WordPress “masks the database and creates a continuous blogging experience within the browser” (Helmond in Reader, p. 180), yet the database is rigidly defined and categorised.
Discuss how this shapes the way we interact with the World Wide Web through blogging and how it affects user agency.
The features of WordPress allow for the database to not only be easily hidden, but be masked completely to the user. It is this intricate feature of WordPress which makes its usage appear seamless and effortless. WordPress provides a facade- that is the ideal that through one’s WordPress blog we are free to control our page in whatever way we choose or please. This is not in fact correct. Each and everytime one makes a post on WordPress, every detail or special function that we attach to that post collaborates it with the greater interface; “WordPress is essentially the construction of an interface to the database (Helmond, 53)”. It is this interface which “[masks] the complexity of the database (Helmond, 53).”
There are several ways in which the database of WordPress is either purposefully or not, controlling the ways in which the user enjoys their browser experience. Some of the features which lend to this debate are follows:
Categories and Tags
In every post made by a WordPress blog user, they are able to customize it so that each blog entry they make has its own category or tag. A tag in a blog post relates to key features or key concepts in the blog that not only organize posts but make them easier to navigate. The use of categories and tags provide information that defines the users experience on WordPress in a rigid manner. They guide how a “search [engine] trawle (Helmond, 74)” navigates through a blog and to give a preview to the content available on said blog.
Themes
WordPress has several different themes available for the blog user to employ to personalise their space. Whether they are free or completely customizable themes (which unfortunately cost money) WordPress bloggers are able to change their space to suit their needs. However, in choosing a theme a user is altering the way in which their blog is accessible by search engines. Every change that is made makes a change to the way in which “search engine spiders and crawlers (Helmond, 80)” come across a blog.
Widgets
There are many widgets available to a WordPress user that gives the impression that the blogging experience is an uninterrupted one. They are simple, easy to use and very simply applied to a blog. Widgets highlight the “close interaction between the (open source) WordPress community and the WordPress developers (Helmond, 77)”. Some widgets enable a wider and more thorough connection between the blog user and search engines. For example, there is a widget which allows Google to index your blog and not only make Google services easier to use in the blog but also allow Google to have greater control over ones blog through configuration.
And lastly, by adding data of any sort to our personal blogs we are feeding information to search engines which enables software to establish “relationships with the engines by using the underlying protocols of the blog’s core features (Helmond, 44)”.
“When we are posting a blog spot we are actually communicating with the database by feeding the database fields. Nearly every field in the WordPress Write interface corresponds with fields in the database. WordPress is essentially the construction of an interface to the database (Helmond, 53).”
All of the above features, and more, are able to be altered or changed by the user to some extent. These are only some examples of WordPress’ basic features that are available to a user that lend to the idea that the user receives a continuous blogging experience.
As Lev Manovich describes, the database is a “structured collection of data (Helmond, 49)” and no matter how much control we believe we possess over WordPress it is intrinsically linked to a larger database that is able to control how much freedom we have over our pages.
References:
Helmond, A. (2007) ‘Software-Engine Relations’, Blogging for Engines: Blogs Under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations, MA Thesis, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, pp.44-80
Vanessa Condemi 