organized structure, user resistance becomes too diffuse to trace and nebulous to characterize. As such, my study analyzes only resistance that surrounds particular and crystalized topics, though other actions and rhetorical discourse moves can also be viewed as resistance. With #blackout, users followed an established structure by sticking to a predetermined schedule to heighten awareness and visibility. Not only that, but the leaders and organziers of the movement created and shared rules, codes of conduct, and guidelines for the circulation of posts in the hashtag. For #replybutton, users shared and reblogged content in a dedicated space to streamline and index such an overwhelming response to design change by coalescing around a catchphrase like “bring back replies.” Although #replybutton was not as orchestrated and overtly planned 97 as #blackout, those resisting the removal of the reply button did seek to organize their resistance through the use and proliferation of the hashtag. Both examples illustrate how normalized, everyday actions worked to voice resistance and make it visible and communal. Further, the ways users shape and use their identities in online spaces was an important channel for articulating resistance, as users’ personal experiences and histories helped them make sense of the ways they engage with/in different technologies. As #replybutton demonstrated, users told stories about how the reply function facilitated relationship building on the site. Similarly, users in the #blackout tag used stories about how they found confidence through the popularization of the #blackout hashtag and movement. Not only were users voicing their frustration with the lack of representation on the site, but they turned that resistance into positive thinking and encouraging others to join in the cause, users voiced their frustrations with the lack of representation on the site by the official Tumblr staff blog. Resistance is Not Futile As evidenced by my data analysis, an understanding of user resistance is only possible when the user’s identities, histories, and contexts are at the forefront of technology design. By shifting focus from a system-based understanding of userresistance to that of a user-focused understanding of resistance, designers, technical communicators, and user experience professionals can embody a more complete usercentered design approach to technology and interface design. Understanding how user resistance functions in dynamic online spaces can help researchers and practitioners attend to user needs in complex ways not only in the design and testing phase, but also in the implementation and optimization phase as well. Doing so will help strengthen the 98 connections between usability/user-centered research and actual practice to better serve the design of technologies in user-centered and designed for user needs, cultural diversity, and organizational values. Understanding user resistances can help understand user contexts and user usage in ways that directly challenge the power imbued in the creation of technologies. For technical communication scholars and practitioners, understanding user resistance can help make more sound, ethical and culturally located choices. As such, user resistance should be regarded as a productive means of inquiry in the design and implementation of technologies and platforms—not as an obstacle meant to be avoided before it occurs. User resistance should be studied from a humanities perspective and honor the This vantage point allows researchers to better understand the complexities, agencies, and contexts that user-centered design should entail. To do that, researchers and practitioners should understand resistance as more than just opposition to a source of power. Resistance is Elastic My analysis of user resistance demonstrated that articulations of everyday resistance can take different forms and serve different purposes. The concept of elasticity—not just in the wake of user resistance—is important for user researchers to take more critical stances toward diverse user groups. And, as my study shows, valuing the situatedness of local cultures and contexts is important when analyzing user resistance. According to Sun (2012), local culture constitutes the dynamic nexus of contextual interactions and manifests numerous articulations of practices and meanings. With the study of #Blackout, the exigence was to resist the system—not just the infrastructures put in place by Tumblr staff, but also the system of oppression that 99 the site implicitly upheld. Users participating in #blackout took control of what they saw on their Tumblr dashboards by sharing and circulating the images, art, and media of the black community. Although all articulations of resistance were in response to some kind of power structure, users found different ways of articulating their identity and their shared community to express and work through their resistance. Through storytelling, calls to action, words of encouragement, and bold statements of self-affirmation (among other rhetorical moves), user resistance was layered, complex and contingent on specific user contexts. In the case of the #replybutton, Tumblr saw a different form of user-resistance emerge—a resistance to design changes. The choice for Tumblr staff to remove the reply function was rooted in the perceptions of value, which did not align with the users of their platform. Because of this, users found outlets to voice their resistance in ways that corresponded to local, contextual and temporal factors. The data collected from my #replybutton analysis demonstrated that resistance served three purposes: to reach a shared community, to articulate a sense of identity and to reach a specific audience (an audience of power). Much like #blackout, resistance shown in #replybutton was multifaceted and complex, relying on multiple rhetorical moves to reach an outcome. The elasticity of user resistance underscores how everyday acts of resistance “rely on contextual tactics, opportunities, individual choices, temporality and [they are] shifting, moving and transient” (Vinthagen & Johanssen, p. 23). Both #replybutton and #blackout are windows into how users leverage the transient nature of online spaces to articulate their resistance. 100 Resistance is Multiple As #replybutton and #blackout show, acts of resistance are not singular. They need collective action, momentum, and velocity to gain traction in changing the ways technologies are created and for whom they are created. Understanding resistance as an act that requires the collective work of many is necessary to analyze user resistance as a thing of value. This would be an interesting moment to talk about how resistance isn’t just a “one user” act. In the context of my study, user resistance emerged through collective action. The volume of posts made15 and shared through both #replybutton and #blackout showcase how important it was for users to coalesce around a particular topic. Through the creation of hashtags, users orchestrated a space for others to share and circulate their resistance articulations together. Hashtags were one way of making reaching out to large groups of people, which in turn helped users gain momentum and velocity through connecting with others, collaborating, and taking action as a unit. The number of notes16 each post received are another indicator of how working together as a collective can make the biggest impact for user resistance. As #replybutton showcased, users worked together to voice the loss of a valuable tool for engagement and community building. Together, they prompted Tumblr to reassess the value of the lost reply function. As #blackout demonstrated, the black community (and anyone else sharing content from the #blackout movement) worked together to voice the value of their personal and shared histories, experiences, and identities. Together, they created a successful movement that uplifts and celebrates the 15 Hundreds of thousand posts were made between the two hashtags: #blackout and #bringback-reply. 16 Points of interaction: reblogging, sharing, and liking. 101 black community—a practice that has persisted through time and space and continues to flourish at the time of this writing. Resistance is Deliberate Because resistance is multiple, it necessitates a purposeful organization and structure to coordinate the many users that comprise a community, collective, or group. The use and proliferation of hashtags is one way that users organized and maintained resistance articulations to serve the purpose of resistance’s elasticity and its multiplicity. User resistance, then, is not just venting about frustrations and discontent with design or infrastructural changes. User resistance is not just minute acts to undermine structures of power. Instead, my analysis of both #replybutton and #blackout illustrate that user resistance adheres to conventions specific to the contexts of the users resisting. In both examples of resistance, users enacted resistance in pointed ways—they did so to assert their agency as users on a platform and to push against power structures that limited their use of the platform. In the case of #replybutton, users were most deliberate in the ways they confronted those in positions of power. As my data revealed, they asked questions, they anchored their resistance in personal experience, and they sent forth calls to action to broaden the audience for their resistance articulations. In the case of #blackout, users took similar approaches to the purposefulness of their resistance, but they took it one step further by creating a set of guidelines and rules that ensured a smooth and successful movement. Though content in each hashtag varied widely, all posts were guided by collective goals, giving each case of user resistance a clear and deliberate purpose. 102 Further Implications For designers17, paying attention to the ways users resist means listening to users not just in the testing phase, but throughout the implementation and beyond stages as well. A thoughtful examination of why and how users resist can help usher in engaged conversations around areas of tension between perceived and actual value of platforms and services. As my data revealed, resistance articulations can be nuanced and subtle—making it even more pressing for designers to listen to the everyday, the mundane, and even the boring acts of users across platforms. As user actions become normalized practices, it’s important to pay attention and ask better questions about how users are engaging with technology. Empathizing with and listening to users goes beyond introducing features that are “bigger and better” for users. It necessitates a thorough consideration of how users might resist to technologies—not just that it is articulated. More importantly, paying attention to user resistance can help designers confront the power they have (whether its direct or indirect) and how that power affects the ways users engage with the technologies they create. According to George Aye, professor of design at the Chicago Institute of Art, power is an issue that is rarely addressed in major design disciplines (2017), with few design programs offering classes on ethics. Because of this, many students are unaware of how to confront the power that is directly and indirectly enforced by their role as a designer. Without a clear understanding of their own power, there is little room to recognize and value how users will respond to the power structures put in place both implicitly or explicitly. As designers 17 Although design can mean anything from graphic, industrial, architectural, and communication/information, for the purpose of my dissertation, I am contending most directly with technology design such as UX/UI, web design, etc. 103 become increasingly more integral in the development of socially aware projects, it is important to not only challenge power differentials and power structures that dictate the design of technology, but recognize one’s own role in the creation of power. I believe that technical communication researchers and practitioners can mitigate and alleviate this issue. The field of technical communication has contended with power and privilege since at least the mid-2000s as traditional viewpoints of technical communication work moved beyond hyper-pragmatism and efficiency (Agboka, 2013; Dilger, 2006; Palermi, 2006) into culturally situated practices. Because of this, technical communicators and technical communication pedagogy is well equipped to train professionals looking to go into technology design to acknowledge their inherent power and understand how users will respond to that power. User resistance offers researchers and practitioners a concrete way to both solve user problems and engage in conversations with users about those problems. By leaving space in the design and implementation process to interrogate user resistance as it occurs, the field of technical communication and user experience can help create technologies that are locally situated for diverse user groups. Not only that, but articulations of user resistance are prime moments to practice what Guiseppe Getto (2014) calls, engaged design, where users are seen not just as participants or endusers of a “product or service […] designed to satisfy,” (p. 51) but as stakeholders in all phases of the design process and product output. 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