{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.027287319422150885, 'fraction_numerical': 0.010165864098448368, 'mean_word_length': 4.917721518987341, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Net work: the professionalization of web design

In the decade or so since it first emerged as an area of work, web design has normalized. From its birth as an anarchic free-for-all, web design has undergone a process of standardization, resulting in recognizable job titles, core skills and an emphasis on adhering to the guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other international standards. At the same time, a great representative burden is placed on the shoulders of web designers. They are portrayed as exemplary of the future of work and of working in the new economy. Their work is emotional and affective, it is claimed. They are either creative and autonomous producers of culture for the digital economy, or victims enslaved to the mundane and low-paid, or to the insecurity of portfolio knowledge work. As Rosalind Gill stated in 2002, web designers and other new media workers are ‘invoked rhetorically all the time but rarely studied’ (Gill, 2002: 75). This article addresses the call made by Gill and others for more empirical studies of (new) media workers, which move away from rhetorical invocation and burdensome representation, to focus on how this group of cultural labourers feel about their work, and what work means to them. The paper focuses on a topic which is central in web designers’ talk about their work – that is, the professionalization of web design. This issue has not been sufficiently acknowledged in the limited body of literature on new media work (though Christopherson, 2004 and Gill, 2007 are exceptions). Instead, this literature has focused on other issues in cultural work, such as affect, creativity, networking and risk, themes which all, in turn, map onto broader debates about the contemporary social formation. The prevalence of these issues in the literature sidelines the professionalization