Technical Communication Quarterly Jul 2019

Empty Templates: The Ethical Habits of Empty State Pages

John R. Gallagher ; Steve Holmes George Mason University

Abstract

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

Journal
Technical Communication Quarterly
Published
2019-07-03
DOI
10.1080/10572252.2018.1564367
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Closed
Topics
qualitative research
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (5)

  1. Hunter (2024)
    Toward TPC-UX: UX Topics in TPC Journals 2013–2022
    Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
  2. Gallagher et al. (2023)
    Required Templates: An Assemblage Theory Analysis of How Template Character Lim…
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  3. Gallagher et al. (2022)
    Project-Oriented Web Scraping in Technical Communication Research
    Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  4. Gallagher et al. (2020)
    Peering into the Internet Abyss: Using Big Data Audience Analysis to Understand…
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  5. Gray et al. (2020)
    Tracing Ecologies of Code Literacy and Constraint in Emojis as Multimodal Publi…
    Computers and Composition

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CrossRef global citation count: 8 View in citation network → Build reading path →

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