I'm Back in the Datacloud Again, and It's Fixin' to Rain

TC luminaries like George Hayhoe sometimes espouse an industry focus which emphasizes the value created outside the classroom by TC professionals and subject-matter experts. Hayhoe writes, “Academics need to work with our practitioner colleagues to identify in detail the body of knowledge and skills that technical communicators need to be competitive and effective on the job. We must then revise our curricula to focus on that knowledge and those skills to prepare future students” (266).

However, if our mission is to teach rather than train, as Johnson-Eilola puts it (and Stanley Fish, too, in a recent column entitled “The Last Professor”), then we cannot allow ourselves to simply follow industry, meeting only current expectations rather than exploring new ideas and creating knowledge within the classroom. Hayhoe also notes that “discipline-standard processes and criteria for evaluating work products are other hallmarks of a profession” (p. 266). Standardization, if indeed desirable, would come most effectively after a sturdy partnership exists between industry and academia. That partnership, though, comes at the cost of re-evaluating our research methods not merely in terms of how to gather data, but also as a way of creating communities of knowledge. Research, knowledge, practice, and education cannot exist as separate cultures if TC is to grow into a mature discipline. In my writings and readings this week on technography, I think I’m beginning to identify a useful construct, or theoretical stance, in keeping us in touch with our research agenda while keeping us grounded in the workaday experience of using tools to create and collaborate.

Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s Datacloud discusses technical communication in terms of “remixing”: just as a dj remixes music, symbolic-analytical workers (Robert Reich’s terms, borrowed for the book and for this discussion) re-mix information for different audiences, taking complex, sometimes very technical data and turning it into a prospectus for investors, marketing materials for potential customers, an operations manual, and a series of graphics for an online advertising campaign. We’re like conductors assembling the evening’s program from our repertoire of rarefied musicology. In the end, the audience should be satisfied that we’ve presented them with a meaningful experience, even if some of them only listened to the timpanist.

Johnson-Eilola’s version of a datacloud is one in which huge chunks of data are presented and re-presented by trained professionals interacting with their audience, their tools, and their colleagues. Kien’s view of a technography, as I wrote yesterday, seems more interested in the experience of the individual within the group (no matter his example of a group modifying a document—his vignettes from personal life focus almost exclusively on his own subjective experience awash in connectivity). For my money, the current rein-holder of technography should focus in on the group experiences of technology in which the tool itself plays a pivotal role. As a technical communicator, I’m currently most interested in document production, and the process of revision is my (again, current) area of interest. But I think Johndan’s version of the datacloud provides a wealth of opportunity for researchers interested in performing a technography.

For instance, in “Relocating the Value of Work,” Johnson-Eilola mentions the potential power of networked technologies. One use of networked technologies is, of course, distance education. But another, more activity-oriented implementation of networked technologies might include reaching outside the classroom and into the workplace, reducing the isolation of students and mentors (an isolation which Johnson-Eilola argues against) and increasing contact with the workplace. A network as an “environment for learning,” as he puts it, can be implemented by combining human networks such as classrooms and teachers, along with mentors and peers outside the classroom, and then adding computer networks to gather and reflect upon knowledge gained from the interaction of the human networks.

Here’s how he says it:
“Perhaps more importantly, we must move beyond the idea that the network is a medium for transmitting knowledge. A more radical notion is that the network is also an environment for learning, working, and living. Put in a different way, we need to think about new formations for knowledge that rely on network organization, metaknowledge and metawork that act at a level above current knowledge structures. This is another way of saying we need to redefine technical communication in broader terms than functional skills: we should be teaching rather than training” (p. 264-5, emphasis in original).

Bringing the discussion back to technography, I re-read a passage in Johnson-Eilola’s Datacloud this morning in which he not only echoes, but I would say presages Kien’s remarks on technography:

“In analyzing these continued processes of articulation and rearticulation, we begin to see a recursive development in which the computer absorbs social actions, fragments and flattens them, only to have those actions and spaces reabsorbed into culture in various ways. However, I want to avoid the idea that the computer interface somehow autonomously causes broad social changes. Instead I want to suggest that the computer participates in broad social changes. In a recursive and contingent process (or set of processes), particular forms of interface tend to influence how people work” (34, emphasis in original).

Clearly, this is a good sign for me and my current fascination with all things technographic. Here’s a well-known TC researcher indicating that yes, the technology we use participates alongside us in social change. Again, as with Kien, I’m a little uncomfortable assigning any hint of volition on the part of a tool or any sort; however, it’s worth noting that tools and techniques are little is not the reflection of desires on our part. The desire to work and produce drives our desire to tools that aid in that work, and thus our tools are manifestations of our desires. In that sense, we could certainly argue that our desires participate, as parts of us, alongside us and within us, and the tools we use are physical symbols of that participation. So perhaps I’ve quieted my own doubts concerning Kien’s anthropomorphism (animism is what it reads like) by bringing my own thoughts about technology out of the theoretical, abstract realm and back into the day-to-day experience of working with tools.