The May issue of Intercom centers on ethics and has been guest edited by Dr. Derek Ross. Derek is an associate professor in Auburn University’s Master of Technical and Professional Communication Program; co-director of LUCIA, Auburn’s laboratory for usability, communication interaction, and accessibility; and the ethics columnist for Intercom. His research interests include perceptions of environmental rhetoric, ethics, and document design.
I am quite pleased with the issue Derek has put together. He solicited six articles from well-known experts in the field. Topics range from ethics lessons and everyday advice, to ethics in health care, ethics in visual displays, ethical experience architecture, and the ethics of “other” knowledge. I thank Derek and all the authors in this issue for their contributions to knowledge in technical communication.
From the Guest Editor
Sam Dragga once told our ethics class that “no one wants to read what you write.” I thought, “Man. What a bummer.” But it’s often true in technical communication. We’re not writing the next History of Hogwarts, we’re writing documentation for Hogwarts’ communication systems. We’re designing, or facilitating, systems images, medical information, complex instruction sets, charts and graphs, and more. We network, accommodate, articulate, and steward. Technical communicators don’t often write the books that we’ll pick up on our next flight to the Summit, but we do write the information that lets the airplane get built, the tickets get sold, and the radar systems keep doing what they need to do. We codify knowledge and life goes on.
That’s why, to my mind, this is such a valuable issue of Intercom, and one I was happy to help shape. Ethics is a complicated, messy study. Ethics allows us to justify our decisionmaking process to ourselves and others; asks us to think through difficult, often un-solvable problems; asks us to recognize that every action has a reaction—and every reaction may neither be “equal,” nor “opposite.” Folks tend to shy away from ethics, and after serving as the ethics column editor for Intercom for the past couple of years, teaching classes on the subject, and incorporating the study of ethics into my own research and writing, I can see why. Ethics is frustrating. Ethics are frustrating. Many of us come from a scientific or semi-scientific background. Or we work with scientists, engineers, computer scientists, medical professionals, business analysts, and startup companies. We work with “hard facts,” “solid data,” “real-world information.” And that, to me, is why ethics is so important. In the presentation of those facts, data-points, and (T)truths, we’re forced to make decisions that may ultimately shape how someone acts on any given day. We may write a manual, or design instructions, or help network a series of communications that ultimately lead to someone actually doing something in the world. Hogwarts makes us smile. Technical communication makes us act.
Our own Society for Technical Communication offers a series of ethical guidelines that help shape our everyday choices. We should consider legality, honesty, confidentiality, quality, fairness, and professionalism in everything we do. Those are great starting points, but as Kelsey Loftin and Myles Cryer point out in this issue, those guidelines still leave us with complicated decisions when our employers, or clients, or even colleagues question our design choices. So this issue is important, to me and I hope to you, because rather than present you with a series of guidelines, a bunch of new technologies, and a few “how-to’s,” it should leave you with questions. A lot of questions. Don’t get me wrong. Everything I said that this issue won’t do is critical to our field and everyday operation, and if it were not for the new technologies, how to’s, and guidelines offered in Intercom, I’d be missing out on rich and complex areas of our field. But this time we’re going to ask you to do something different. This time we’re going to ask you to ask yourself “what if?” rather than “what for?”
I wish I could say that, by the time you’ve read this issue of Intercom, you’ll be an ethical expert. What I can say is that by the time you’ve read this issue of Intercom, you’ll probably be frustrated, tired, and have a lot of questions. And that’s OK, I think, because ethics is never about coming up with the right answer —it’s about coming up with an answer that you can confidently support at the end of the day. “Right” suggests that we all share the same knowledge, and we wouldn’t be technical communicators if we believed that.
Thank you for reading this issue. I hope that it offers you something to think about, I hope that it offers you something to talk about, and I hope that, at the end of the day, you leave with some new ideas, and some new approaches to this
rich field we call home. And if you are writing the next History of Hogwarts, I hope that you’re now thinking about the implications of your actions even more than usual.
All the best,
Derek G. Ross
Auburn University Department of English
To read the May issue of Intercom, visit intercom.stc.org.