Beyond Star Flashes: The Elements of Web 2.0 style

In his “Web 2.0 How-to Design Guide,” Ben Hunt identifies the stylistic elements shared by Web 2.0 sites, including “star flashes,” circular badges reminiscent of sale price stickers. However, Hunt's approach to style is limited to cataloging surface features. A site designed using his guide would certainly look like Flickr, YouTube, or LibraryThing but might not employ the approach or functionality of those sites. While composition teachers can and should embrace Web 2.0, we must do so critically, by considering what Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner would call the “conceptual stand” of Web 2.0, its fundamentals of writer, reader, thought, language, and their relationships. This approach to style recognizes that separating style and substance, however convenient, is misleading. In this essay, I map the conceptual stand of Web 2.0, providing a structure for critically evaluating sites that claim the “2.0” moniker. Given these elements of Web 2.0 style, composition teachers can better understand, employ, and engage Web 2.0 in teaching and scholarship.