By ALAN J. PORTER | Senior Member
“Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th Century environment where information is scarce, but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects and schedules.”
I first came across this quote in the opening sequence to an excellent YouTube video on how students learn today (www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o—A Vision of Students Today—posted October 2007). It seemed a very apt quote for some of the problems we face today when it comes to delivering information, but then it struck me that the quote originated in 1967—43 years ago—but it is still just as applicable in 2010. It seems that while technology has changed rapidly in those 43 years, attitudes and underlying assumptions on how we structure and deliver information haven’t.
No matter what progress we make in other areas, when it comes to information sharing and delivery, we are still obsessed with old ways of thinking. The advent of eBooks is being heralded as a revolution in thinking, but I’d argue that, at the moment, even that technology is just another example of the same old ideas wrapped in a shiny new package. We are still locked into a book-based paradigm that has changed little since the invention of the printing press. Today, eBooks are little more than simple electronic page turners, built for—and largely consumed by—the tech-savvy, geek-gadget members of the older generation (among which I count myself). But this model will not work for the new generation of information consumers.
First off, let me state that I love books. I read books, I collect books, and I write books. I love print, I love the tactile sensation of holding and reading a book. My life has been dominated by a love of books; they have been a constant influence for as long as I can remember. But I have come to realize that the book-based information model needs to be reassessed. A thought that applies not only to traditional books but also to the creation and delivery of technical documentation.
I never really questioned the underlying makeup of books or manuals, the models we used to organize content, or the need for hierarchical structure and imposed taxonomies until about 18 months ago when I watched my teenage daughter doing her homework. She made me completely reconsider those assumptions.
Let me explain.
Experience-Based Assumptions
I’ve been working with topic-based authoring, structured content, and mark-up languages for more than 20 years now. This highly formalized approach to technical documentation has always seemed to be the right way to handle large amounts of complex information and deliver it in a way that enables relatively easy navigation.
I’ve seen them all come and go: SGML, DocBook, XML, CALS, DITA, plus a ton of various industry and company standards. I’ve even served on several such standards committees and working groups in my time.
For those of us raised on more traditional media (i.e., the printed word), we are most comfortable with the book paradigm. That information should come in a structured format (i.e., chapters with headings and subheadings). That navigation is best accomplished by either a map to that structure (i.e., a table of contents) or an alphabetical listing of subjects covered (i.e., an index).
Naturally, when we started to deliver information electronically, we carried that paradigm over. Sure, we made a few concessions to the new media (for instance, I remember having a long and somewhat heated discussion on why we didn’t need page numbers on a CD deliverable—and I’m still hearing the same argument about books on the Kindle today). But the underlying print-based model stayed because that’s what we were comfortable with. It’s what we naturally understood and it matched the way that we handled locating and using written information outside of the work environment.
Observation-Based Epiphany
Helping my teenage daughter with a school project on Pearl Harbor, I realized that the new generation now entering the workforce has a different way of accessing information.
Of course, the first thing she did was go to Google, search for “Pearl Harbor,” and start visiting links. The next stop after that was Wikipedia. Then she got on Facebook and Yahoo IM and started using messaging to ask friends who were online for recommendations. These friends were literally from all around the world, including a family friend in Japan, so she was given access to resources with different perspectives than those in the classroom or textbooks approved by the local school board. As I watched, she soon had six windows open on her iMac and was pulling information from multiple sources into her own document, interactively building the structure and narrative as she went.
One friend suggested going to a social bookmarking site and searching using a variety of user-applied tags. Instead of being driven by a predefined taxonomy, she was now applying a community-derived folksonomy. Of course, being a bibliophile and a bit of a history geek, I had a few old-fashioned print books on World War II sitting in my home office. I proudly placed them on the edge of my daughter’s desk and suggested she look through those for information on Pearl Harbor as well. She dutifully picked up a couple of the books and started flicking pages over, skimming through the contents.
“Why don’t you use the Table of Contents or Index?” I asked.
“That just confuses me. I can find stuff quicker this way,” she replied, looking in bemusement at her obviously aged father.
I sat back and watched her navigate the books for a few minutes. She quickly found what she needed—and then I realized what she was doing. She was “browsing” just as if she were online.
Questioning the Old Paradigm
That’s when I started to question the paradigm that’s informed the way I’ve thought about documentation delivery for more than two decades. The book-driven, structured paradigm may have been ideal for my generation, but what about the new generation?
Since that moment, I have continued to watch and learn how people use today’s technology to access information and have tried to extrapolate from that what they will expect in the not-too-distant future.
So is the book an irrelevant model for kids raised as part of the “digital generation”? Yes, the information they access still needs some sort of mark-up and tagging so the search engines can find it. It still needs metadata to enable user tagging. But instead of strictly enforced hierarchies, what is being built and accessed is more of a flat ocean of information that users search rather than navigate, and then dip into to find the components they need to build their own solutions.
This is a future that we should be planning for now, and it’s not just the teenagers we should be thinking about. In her book The New How (2010), enterprise strategist Nilofer Merechant points out that in 2010 there will be more Millennials than Baby Boomers in the workforce and that “this new workforce will not only expect to be involved, but they will apply their talents only when they can be fully engaged.”
I believe a large part of this change in our experience and expectations is due to an effect I term “technology comfort.” For most of my working life to date, the technology I used at work far outpaced that which I used outside of work. But not any more.
Now the technology I use at home has generally outpaced that found in most workplaces. My iPhone is more powerful and versatile than either of the two laptops I use for the day job. It also presents information and a user experience that is far more intuitive and closer to natural behavior patterns. But perhaps the biggest change has been the rise in social media and the way that we look for information online.
Given the sociological, behavioral, and technological changes we are experiencing, I strongly believe that we realized that the book-based model is now just one option among many. I’m not suggesting that we abandon it altogether, because it will persist and continue to be vital for certain types of information and delivery mechanisms.
But where does that leave current, favored structured standards like DITA? I believe they have a place in more rigidly defined and regulated environments, but how long they will remain useful is open to question. It’s no longer the case that a single approach is the magic solution to information delivery (if it ever has been). I believe we need to stop trying to shoehorn the current “flavor-du-jour” standard into every publishing project.
It may be that the true solution is a chaotic, amorphous mass of information where the structure is applied by the consumer at the time they require it depending on their retrieval and delivery needs. The model is moving away from “here is all the data and mechanisms for you to extract what you want” to “give me just the information I need at the time I need it.”
So how do we prepare for this potentially chaotic future? Take a step back and look at how your kids do their homework. In five to ten years, they will be your new workforce, and perhaps more important, your new customers. Today’s generation approaches information gathering and learning based on a model where social interaction is more important than structure. In short, to survive and prosper, we should start designing information not for ourselves but for the next generation.
Alan J. Porter is president and founder of 4Js Group LLC (http://4jsgroup.blogspot.com/), a technical and business communications consulting and services company that specializes in helping organizations “tell their stories” by combining creative talent with business experience. 4Js Group is the go-to company for corporate comics projects.
