Robert Johnson vs. Kien's Technography

Robert Johnson’s User-Centered Technology is a favorite work among technical communicators. In it, Johnson proposes “that the end of technology be refigured as in the user: those humans (virtually all of us) who interact with various technologies (large corporate and governmental systems or small, stand-alone devices; simple hand tools or complex electronic networks; discursively created or materially constructed artifacts) on a daily basis in our public and personal lives” (21). Johnson contrasts his view with how he perceives other theories of technology, those that largely subordinate the user of the technology to the tool, or system, which the user is using.

In contrast, Kien’s Global Technography seems to argue more in favor of viewing humans and technology as an interconnected system, claiming that “ubiquitous mediation is the norm” (14) and that “the props, backdrops, and containers of our interactions practice everyday life right along with us” (16). While this statement certainly teases my imagination, and makes for interesting research ideas, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with Kien’s casual anthropomorphizing of technology. In short, I’m not sure that tools “practice” anything, much less “life.” That the presence of the tool, or system, affects my performance of everyday life is not in question. What is at the heart of my discomfort is whether one can assign agency to technology.

In response, we might point to Johnson’s argument that “the system-centered view holds that the technology, the humans, and the context within which they reside are perceived as constituting one system that operates in a rational manner toward the achievement of predetermined goals” (25). But here we can see that Kien moves away from Johnson’s condemnation of “predetermined goals” by side-stepping the issue of determinism altogether and getting into the messiness, the unpredictability, of everyday life. Kien’s “global,” as it were, argument is that because our human interactions are constantly mediated via technological interface, we need to create a methodological affordance, a stance, which accounts for our interactions with technology (as those interactions pass through that technology on their way to the intended human audience). Kien argues that this “ever-changing vicinity of the device itself thus becomes the defining parameter of the field of study” (16). Kien seems to be talking mostly about communications technology, and his book is full of anecdotes describing the changes in behavior and interpersonal relations that occur due to our modern existence being almost entirely circumscribed by technological connectivity. And not just any technologies, but wireless communications technologies: devices specifically made to allow for interactions between people, thus also made specifically to mediate the interface that exists between two people. That interface is at once made possible, as well as changed by, the phone (for example).

Where Kien and Johnson seem to agree is on the user’s technological awareness. Johnson argues that “users know about technology and the experiences they have with it are always located in a certain time and place that changes from minute to minute, day to day, era to era” (9). Kien keeps talking about “eruptions” of change and an ongoing “epiphany” of insight into how communications technology affects our performance of culture, life, and learning. For me, an eruption or an epiphany carries connotations or either the unpredictable natural world (erupting around us) or divine interference (epiphany); either way, the user experiences life by way of accident, or lack of control, and is not aware of his or her performative relationship to technology. I don’t think this is an accurate characterization for all users, at the very least because I feel there are a great many users out there who are thinking actively about their relationships and performances with regard to technology. By way of example, I point to all the poignant criticism of Apple’s just-announced iPad. Many of my friends on Twitter and Facebook, along with professional reviewers at Wired and CNN, are pointing out shortcomings of the device, and actively critiquing whether this new device, neither laptop nor phone, can (or should) be fit into our lives. I think these reactions to a device not yet publicly released contradict Kien’s descriptions, his sort of non-teleological lens through which our interactions with technology change and reproduce unpredictably.

Back to my own study, wherein workplace writing review is examined in terms of how technology changes that process, I think a researcher would deliberately look for work groups who actively consider their technological aids to document production. If not, if the participants are of the sort hinted at by Kien, who simply react to technology rather than think and plan and theorize it, then their descriptions of how technology changes their revision process will be worthless, and ultimately, impossible to reproduce in the classroom.

But I think my own criticism of Kien’s theories is really only in how he writes about them, treats them, and not with the base idea: an ethnography, which measures and describes human activity within a particular cultural and spatial context, can be channeled into a technography, a description of human activity with a particular cultural and technological context (I’m tempted to write “virtual spatial context,” but the term “virtual” to describe electronic interactions is annoying to me). Kien indicates that our interactions with communications—and it’s only fair to note that he’s talking about global connectivity--technology seem to throw traditional narrative and theories of knowledge out the window, but I don’t see that at all. Instead, I see technography as a way of performing a particular kind of ethnography (even though an anthropologist might not see it as ethnography at all). So I’ll be more specific: a technography, for me, is any study that focuses on how technology alters a human activity, and which tries to account for that change by way of gathering data from the people who use (a) while they’re using it, and (b) in the contexts in which they use it. Thus, disruptive though technology may be, and disruptive to our data-gathering methods, no doubt, methodologically speaking a technography is simply a more narrowly focused application of ethnographic methods.

Not sure I’m comfortable with that, but it’s time to start working what I’ve written into a usable format.