Templates and why they Make sense

 This week in class, we discussed the importance of templates in online writing. From a writer's point of view, templates are used to ease the workload of creating a new reading format by using pre-existing ones that have been proven to work. By having universal formats across an entire writing genre like blogs, readers have an easier time navigating through the content due to its familiarity. 


Furthermore, as these templates have been proven to work among the general population, writers continue to reuse them to effectively spread their message to as many people as possible. In our course textbook Update Culture, John Gallagher, the author, describes templates as “an empty vessel for communicating messages” (35). Unlike Word documents, where content is made to create a final product by an individual person, IPI templates were created to take messages from different individuals and have them interact with one another. 


Examples of effective IPI templates are those used by social media websites such as Facebook and Snapchat. Because of Facebook or Snapchat’s IPI templates, millions of users can communicate with one another in such an easy manner with templates so easy to navigate that we don’t even realize they’re there. The author of the book states, “while an interface is an obstacle for users at first, over time, it recedes into the background as a thing that has been worked through. IPI templates are quite influential in how we structure our writing, but their simplicity often makes us overlook just how much it’s controlled the way we write (Gallagher 38). One example of an interface influencing our writing is reducing a big idea in our heads into a 140-character post on Twitter. Because of the social network’s posting rules, our way of communicating on the platform has forever changed.






Comments

  1. Ciera AndersonSeptember 11, 2022 at 7:22 PM

    Hi Cesar,
    I really liked the example you gave about interface influencing and how we have to confine our ideas into a small word count. That made me think about the time when Snapchat was first released and how the platform had a restricted word count. I vaguely remember if there was more information than what fit into the one line, you would have to write with the pencil icon on the screen. It was really tedious and you had to choose your words and characters wisely. We had to structure our writing in very abbreviated, short terms.

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