Is Revision Separate from Writing?

Revision as Writing

In thinking and writing about groups working on revising a document, I’ve become increasingly convinced that “revision” may be an artificial separation. There is a substantial, though not insurmountable, body of research that indicates revision is indeed something different than writing, or that revision is at least something which it is possible to distinguish from writing even if it is not separable from writing.

Haar (2006) claims that revision “doesn’t have a well-developed history of theorizing and study” (3). I might suggest that revision doesn’t have a body of study or academic theoretical framework because it’s so very difficult to separate revision from simply writing. I cannot imagine any circumstance under which I would write without some modification of the text—spelling, organization, word choice, rhetorical strategy—before the text hits the screen. My son, all of 8 years old, is at the beginning stages of writing. He prints letters, frequently not distinguishing between lower- and upper-case into words, and makes sentences of those words. But he’s already revising in his head before he begins printing. He speaks softly, mouthing the words to himself, making corrections and emendations, before beginning to write. And as he writes, he makes little corrections (rounding out a “c,” perhaps, or getting the downward stroke on the correct side of a “d”). Those physical corrections, of course, are simply the end result of the revision process already in place in his head. His writing, in fact, is indistinguishable from his revision. They are coterminous, sharing the leading edge of his thought plane.

But as important as writing is, it seems foolish for me to simply dismiss revision as the focus of serious study. For one thing, writing, and any aspect of writing we care to identify, is simply too important to ignore. That argument has been made too many times by too many people for me to go into it here. Suffice to say that writing’s important; therefore, research into revision must also be important. Haar indeed states that that “revision touches every part of the writing process” (7), and then goes into various academic definitions of revision, some focusing on the time scale during which revision happens, others identifying the mechanical aspects of revision (proofreading as opposed to organization, for instance). Haar provides us with examples of “deliberately wrought” (11) descriptions of revision offered by revision scholars, ranging from metaphorical (“internal” and “external,” “up” and “down,” revising “out” and “in”), cognitive (“a turn, a change of direction or attention, a step, a transformation from a writer-centered to a reader-centered mode of writing,” according to Flower), duration (“quick” and “thorough,” according to Elbow), and a literal definition by Fitzgerald that says “revision means making any changes at any point in the writing process.” Fitzgerald’s distinction seems to me to be the least helpful. Writing itself is, for me at least, an act of change, the most insignificant portion of which takes place on the screen and the most profound of which takes place within myself or my readers. In other words, I’m not sure but what revision is so closely related to writing that distinguishing between the two is simply an academic exercise.

Fortunately, I’m in the business of academic exercises.

And separating revision from writing does indeed allow for some advantages: for one thing, the perception that revision is different than producing, say, a rough draft, is helpful in locating a particular event or process to investigate. Another advantage to separating revision from writing is that revision is almost always in response to your audience, whether you are serving as your own audience (and editor) or whether you are revision in response to someone else’s input, revision is a response to the reader. For my purposes, the group action—two or more people changing a workplace document—is important in that group revision and peer review have become more important to composition theory in the last ten years as we see the de-emphasis on the individual as author and the emergence of recognition that writing is the result of living and working with others—friction, if you will, which is both positive and negative. There never was an author who wrote out of a vacuum, creating something from nothing (no matter how long it’s taking that idea to die, it was never true). But the teaching of revision in TC service courses (and I think we could expand this to freshman comp, too, as well as others) is still often a limited-interaction exercise.

I’ve received some very good, thoughtful responses from posting the following query to the ATTW-L:

I'm interested in knowing how group revision activities (two or more writers working on the same document) are conducted in your department's TC service courses. What sorts of genres, activities, and technologies are included when teaching/allowing students to revise a document in groups? How is authorship represented in the final document, and what roles do the students play when revising in groups?


The reason I ask is that my dissertation deals with service courses, and my preliminary research indicates that group revision may look and be conducted much differently in the workplace (specifically, engineering firms) than in the classroom. I am looking for more evidence of the classroom experience of document revision.


Any information or thoughts you have will be greatly appreciated, on- or off-list! Of course, I'll be happy to share my findings.

The responses I’ve received so far indicate that much of the peer review that takes place in TC service courses can be described as “asynchronous” (groups actually working as individuals and supplying critiques to other individuals) and somewhat mono-technological (MS Word shows up quite a bit; email somewhat less; Drupal only once, and no other technologies listed).

But the preliminary information I’ve received from civil engineers answering basically the same questions is that group revision is frequently an activity wherein the group offers feedback as a group: in other words, everyone talks about what needs to happen as a group rather than as individuals working silently. Furthermore, there’s a wide range of technologies that gets used for this revision process: Google Docs, Google Sketchup, paper, Words, and PDF docs.

So, as Rich Rice pointed out the other night, the real value of my dissertation will be to figure out how service courses get their information about group revision, and to then suggest a process by which service courses could get more accurate and timely information about workplace writing (in other words, try to offer some solution).

Service Courses at the Center of the Universe

Service courses exist at the center of the academic universe, pulled by the event horizons of a dozen different institutional singularities without ever fully succumbing to the influence of one or the other. Their orbits are unstable, and yet for decades they have managed to balance on the pin head of academic gravitas.

Service courses exist because legislatures tell public institutions they have to have them; they exist because academic institutions feel that students need to “just know” some things; they exist because legions of students have taken them in past generations, thus making them a tradition; and, they exist because they are part of an honest effort at helping students become citizens.

Many academics take “service course” to mean any of the lower-level courses that all students at public colleges are required to take; thus, introductory classes in history, political science, and freshman composition are all service courses. However, service courses are actually any courses offered by one department to the students of other departments (non majors). Thus, there are far more service courses than one might think. Service courses that fall under this definition could be as varied as renaissance and reformation history, medieval philosophy, web design, or technical editing.

But whatever its most far-flung incarnations may be, for technical communication researchers the “service course” is most commonly the class taught to students from across the university who need initiation and practice in the workaday documents they will be required to produce upon graduating and securing a job. This course, designated ENGL 2311 by the Texas Common Course Numbering System (TCCNS), has a variety of definitions across the nation, but most fall pretty comfortably into the following description:

“Principles, techniques, and skills needed for college level scientific, technical, or business
writing.”


Texas A&M University refines that to the following:

"Processes of developing field-specific technical information related to the major, including researching, drafting, editing, revising, and designing technical reports, proposals, manuals, resumes and professional correspondence for specific audiences. Special topics, computer and distance sections available. Prerequisites: ENGL 104; junior classification."

A careful reader will note that while above I defined the goal of the service course as preparing students for workplace writing, the first definition—from the Texas Common Course Numbering System—mentions only “college level. . .writing” and that A&M refers to writing “related to the major.” The question that arises naturally from this juxtaposition is whether “college” writing is the same as “workplace” writing. My experience talking to people in business, politics (including members of the Texas State Board of Education), and education (elementary, secondary, and post-secondary) indicates that at least for many people, college writing is in fact the same as workplace writing. In other words, many college graduates who have gone on to shape our families, communities, businesses, and schools think that the way we write in the classroom is the same way we write in the office. Therefore, there is no dissonance caused by the above contrast in definitions.

Researchers conversant with college writing and business writing will, or should, note that there are in fact pretty significant differences between college and business writing. For instance, there is a distinct difference in genre. College writing is often in the form of essays, but essays practically don’t exist at all in business. Furthermore, a good college-level producer of essays will write using terms and citation styles that often don’t apply to business. MLA citation style, by way of example, is practically unheard of off campus, and essays frequently deal with students’ personal opinions on politics, literature, and history, which, though important, do not often come up in workplace writing.

There is, of course, a significant amount of college writing which is not in essay form. Students routinely produce proposals, lab reports, and technical reports. They also make posters, slides, and handouts for technical presentations, and some students produce educational materials as well as websites and business plans and case studies. These document do in fact share a great deal in common with workplace writing: they are modeled on actual workplace documents (such as business plans) and are required so that students gain experience in generating these documents, becoming more comfortable with the genre and purpose of such texts. So far, so good.

But perhaps one of the most important distinctions between workplace writing and college writing is the end, or goal, of the document. In school, everything a student does is (or is supposed to be) for the direct benefit of the student. Students work as individuals and are graded as individuals. Even in group work, students receive individual grades, and savvy instructors have policies in place for the student who does not contribute as much as is expected. Upon graduation, students receive a personalized diploma recognizing their efforts. Students own their writing, and thus their grades.

In workplace writing, documents frequently do not list an author but instead bear the name of the company or institution for which the student (now graduated) works. The end of the workplace document is to increase the value of the organization, not the individual, though individual benefits of course come through in the form of paychecks, raises, and promotions. But the primary purpose of that document is to increase the value of the organization: paychecks are a secondary benefit, a consequence, of the increase in organizational value.

Writing in the classroom means the student owns the document and produced all of the work within it. When a student cites information, it is for the purpose of acknowledging outside help, such as quoting a source of information. But in the workplace, documents are frequently used and re-used, and even kept as templates for later work. A single paragraph page may contain the words of five or six employees, but those words are not attributed directly to those authors; instead, the document is taken to be literally the work of the group. Ownership of that text goes to the organization, and plagiarism takes on an entirely different shape and meaning. Stealing words and ideas from other companies is bad; re-using text produced from a worker who may no longer work there is completely reasonable, even without attribution.

The lack of recognition of the difference between classroom writing and workplace writing is largely transparent, and often detrimental, to the service courses designed upon the assumption that classroom writing and business writing are the same thing.

Focusing the Question

How do we, then, 1) measure and 2) bridge the inevitable gap between employer expectations and the knowledge, skills and dispositions taught in TC service courses such that schools can better keep up with changing needs and emerging trends in industry?


This question is the one that’s occupied me for the last couple of years. It’s a noble quest, to be sure, trying to keep a practical, service-oriented course on track with employers’ expectations. It’s the basic requirement of an education: teach me to do something, or to think something, that will better me (or, in this case, make me more employable). But over time, the base question (“How do we. . .?”) has become more rhetorical than anything else. How, in fact, do we keep classes current with industry, assuming that we should do so in the first place?

And is it possible to keep a course which serves an entire undergraduate university population, composed of 90-some-odd majors, relevant to the writing practices of each student’s intended career path such that those students will come out of the course actually writing and understanding the documents of a particular profession better and more effectively than when they went into the course? No, probably not. But it’s worth looking into.

William James might argue that the “cash value” of the larger question, the “How do we” question, is to serve as a touchstone or a frame, but not the actual endeavor itself. Rather, it lays philosophical ground for me in that it keeps the focus on the practicality of the TC service course.

So back to the question, I’ve been refining it in my head for some time now. If the question lends itself to broadness, to lack of specific focus such that it really does become more rhetorical than an actual request for information, then I can at least refine my approach to the question. The question of “How do we. . .” then becomes a guiding philosophy rather than something I have to answer directly. I’ve considered questions like:

1. If more authentic writing situations make for more effective learning, then how can a technographic study help capture workplace writing practices for inclusion into the classroom?

In order to answer this question, I’d need to make clear the value and validity of a technographic study (which, in all fairness, I’d need to do in any study that uses the word “technographic”).

The study design would have to take into account other study designs and their findings in order to make that final comparison, the “how can a” part of the question, make sense. And that’s a sticking point, seems to me, since another ethnographic study (not technographic in nature) would of course have examined different things in the first place; thus, comparing results wouldn’t work too well without some serious rhetorical gymnastics.

2. How can ethnographic observation methods, traditionally used in writing studies to record information on the production of texts as well as the interactions of writers, be shifted in order to take into account the participation of technological artifacts in the writing process?

I like this question a bit more than the first because it allows for a simple critique of past studies and an opportunity to justify a different approach (the technographic lens, if you will). That’s a valuable piece of real estate, but I think it would work better as an article rather than as a full-length dissertation project. Must make a note.

3. If, as a number of researchers assert, technology “participates” with us in the creation of both artifacts and activities, how can we measure the extent and influence of that participation?

This question works well, too, and in fact may be the winner of this group. First, I’d need to line up some theorists and researchers who assert that technology participates alongside us (Johnson-Eilola and Kien I already have, but I’m wondering if there aren’t some other techno-heavy hitters like Marcuse and Ellul who could be worked in?). So, assuming I’d gotten the theoretical basis squared away, next would come the study. And the study itself would be the primary benefit to this question over the previous: the previous question could be answered entirely using deductive reasoning, or at least an answer could be roughed out of the raw material. But with this third question, I’m allowing for the inclusion of a decent empirical study. My diss chair will argue that it’s going to be difficult to quantify the word “participation” empirically, but I’m not sure that’s the hard part. I think a good study design would adapt ethnographic methods such as direct observation and interviews, with focus groups where we focused on the technology itself and got the group to provide some feedback, some sense of how they fit the technology into their daily work.

But there’s a host of what I’ll call on-the-ground problems with that one, starting with who I’d be using as participants and why, and how to get them to talk about technology without leading them (technology is notoriously transparent—just think about the last time you really thought about how helpful shoes are) into saying what I think. So that’s just two good problems to deal with. I’m sure there are more.

But one of the more serious, I think, problems is that I might just uncover disciplinary differences in the group inclusion of technology that point to the dissolution of TC service courses, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

Let me back up: let’s say I use two participant pools, one from a human resources firm and one from a civil engineering firm. What if I find that the use of language, the production of written artifacts, and the inclusion (and subsequent participation) of technology into both spoken and written communication is so very specific to each firm (and really, to each field) that, in fact, there’s no way to include both approaches in a single class? Would that point to an overall condemnation of the idea that we can train future professionals to produce technical documents in a single, one-size-fits-all course?

Honestly, though, that potential conclusion doesn’t worry me. It’s getting there—the problems on the ground, as it were—that are the real obstacles. If those can be addressed such that a replicable, empirical study can be carried out and the results recorded in a usable fashion, then the results may fall where they may. I imagine chapter five will be full of all kinds of speculations about application anyhow.

Techne and Teaching TC

I’ve just this morning re-read Moeller and McAllister’s (2002) “Playing with Techne,” which offers a strong contrast to much of my reading, writing, and thinking over the past couple of years. In a nutshell, Moeller and McAllister argue against the current mindset that professional, as opposed to academic, documents and setting are the preferred method of teaching technical communication. As a caveat, I think it’s important to note that Moeller and McAllister seem to be talking about TC classes offered to TC majors, rather than the far more common service courses offered to non-TC majors (to the tune of some 800,000 students per year, in fact). So that distinction may be responsible for much of my reaction to their argument. And it’s only fair to point out that the essence of their discussion—that encouraging students to “play” with newly-acquired tools and knowledge is one of the best ways of getting them to develop skills and learn associated conventions—is an excellent point, though I’d point out that encouraging folks to play with anything is a good start to learning.

Moeller and McAllister (2002) argue against “textbooks that push technical communication students prematurely into workplace scenarios” and claim that textbooks of technical communication “position the student as an employee who is stuck awkwardly between a boss who wants a project done inexpensively but well and a customer who wants a project done well but inexpensively” (185-6). Moeller and McAllister miss, however, one of the primary exigencies of teaching technical communication: the overwhelming majority of our students are not going into TC as a profession, and they do indeed enter the classroom looking to learn a few things that will immediately help them in a workplace situation. Engineering students, in particular, tend to graduate and begin working immediately in positions that place them between a mid-level boss and a customer in precisely the scenario described above.

Moeller and McAllister also argue against the data-driven assertions of other TC researchers that novice writers often only begin to value rhetoric after being exposed to the professional discourse and environment. Instead, they criticize TC for having “warmly embraced an emphasis on ‘efficient writing’ simultaneously taught and practiced in a recontextualized classroom that tries to mirror difficult workplace realities” (187).

A great deal of their argument reinforces the classroom versus the “real world” duality that makes for so much trouble in both academic and non-academic surroundings. The purpose of universities has always been to produce and spread knowledge. This mission, which is tempting to describe a two-pronged but is really indicative of the symbiotic relationship between research and education, is and has been commonly found in the Far East, Middle East, Near East, and Western schools for centuries. And while the modern American university now leans more towards being a trade and professional than a liberal arts institution, our job is still to produce knowledge and spread it around in anticipation of someone doing something with that knowledge. Whether they’re hunting for furs or designing solar-powered sewage treatment plants, our students have got to be ready to do something with what we teach them, and that means the classroom is part and parcel of the “real world.” To pretend that school isn’t the “real world” is simply to miss the point of school.

Moeller and McAllister go on (unwisely, in my opinion) to suggest that students don’t have much experience being students, even though they show up to college having already experienced as many as 13 years (sometimes more) of formal instruction (188). In fact, our students show up often knowing little other than how to be students, and how to fit within the construct of the classroom environment. What we need to break free from, then, is the idea that the writing assignments of the TC classroom will be similar to the essays and personal narratives they’ve written so far. Thus, approaching the TC classroom with an air of workplace sensibility seems to be a good start particularly if we’re going to pay attention to the research results from Katz, Winsor, and others.

The crux of their argument, which despite my criticisms is an interesting and valuable point, is that students in TC courses should be encouraged to be shapers of knowledge, the artisans to whom the word techne makes reference (though actually the ancient Greek for “artisan” is, in Roman letters, tekton). But it seems they’re working from first principles rather than hard data, and I think they’ve missed the target in terms of accurately identifying the first principle. For instance, and as I stated earlier, they identify students as not knowing much about being students. That’s a missed opportunity for enlightenment. I’d argue (again) that college students know, in fact, very little except for how to be students. And, as I also pointed out above, they’re simply missing out on a great deal of valid data gathered by painstaking ethnographic methods, and while I’m currently engaged in a critique of those same studies, I’m by no means under the impression that the results of those studies are invalid or should simply be ignored. Far from it! My own critique is based on the idea that there’s some missing element to the methodology behind many of the ethnographic writing studies we’ve done in the past. But the results of those studies, such as they are, sure seem pretty solid and are at least worthy of comment in Moeller’s and McAllister’s article.

Artemeva, Logie, and St-Martin (1999), in an article that represents the dialogic opposite of Moeller and McAllister’s argument, describe a course in which lower-level engineering students are exposed to “typified writing practices in situated contexts of the engineering disciplines, interactions with existing texts, and interactions with relatively experienced writers (engineering students from upper years, teaching assistants, and instructors)” (302). Artemeva, et al, admit that “[r]ather than viewing their course work as dummy runs or simulations, students need to perceive what they are doing as being real and having consequences” (303), but this admission is in frank response to the necessity of TC coursework matching TC professional practice rather than resisting it.

In line with Winsor’s findings, Artemeva, et al, state that students “usually bring with them a resistance to the notion of engineering as a profession that requires literacy” (303). If Artemeva, et al, are right, and my experience indicates they are, then Moeller and McAllister’s humanities-based approach will simply not appeal to the engineering students in their classes, and might even alienate them entirely.

How TC fails Pragmatism

My master’s thesis deals with pragmatism as it appears in a series of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels. I argued, pretty successfully, that Jamesian pragmatism was already a feature of American novels before James himself became famous for endorsing pragmatism as a life philosophy. Since then, I’ve been affected by James’ writings in my teaching and my research, always believing that I was engaged in a very pragmatic practice: teaching others to improve their writing so that they could move on in their classroom and work-related careers. But a conversation with my dissertation chair, Fred Kemp, has made me question that assumption of pragmatism. Pragmatism is an approach to valuing a theory or situation so as to find whether it benefits the individual. A pragmatic approach to education would involve a student choosing a major and then taking classes that fit his or her interpretation of that major’s value to the individual. A history major might focus in on nineteenth century America and classes that would aid in teaching that history to high school students.

But Fred pointed out that TC service courses are a response, not a homegrown initiative. Those classes are a response to a need identified by others, and our response is to create and offer a class based on those needs. It’s a backwards sort of pragmatism, one that responds to someone else’s pragmatic desires. A department which offered such courses could do so in a pragmatic matter, being sure to make money and intercampus social capital, provide teachers with an outlet for their well-honed pedagogical skills, and creating a curriculum that meets the needs of the department while also serving the students and client departments. But that’s almost never what happens. In fact, I’d argue that it never happens except there may be some golden campus where service courses benefit everyone. In practice, those classes tend to make servants of the undertrained instructors who are paid blue collar wages for university-level teaching, and the students are frequently not served by those courses due to the courses’ generality and lack of theoretical and practical rigor.

So in practice, TC service courses are the opposite of pragmatic. They’re some sort of perverse altruism where the best of intentions help few, if any, attain their goals.

Joanna Wolfe (2009) points out that textbooks for introductory TC service courses actually fail to serve a huge chunk of their clientele: engineering and science students whose rhetorical and epistemological approach do not mesh with those of the humanities scholars who produce the textbooks. To be fair, there are textbooks written by engineers or by humanities scholars who work closely for engineers. Hillary Hart’s Engineering Communication is such a book, created by a humanities scholar whose position and experience aligns her with an engineering college. But those books are few and far between, and their level of adoption does not even begin to approach those of the humanities-driven textbooks.

Part of the disjuncture between writing for the humanities (and thus the approach that humanities-based textbooks take) and writing in the scientific and engineering fields has to do with the mission of technical communication itself: clarity reigns supreme. Over and over, engineers are taught (rightly so) that clarity is the goal of all good writing. The humanities, though, often approach writing as an art in itself, and that freewriting and rough drafting and the very act of writing is worth taking noting. And as with the engineers who argue the opposite, the humanities scholars are indeed correct. Two approaches, both utterly logical, and both somewhat incompatible in teaching and in practice.

The contrast between what engineers and employers seem to want can be seen in Blyler’s (1995) article in which she argues for a pedagogy of social action, urging teachers and students to take a rhetorical approach to the construction of power in both textual and graphical narratives. Blyler (1993) takes a humanities-based stance when arguing against a “formulaic” view of genre and purpose for business communication courses. But formulaic is exactly what the engineers would like, and is often exactly the approach needed for effective engineering communication. In the humanities, we argue that texts are social artifacts constructed to meet the needs and expectations of (frequently) tightly-knit groups with a level of discourse contingent upon their workplace activities and needs. But Blyer’s argument suggests otherwise. We should not train students to write genres within such a specific space and place. No doubt helping students recognize their rhetorical circumstances, taking a broad approach to audience analysis and textual production, would help them think more globally about writing and perhaps more critically about the purposes of genre. But that means we’re not responding to the needs, the stated needs, of our client departments and are in fact working more pragmatically according to our own “cash value” when it comes to our service courses.

Perhaps pragmatism has failed me at last, in that a pragmatic view of the TC service course will result in classes that do not address the specific needs of the intended audience. Furthermore, if we deliberately create courses that do not address those specific needs, we may be failing to follow our own stated goals for effective technical communication. If the class fails, perhaps the class author is the one to blame.

Bushnell (1999) argues that preparing students simply for their future jobs, based on expectations provided solely by employers, undermines the role of the university in producing writers who “shape knowledge” and acknowledge bias rather than avoid it. However, for students in technical majors who take the service course as part of a communication requirement, the expectation to “shape knowledge” may be too great a leap: engineering students, for example, are taught to create knowledge (conduct tests) and then to report it. To introduce the idea of shaping knowledge in the form of a one-semester course, or to encourage students to take a rhetorically-bound epistemological stance, may be asking too much. It’s also important to note that Bushnell’s take on university education is dated: we no longer (always) aim to broaden minds and further intellectual horizons. Instead, the more common goal is to train students for specific professions, which more and more commonly require even further specialization after college. What careers exist for which (a) a university degree is required, and (b) require no further specialization or continuing education?

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.

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.