This column focuses on a broad range of practical academic issues from teaching and training to professional concerns, research, and technologies of interest to teachers, students, and researchers. Please send comments and suggestions to ttbarker@ualberta.ca.
By Thomas Barker | Fellow
The state of the discipline of technical writing is always emerging because it lies at the intersection of content and media. These two ideas interact in interesting ways because from them come what we call information, and from that we derive value. This interaction and its evolution raise interesting academic issues of knowledge and how we validate what we know. It creates a path for scholars.
Social media changes how information is created and used in the social arena. David Carr, in “How Social Media Changes Technical Communication,” has lots to say about how social media challenges editing and production control. But it also changes what we think of as “knowledge,” and it changes how companies relate to their customers and to their employees. Social media—social networking services, microbloging, bookmarking services, content curation services (“thumbs up or down”) customer evaluation and feedback forums, and wiki sites—function to connect people and allow them to share content. They facilitate content aggregation, but more importantly and problematically, they are shaped by the whims and desires of users. Media remakes the relationship between writers and readers.
In the scholarship of technical writing, media also changes how we study knowledge. The study of knowledge, or epistemology, is a draw for technical communication scholars. In technical communication, and in all communication, “what we really know” is commonly shaped by writers’ actions. We depend on intentional writers to proxy readers’ questions, to anticipate qualifications, to vet alternative thinking. All along, through the process of time, what we know sifts out of what we think we know, and what remains is really knowledge. That sounds obvious, but to the scholar it represents an epistemological process of reduction through acceptance that is guided by the affirmation of consensus. For this there are theories of dissemination of technology or cybernetic systems that attract scholars.
The Greek scholars knew all about “social media” when they took their discussions outdoors. Outdoors, with the bright Mediterranean sunlight glowing on marble walls (the 5th century BC version of social media), made it easier to see truth and how it was made, epistemologically. The outdoors of today is open source, community content, and Twitter. Social media is our century’s affirmation that shapes what we finally know. The problem with it is that the process is messy and unpredictable. The result is often obscure and contradictory for technical writers; for academics it’s a theoretical playground.
Much writing on social media and technical communication focuses on the ways community content challenges professional writers and editors to curate user content in ways that enhance the editors’ value in the product development cycle. That has certainly been the direction of technical communication in the past: to find the value that writers bring to information.
But the influences that shape knowledge today are part of larger economies of giving, of social compact, of leadership and community. The dynamic of information today is the engagement and wellbeing of society, and the role of communicators is to see and align with the multitude of voices. For the technical communication scholar, the multitude of voices suggests research questions like: How does interpretive discourse affect the values of technical communication? (Williams). How does social media in corporations constrain the agency of individual content providers? (Weber). These kinds of studies bring a scholarly perspective by asking the questions behind the questions posed by social media. They represent the theoretical value of customer content.
The impulse to mine customer content has always been strong in technical writers. In the past, community content was derived from user communities. Technical writers of the past knew that users adapted products to their specific situations, to the domain tasks of users. Often this adaptation was deemed sub-optimal because it involved using menu features and functionalities in innovative ways. It wasn’t planned, it just emerged. And writers and editors strove to stay ahead of the curve by using forums and user surveys.
Also staying ahead of the curve, technical communication scholars pose theoretical questions, such as, “What are the legal implications of customer content?” (Helyar) or “How can we conduct research using social media and Web 2.0 tools?” (Thacker and Dayton). The two-way communication aspect of social media opens up questions for scholars.
Establishing two-way communication between writers and users led to help systems that advertised that customer feedback made the product better. Messages that said “We want you to help improve our product” began showing up on screens as a way of encouraging users to vet knowledge, to have their say, and to let the system administrators know whether an article was useful. Again, community curation in the form of assessment and evaluation was emerging as a value proposition.
The problem with community content that has evolved into something writers cannot dismiss is that it is messy and lacks the shine of a well-produced information product. To address this problem, writers and editors took on the role of lurkers in forums. They were like ghostwriters for individuals who couldn’t organize, tag, cross-reference, or otherwise make content systematic and searchable. In some forums, writers or product representatives became just another voice in the stream, identified by the company logos in their profiles instead of cartoon characters or generic person icons.
Now we have crowd documentation (http://blog.ninlabs.com/2012/05/crowd-documentation). The primary goal of a crowds programming site like stackoverflow.com is to turn the world of documentation on its head. In this model, similar to that of Get Satisfaction (https://getsatisfaction.com), communities share information and ideas. The mechanism uses problem-solving motivation along with recognition in the form of badges inside an online customer-engagement platform. Rather than add value, these types of platforms “unlock” value.
Customer community platforms wrangle the disorganization inherent in social media, and in doing so address one of the main concerns of the technical writing community: that community knowledge lacks intentional design. And as such, it undercuts the proposition that writers and editors add value. But at the same time, customer platforms allow something to emerge—relevancy. The problem with traditional content management was that it missed the detail and relevance that made documentation useful in the first place. Writers and editors cannot overlook this fact. Community documentation has real relevance to users’ workplace problems, to how users apply software systems to real issues. Community documentation reflects the concerns of users and their work communities. But what about the broader communities? How might a scholar approach the broader questions?
Author Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody takes on the challenge by asking, “What happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures?” Similarly, Howard Rheingold, in Smart Mobs, examines the social and economic implications of social media. These writers reflect the concerns of technical writers and put the issues they face into the broader context of communication and society.
In public health, the focus of customer orientation is on the role of social media and the touch-points of customer contact—the click, call, or counter of interaction with health systems. What social media has allowed health agencies to do is to build business models based on evidence-based practice or outcomes-based service delivery. These interactive practice frameworks narrow the gap between customers and health providers. They derive value from the cyclic process of knowledge creation, rather than the older model of one-way knowledge transfer. The question of what’s next for public health lies in process. New directions lie in finding emergent ways to interact and engage with clients and patients.
Engagement research lies at the heart of expertise-based educational reform, government community involvement, disaster communication, workplace communication, and leadership communication. Social media platforms as channels make it easier than ever for academic professionals in these fields to connect with theoretical concerns with customers, clients, and citizens. For technical communicators, they open an arena for communicative activity that revitalizes the processes of content creation and management. Scholars from Utah State University ask questions about how well community-based research methods, often fueled by social media approaches, suit the empowerment and development of understanding and knowledge. The access to communities provided by media lead to increased connections between health communities and their constituents.
For academic technical communicators, the connections made by virtue of social media make possible otherwise clumsy forms of research, such as the “messy” community-based research in the previous example. In the 1970s, environmental researchers had to attend meetings, listen to debates, and engage through community-service mechanisms. That is changing because of the way media not only enables emergent voices, but also opens the possibility of participation and scholarship. Conversations that were once hard to hear or to gain access to are being broadcasted on social media. Researchers doing participatory action research see these as opportunities to study the involvement of customers and companies. Looking ahead, we may see a bright future for another emerging trend—community-
engaged scholarship.
Enlightened technical communication practitioners see social media as a bellwether opportunity to study the involvement of customers and companies; their partners in the academic realm see it as the beginning of even more productive academic conversations.
References
Carr, David F. How Social Media Changes Technical Communication. Information Week, 4 January 2012, www.informationweek.com/how-social-media-changes-technical-communication/d/d-id/1102043?.
Helyar, Pamela S., and Gregory M. Doudnikoff. Walking the Labyrinth Off Multimedia Law. Technical Communication 41.4 (1994): 662–671, www.jstor.org/stable/43089749.
Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Basic Books, 2013.
Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Books, 2009.
Thacker, C., and D. Dayton. Using Web 2.0 to Conduct Qualitative Research. Technical Communication 55.4 (2008): 383–391.
Walton, Rebecca, Maggie Zraly, and Jean Pierre Mugengana. Values and Validity: Navigating Messiness in a Community-Based Research Project in Rwanda, Technical Communication Quarterly 24.1 (2015): 45–69.
Weber, Ryan. Constrained Agency in Corporate Social Media Policy. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 43.3 (July 2013): 289–315.
Williams, Sean D. Interpretive Discourse and Other Models from Communication Studies: Expanding the Values of Technical Communication. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 40.4 (October 2010): 429–446.
