Web Aesthetics

The business world is changing rapidly and it is getting restructured at an astonishing pace. Internet penetration has resulted in the commencement of a new era and has brought a completely new and important source of income for small, medium and big companies by servicing their customers through internet whether they are in their work place or at home. It is getting used as an easy and affordable means to transact business without any limitation of time, place or situation. Online shopping has created a new platform for the expansion and growth of business. This study examines the role and impact of aesthetic design in online shopping stores. Designing online shopping sites involves the application of knowledge from diverse fields such as marketing and human-computer interaction. This article is a collation of research findings from different areas to investigate the role of web aesthetics in shaping the mood and perception of consumers in favour of online shopping companies.

Undeniably, the trajectories of aesthetics, art making and attitudes towards the art object have been drastically destabilised by digital enclosures for some time. Blogging platforms and social media have more recently become spaces of dissemination and dispersion for the cultural objects we use to construct our identities and perform them to the world. Even with legal binding terms and conditions on sites like Tumblr and Facebook, warning not to upload copyrighted material lest our accounts be suspended, art reproductions are circulated to show friends, to aid in composing a personality that is read and understood by other users scrolling through the flows of the digital sea. Curating real life identities over the Internet results in fugitive objects that are cycled and recycled in the name of belonging. Vito Campanelli provided an early, necessary overview of how social networks are utilized to mediate a contemporary culture of ‘cutting and pasting’ and viral circulation through social media. His work in Web Aesthetics provides an important access point to exploring how this culture has expanded into the “aesthetics of social exchange.” I propose that this culture has alienated artists and art objects in favour of egoism and self-presentation. Additionally, the self is alienated when the identity performance channels the aesthetics of estrangement and melancholy. As digital images begin to stand in place of a person, culture is neither atavised nor preserved in digital space, but rather fragmented, exploited and squandered. The most effective way to track these transmutations, even since the publication of Web Aesthetics in 2010, is by observing the communities that emerge from the inside of digital enclosures that mediate flows of decontextualized images like Tumblr, Facebook and Pinterest.