Are we down to a problem of semantics here?
Louise
Yes. People studying the internet who are not User Experience professionals use the same term to mean different things. Now if we're talking about a term like "hegemony" or "subaltern" or one which clearly emerges from a very particular intellectual tradition or was coined by one particular theorist, I think we can agree that there are right and wrong ways to use the term. When we have words like "user" and "experience" we are talking about words that may have long traditions in different fields and even if everyone within one field believes the term to be theirs and the definition to be clear, it doesn't mean that others outside the field will or should relinquish rights to use the term to mean the things that they have always taken it to mean. Louise makes the contrast between 'what the user experiences' and 'what experience the user has', but grammatically the term 'user experience' does not priviledge one interpretation over the other, so we have to rely on disciplinary convention to make that distinction. My discipline would recognize the importance of that same distinction, but we wouldn't rely on the phrase "user experience" to capture it. Google searches tell us what sources that are on the web and use that phrase prominently mean by it, but I hope we haven't reached the intellectual point where we use Google to resolve questions of theoretical meaning and conceptualization. There are a lot of academic ways to use a term that Google won't catch till it starts indexing the content of all our publications. -- ________________________________________________________ Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas 102 Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org