Let’s Talk about Jane: The Ethics of “Other” Knowledge

By Stephen Carradini

Who creates knowledge? Where do we find expertise? What technological practices benefit technical communicators? Does knowledge arrive in a top-down manner from professors to students, or do practicing writers who experiment with new things create it from the bottom up? Where do subject matter experts come in? These epistemological questions run deep through our field. The nature of technical communicators’ responses to these questions shape the way we view technical communication and how we develop new knowledge. Practitioners, researchers, and students of technical communication have an ethical duty to continually interrogate our epistemologies and look toward “other” ways of doing things as we attempt to understand, apprehend, and translate an ever-shifting world for an ever-shifting audience.

Let’s Talk About Jane

Jane is an aspiring professional independent musician who wants to go on tour. She has an audience of several thousand people that she has built up through local shows and online networking. To learn how to book a tour, she searches “DIY tour booking” in a search engine. Clicking on a result brings her to IndieOnTheMove.com, a platform that hosts venue information. She clicks around and finds some potential venues she could play, then stumbles across a blog post with step-by-step instructions for contacting venue bookers. She reads the post, then writes several emails using the strategies she has read about. She throws in some of her own humorous flair.

In a few days, Jane hears back from a venue in a nearby state that will let her open for another band. She posts this information to her Facebook and Twitter accounts, then sends out an email newsletter using MailChimp. Jane uses that show as a springboard to book a small tour, then another, then several more over the years. As she gains experience, she responds with advice to tweets and Facebook messages of younger artists about touring. After giving similar answers a few times, she documents on her personal blog the methods that she has tweaked via repeated practice. Now she can link people to the blog post for answers to basic questions and answer the harder ones herself.

Jane isn’t in the field of technical communication, but she is interacting with, creating, and disseminating specialist information related to specific, technologically-mediated tasks. She uses search engines, knowledge bases, blogs, and instructions; she develops a social media presence, and writes email, newsletters, and documentation. These tasks should sound familiar, as they include the sorts of tasks that technical communicators often do.

Learning from Jane

What should technical communicators learn from Jane, if anything? How can the accumulated experience of booking several tours (a complex, situated, mediated, online task) translate to the work that technical communicators do? Should researchers be looking at emergent communication practices in fields other than our own for knowledge that technical communicators can take away? Should scholars be teaching the insights learned by practitioners of other fields, fields that don’t share our ethics or epistemologies? In short, does booking a tour online matter to technical communication?

It’s a sticky question. Even though the classes in various technical communication programs may differ, technical communicators have developed a set of pedagogical concerns that include the ethics of doing work. Most musicians aren’t technical communicators, and they don’t know the things we know—nor do many of us know their world. They don’t have our ethical structures. What if the things they know, the ways they get things done, go against our ethical structures or our best practices? How do we square our knowledge of how we do things with the practices that are effective in other fields—practices that may make us more effective? How do we keep technical communication distinctive without missing the boat on something valuable? How do we understand, evaluate, and incorporate these sorts of actions, practices, and (ultimately) epistemologies into technical communication? Should we? How? When?

People complicate the narratives that we have about technical communication. And that’s a good thing. This article is more about questions than answers. I don’t have all the answers to the questions I’m presenting, although I do have some suggestions.

My Questions and Suggestions

What if Jane lies about her audience size in a particular city to get access? What if she uses vague language and stretches things a bit to convince a booker who doesn’t know how she’ll fit with a show? The types of communication that Jane uses may be instrumental in their design, not taking into account the situation that the reader is in. We do not want to emulate the types of communication which might make us think, “That’s why technical communication exists, right there.” Some communicative practices outside our field do deserve a “harrumph” and no more.

But what if there are things to learn? Social media is a growing field in technical communication. Jane lives and dies by her social media, as it is a direct connection to her fans. What strategies does she use to connect with her audience most effectively? How is she communicating valuable information about when a show starts, where the new music can be heard, and how to pre-order a t-shirt?

There may be emergent strategies of use that develop in ad hoc ways, mature through repeated use, and result in effective communication. If technical communicators want to be the best social media communicators we can be, perhaps we need to know how we can use and adapt those strategies. Perhaps we can learn about rapid dissemination of information through early adopter artists who have to teach their users how to navigate the software and platforms implemented. Perhaps the nature of the instructions that Jane used has something to teach technical communicators about instruction writing in a digital era (as Derek Van Ittersum’s 2014 article on Instructables notes).

We don’t have to look so far afield to find the difficulty of top-down/bottom-up knowledge. How do we understand the relationship of users in software help forums to the company whose products they are giving information about? Sometimes these users give wrong information. Sometimes they give complex, innovative, “correct” information that doesn’t meet our expectations. Are users to be studied, taught, or both? With so many people involved in communicating about technical information, the need to understand as much as we can about the process is imperative. Where do we look for this research? Do we look in organizations? Outside organizations, to freelance and contract workers? Far afield, in fields seemingly tenuously related to technical communication? These are questions that we must ponder; we have an ethical obligation to interrogate where legitimate knowledge creation comes from in our field. If we uncritically proceed with one answer (any answer), we may miss out on developing strategies.

For technical communication to have responsible epistemology and ethical practices, we must continue to interrogate where knowledge comes from. In the digital era, information can come from many places: on scales of formal to informal, classroom to workplace, online to offline, technical communication to things very much not technical communication at all. As researchers consider what to study and practitioners think about their best practices, we must keep our eyes open to the types of communication practices that will benefit us, no matter where those tools come from. In a field that looks to communicate information about the technology that is currently turning up in every aspect of life—from health to weather to shoes to our very brains—we should not turn our noses up quickly. Instead, we should be inquisitive about what we can take away from practices similar to and different from our own.

STEPHEN CARRADINI is a doctoral student in the communication, rhetoric, and digital media program at North Carolina State University. He studies new media writing and the business practices of extraorganizational individuals, with a focus on musicians. He writes about music at IndependentClauses.com.

Reference and Recommended Reading

Swarts, Jason. 2014. “The Trouble with Networks. Implications for the Practice of Help Documentation.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 44.3: 253–275.

Van Ittersum, Derek. 2014. “Craft and Narrative in DIY Instructions.” Technical Communication Quarterly, 23.3: 227–246.