| The dot-com boom of the 1990s is commonly remembered as an era of "irrational exuberance" in both an economic and social context. But alongside the hype and hubris that characterized interne stock speculation, the dot-corn era was also a significant moment of cultural production where creative teams, corporate ties, and changing organizational structures interacted to produce the commercial web. As advertising agencies, interactive shops, e-commerce consultancies, and web boutiques jockeyed for control of a new industry, discourses of "quality" web design were constantly in flux. This dissertation explores these discursive shifts by analyzing how power struggles among industry sectors and creative workers relate to the visual practices and stylistic forms that were produced in the web's first decade.;Bringing together macro-level socio-economic contexts with micro-level attention to the collaborations and conflicts among creative laborers working within new media industries, this dissertation argues that shifts in industrial logic, production practices, and visual expression are intimately connected to the struggles between different players with competing notions of expertise. The organization and reorganization of web industries reveal turbulent contests over power, skill, capital, and creativity as battles played out among advertising agencies, interactive shops, e-consultancies, and web boutiques as different interests sought to define the boundaries of the medium and dominate commercial web production.;By cataloging and analyzing examples of web design produced in different moments of the dot-com bubble, I explore how and why dominant discourses of web aesthetics emerged, stabilized, and changed. The cultural forms, styles, and modes of production that I identify---brochureware, image maps, mega-sites, magazine and print aesthetics, navigation systems, e-commerce, flash intros---are neither naive attempts by early producers to create the early Web, nor are they chronological stepping stones that lead the way to "better" design. Instead, I argue, these practices were the result of specific industrial conditions that served a crucial role for commercial organizations and skilled laborers testing and navigating an ill-defined territory between innovation and the familiar social norms of mediated culture. |
