My title here encompasses a lot of the themes of what I'd like to talk about- questions raised for me through the readings in Spilka for this week (I haven't gotten to the Milner yet). There's is issue of evolution of technology, the problem of the physical self in relation to its technology, and the larger philosophical understanding of the relationship between technology and the subject.
Splika's introduction prepared me nicely to expect discussions of the rhetoric of technology, information design, and content management, all of which I would agree come up in the four other chapters we read. She suggests that the scholarship in TC must get past the question of field definition and instead begin to justify itself in terms of serving needs of other fields through its own expertise (5). Answering these questions in terms of what the new digitally affected economy is the focus of the collection.
So from Caroliner we get a nice history of how authoring, publishing, and management technologies came about and shifted the job descriptions of TCers (see 46), discussed often in terms of the design/content and theory/praxis binaries. In other words, shifting trends in technological development were accompanied by questions over the role of technical communicators- should they be programmers who can speak to networkers, or writers who can speak to end users? TC was affected largely by what was needed and could be afforded by companies whose objectives and audiences were simultaneously shifting. K. But there wasn't much problematization of technology here, more concern about how it changed the field and what TC needs to do to stay relevant therein-a largely reactionary perspective. Enter Dicks.
Dicks' title seemed to be the next step, claiming what I was looking for in Caroliner:"The Effects of Digital Literacy on the Nature of Technical Communication Work." (BTW- I fully recognize that it's my own interests that lead me to perpetually read things as begging the question, and then being disappointed when they don't.) This article was fun and exciting, and offered the play of social and economic analyses that I think ought to accompany discussions of technology. It also had the enthusiasm I like to see-the speculation about how the things we interact with shape our world and how we shape the world through them. The integration of Web 2.0, symbolic-analytic work, and the support economy seem to support the New London Group's idea of shape-shifting portfolio people who need to explore and build and broadcast their flexibility of talents- something I see as less exploitive than recognizing of the experiential and organic nature of work and working. The symbolic-analytic work idea is a bit vague to me, but either way, the mood in this piece is less than outwardly critical of technology, I would say.
The notion of the support economy and Dicks' description of how it might affect business practices are interesting to think about in terms of digital technologies and technical communication. It may seem romantic on my part, but I love the idea that
organization [will] allow customization of their products and services and, with Web 2.0 and other technologies, increased customer participation in product development, review, and maintenance. (57)
(I'm not so opposed to the next line either, lol.) Somehow it seems like increased customer participation is more democratic and hence better supports the ideal of freedom. But then there's the notion that customer data mining can do the opposite by allowing greater manipulation of the buyer's consciousness. If customization merely means better control of a market population, well... Additionally, if the prediction that "technical communicators will be officially unemployed by constantly working"(59), in what ways can we (to anticipate Katz and Rhodes) shift our ethical frames for how we understand what it is to work? Essentially, it seems there are a lot of cool things to look at in these essays, but what concerns me was lurking in the shadows until Clark's investigation into the rhetoric of technology, in which issues of power get mentioned a few times within the descriptions of types of TC scholarship and theory that fall under that category.
Most interesting to me, however, is the dualistic to pluralistic perspectives of the nature of technology implicit in the ethical frames Katz and Rhodes define. The frames seem to elicit anxieties about both technology and theory itself. Their point that we need an ethical frame that matches our current communicative situation is well taken. But in many of the frames they identify, I see an unnecessary flattening of the reality of technology, which I suppose is ultimately their point. They define ethical frames as
a set of philosophical assumptions, ideological perceptions, and normative values underlying and/or guiding how people relate to and exist with technology. (231)
The authors recognize that these frames are socially constructed and dynamic. But the descriptions of the frames seem a bit more "stiff" than need be. Whether a particular manager or the employee handbook's author is the voice driving a particular frame seems to be quite pertinent when a TCer or anyone else is tying to fulfill a particular purpose with technology within a company, and the decisions of the individual actors therein should be taken into account as reflections of the dynamic reality of the ethical frames in practice. It's confusing to me why, for instance, a person would take on a study like Rhodes'.
The authors describe the purpose of the study as an attempt "to capture a more comprehensive picture of employees' email relations through the application of communication theory and rhetorical analysis" (242), though the analysis seeks to explore when and where the ethical frames they described step into the picture. What confuses me, however, is in the "Email as a Tool and an End" section in which the authors use Uncertainty Reduction Theory to assess the ethical frame enacted in the study company's email exchanges. They conclude that "the organization and its employees participate in frames that both regard and utilize email as simply a means to an end-a tool to accomplish work goals (tool frame)" (243). But what bothers me here is that the theory itself provided the analytic lens that produced those conclusions- they claim under this theory one can see that the participants "simply" see email as a work tool, and yet that's the only result the theory allowed the research to see. They acknowledge this on the next page, arguing that we must use rhetoric to understand more about how technology and the workplace and the social context therein have mutually informed each other.
I guess my point here is that it seems like a lot of work to use narrow communication theory to prove that theories of technology are too narrow. My intent here is not really critique so much as to question how we might see this same problem throughout the articles. In Caroliner, the subject seems to sort of drift from place to place as new technologies emerge- the subject is reactionary to technology. In Dicks, the subject makes and is made and displaced by technology. In Clark, lots of stuff is going on and our theories are plentiful. Katz and Rhodes suggest that we need to catch up, epistemologically, to the realities of technology and interpersonal communication. I see some huge questions here about the nature of the subject in relation to technology, and about the inadequacy of our theories for addressing those questions. There's just a huge array of how to think about what's clearly a huge topic- and I wonder how such a diverse collection of essays indirectly positions the reader to face these questions...
