Feb 11th 10
Posted by justin in CCR760
I’m not on blogging duties this week, so i’m just posting notes.
Gurak – Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace
Chapter One – Introduction: Persuasion, Community, and Cyberspace
- This study deals with two online protests which “dealt with computers, privacy, and the shape of communication technology and society in the 21st century” (1)
- Self-selection of what to put onto the internet vs. your information being controlled by media or government conglomerates on the internet is a central tension.
- Fundamental tension between the internet as 1) potential danger in monetary and social aspects or; 2) a community builder and humanity engenderer. (3)
- The author is providing an empirical analysis of life on the Internet that has real evidence to support its claims but that is broader than a discrete experiment because of its use of rhetorical criticism – an approach that has been traditionally highly empirical (Halloran 1984) but which retains the critical and somewhat broad lens of a narrative or literary critic (5).
- Gurak argues that the protest communities in her study used language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in a new social space that is virtual. Community ethos and the new delivery system of communication over computer networks is central to maintaining the shared rhetorical vision in the face of physical absence.
- Community in the absence of physical place is a main concern.
- In the absence of physical presence, the metaphor of the interpretive community or a group of individuals who share “habits of mind” is useful to think about in the digital community.
- Online communities allow people to “lurk” without participation. They also allow fine-tuning toward particular groups. Is this a good thing? Are we only getting the “preaching to the choir” aspect when we seek out specific online gatherings of folks who share our “habits of mind?”
- Ethos can have a double meaning – the ethos of an individual person or the ethos of a particular type of person. (14)
- Delivery in the digital sense means that it is intrinsically bound up not just in the speaker but in the medium (forum, IM) of the delivery (16).
Chapter Two – The Case of Lotus MarketPlace
- The Lotus MarketPlace model simply didn’t understand that for folks to be willing to give up their information they needed to give something back in return so that the population would be complicity – ENTER FACEBOOK.
- Lotus was really unprepared to “fight the internet” and the wildfire reaction that occurred over CMC related to MarketPlace. Funny!
Chapter Three – The Case of the Clipper Chip
- At heart, privacy advocates wanted the two-part encryption key to be divided between a governmental and a non-governmental agency. The government (obviously) wanted it to remain in the family (39).
- The Clipper controversy demonstrates that the power of vox populi must be carefully tempered with “considerations of the greater social and political forces at work” (43).
- The ethos and electronic delivery powerful in the Lotus case – mostly due to the private, profit-oriented nature of the company trying to move forward – didn’t hold a lot of weight in a sphere of government agencies and presidential decisions (43).
Chapter Four – Exigence in Cyberspace
- This chapter considers the events and forces behind the mobilization of online resistance against MarketPlace and Clipper.
- The immediacy, two-way communication, and proliferation of the internet make it a rather unique rhetorical sphere. Now, just how to get heard. (44).
- “In the cases of MarketPlace and Clipper, the exigence involved a technology that many perceived as imperfect and dangerous, and this exigence was defined and focused through the dynamics of communication in cyberspace” (45).
- CMC increased the speed of the urgency of imperfection. This is important for discussions of the possibility of a public sphere of sorts – information needs to travel fast.
- Exigence was the result of three forces:
- General concern of the public about computer privacy
- Speed and reach of online delivery spread information quickly
- CMC protestors enjoyed a shared ethos that was hostile, authoritative and technologically sure of itself.
- The instant ethos granted by the internet forum gets straight to the argument without spending too much time building up the speaker – good or bad? Ethos is now created on forums though with different status’ (noobs, moderators, etc.)
- The exponential quality of CMC is what makes it really quick moving
- Great example of how to do close conversational analysis of CMC texts (59)
Chapter Five: Structures of Online Communication
- This chapter looks at the texts that are representative of the debates surrounding online protest (66).
- Gurak makes the argument that human exigency can get us beyond discussions of technological determinism in that external organizational and social forces are always at work in the interaction of an individual with CMC/CMTechnologies. As such, we are certainly shaped by the way we communicate, but we can also resist it (67). To demonstrate this, she shows how the protests of MarketPlace were bottom-up; however, the Clipper debate were top-down affairs sponsored by organizations in the act of mobilizing forces (is this due to the higher-tech nature of the Clipper problem? YES. Sorry, she answers in next paragraph)
- Gurak is also concerned with the following questions: 1) How does online communication flatten hierarchies (gets beyond brick and mortar in email directly to person – or at least a person’s proxy); and 2) trust in online communities (this notes the self-selection of giving information out across the internet in these cases – it also draws attention to trusting the information that is sent to you in these communities that you inhabit – in Gurak’s case, the online privacy advocacy community).
Chapter Six: Ethos, Flaming, and Inaccuracy
- The dominance of certain textual types – like petitions – is the result of a desire for ethos in online communication environments.
- As I noted before, the fracturing into smaller communities where ethos is assumed allows for the proliferation of inaccurate information due to a lack of criticality.
- Flaming – while it increases ethos – surely might detract from the ability of rhetors to engage in critical-rational debate.
- Gurak notes that dominance vis-à-vis ethos is a common problem toward a liberatarian, all-democratizing concept of the internet because once an individual is operating in a specific imagined community, they are no longer inclined to be critical – in a sence, they are preaching to the choir.
- Bottom-up movements can be uncritical and top-down movements can stifle argumentation/creativity because of organizational – rather than individual – authority. Top-down models also carry the problem of activist-spam or the old “like/dislike” binary without critical engagement on the part of the petition signer.
- Folks on the “other side” of the dominant ethos in community forums often won’t pipe up for fear of being flamed.
Chapter Seven: Gender in Cyberspace
- Reasons why women weren’t as prominent in these online protests:
- Access – professionally, socioeconomically. Also, because the internet was created by men, the language needed to negotiate it is very phallocentric.
- Misogynist ethos of shared communities on the internet (think the Denning debates) (109).
- Women’s way of communicating is different from men’s. Because it’s not as forceful and argumentative, it’s not given as much weight (yet, or at least in these forums at the time – this point is likely still extant, but a little diminished in light of the proliferation of so many small internet communities that are gendered).
Chapter Eight: Big Brother the Corporation and Big Brother the Government
- Corporations responded differently than the government to online protest – is this because of the market imperative?
- The “coordinated” response of the corporation to the protest was exactly the problem – this sort of structuring can’t attend to the proliferation of information across CMC networks – where do you start?!?
- The corporation was also successful because of the “hard-facts” appeals it made – in other words, the corporate ethos wasn’t an effective persuasion to the ethos of the privacy advocate groups in online communities. Facts vs. emotions (anger)
- The government sponsored Clipper chip moved forward in this way:
- Popular support – because of the technological sophistication of the technology – was minimal.
- The government didn’t participate in the forums of discussion.
- They enacted the Clipper and EES standard despite the signatures and petition.
- Gurak is visionary when she notes that corporations haven’t yet realized the potential marketing possibilities of communities in cyberspace (FACEBOOK).
Feb 6th 10
Posted by justin in CCR711
If you’re looking for the Frankfurt School concept map from the Habermas presentation in class on Thursday 2/11, you’ll find it here.
Outline of Habermas’ Argument:
Thesis: What are the social conditions for rational-critical debate about public issues by private people who let argumentation, not status, determine decisions?
- Social systems of “public”
- The Greek Model – freedom is found in the public; however, those who are able to participate in the public must be masters of their private (oikos) (3).
- The European Middle Ages Model –
- Characterized by “representational publicity” (8).
- In this period public is considered something of a “status attribute” (7).
- The “Enlightenment” or 17th & 18th Centuries Model –
- Divided into three separate realms (30):
- The private realm:
- Civil society (realm of commodity exchange and social labor)
- Conjugal family’s internal space (bourgeois intellectuals)
- Public sphere:
- In the political realm
- In the world of letters (clubs, presses)
- Market of culture products (“town)
- Sphere of Public Authority
- State (realm of the “police”)
- Court (courtly-noble society)
- Habermas’ Themes: social structure, political functions, ideology
- The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: Economics
- Social reproduction was a matter of private people left to themselves. This resulted in the “completed privatization of civil society” (74)
- Personal freedoms were a result of this freedom of social reproduction and ownership of property (protection) (75)
- For a brief amount of time – before government intervention in capitalist systems – unmitigated free trade and laissez-faire economic philosophies created a “civil society as the private sphere emancipated from public authority” (79)
- This new economic situation viewed bourgeois as both homme and citoyen (man as owner of private property and citizen as the person who wants to protect that property order as outside the government)
- Habermas sees this as one of the fundamental aspects of bourgeois ideology: this belief in man must be propertied to be man is a false consciousness that Marx also identified (88).
- The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: Codification
- The family is reconceived as the private sphere where the patriarch participates in the public sphere (similar to the Greek model)
- The public sphere is constituted in the world of letters – this leads to politics
- The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: Institutional Bases
- Coffee houses (London)
- Operated without censorship from the crown
- Abandoning censorship allowed for a new, non-revolutionary politics. H. notes on 64 that this signaled that critical debate of the public stopped violence but also “took the form of a permanent controversy between the governing party and the opposition”
- Salons
- Public institutions in private residences because of censorship
- Changed after the Constitution of 1791 that allowed free communication of ideas without censorship (70). Napoleon later reversed this policy
- Table Societies (Germany)
- What makes these Bourgeois public sphere institutional bases special?
- Disregarded status (36)
- Rational argument was the basis for all argumentation.
- There was an openness of topics for discussion (36)
- The public was inclusive in principle if not in practice – if you had access to cultural products, then you could jump in on the culture-debate (37)
- The bourgeois rational debate of cultural products resulted in the questioning of “absolute sovereignty” be relying on the idea that public opinion alone could discover the “natural order” (55).
- Habermas works back to the disagreement between Hobbes (Leviathan) and Locke (Two Treatises) on the role of gov’t.
- Early in the development of the public sphere by private individuals, critical debate was used to discover laws that were inherent to society (83 – center paragraph)
- The ideological Structure of the Public Sphere : A critique on the conception of public opinion as a reasoned form of access to truth (Chapter 4)
- Kant: the most developed philosophy of the bourgeois public sphere
- Public discourse is a way to lead individuals to enlightenment (104)
- This renders communication (read: rhetoric) fundamental in the communalization of the bourgeois subject
- This new “world” community is really the community of the bourgeois subject and the attendant “mixed companies” that participate in argumentation for enlightenment through rational discourse.
- Hegel: the “public” created by civil society are an ideology
- Common sense is actually just mass opinion dispersed among people in the form of prejudices (122)
- Marx: the “public opinion” is actually just bourgeois class interests in disguise
- Mill / Tocqueville: Develop a liberalism that treated freedom relatively
- Wondered about the future of public sphere discourse in the face of increasing membership in said sphere
- What to do with all the new people in the public as a result of expanded suffrage (133)
- Both authors wondered about whether the critical aspects of public discourse would dissolve into what is “popular” and as such worried about protecting minority populations (134).
- Is this a recognition of an argument against the public sphere or just the beginning of the disintegration of the public sphere? (135)
- The Disintegration of the Public Sphere: On the Refeudalization of Society
- Private organizations began to increasingly assume public power
- This undermined the value of public discourse because of the class issues brought about by mass industrialization beginning in the 18th and extending to the 19th centuries. The social inequalities eroded the principle of disregard of status (36).
- The state began to encroach on the private realm
- Instead of using rational debate to discover universal / absolute natural orders/truths, public debate began to be used for negotiation (176). This negotiation occurs between a lot of large, non-public bodies (private bureaucracies, special-interest associations, parties, and public administration) and the public is included as something of a stamp of approval.
- Because of the diminished role of the public in discourse, the movement toward the welfare state comes into being. Some “social rights” or protections afforded by the state are put into place to counterbalance the obvious injuries sustained by lumpenproletariat and proletariat populations.
- The move away from rational debate toward consumptive models (think Adorno and Horkheimer here) is noted on 162.
- Similar to A&H’s thesis, H. notes here that individual gratification replaces the rational-critical debate; further, the role of public communication technologies replaced the acts of “individuated reception” that engendered critical-rational discourse on topics (161)
- In essence, in expanding the public sphere, the form of participation by interested parties was changed drastically from a rational-critical engagement of public discourse to a culture of consumption that isn’t critical about it’s work (169)
- This point is part of the program of the entire critical theory line of thinking that comes out of the Frankfurt School.
- Because the consumption of media is much more intimate and related to financial ability, the status issue that the original bourgeois public sphere dissolved is reintroduced and becomes “unbracketed” and impossible to ignore (172).
- This weakening of the public isn’t perceived by the public as such – in fact, they look back to their previous critical engagedness and believe that they are still practicing critical-rational discourse; rather, they are actually engaging in a recycled form of representative publicity that coerces but doesn’t critically engage (194).
- The diffusion of mass culture also has a couple of deleterious effects:
- Most folks tastes are met; however, a critical review of those tastes doesn’t take place (174)
- The diffusion of mass amounts of goods means that the public isn’t ever capable of focusing in on one object for critical discussion (174 – – in the example of Pamela)
- When this mass consumption removes critical-rational discourse, academics and other “thinkers” are put in the position of culture-producers and critics who stand in opposition to the mass of culture (175).
- The Modern Age: Representational Publicity
- The media is used to create opportunities for consumers to identify with public personas
- The public sphere becomes a stage for corporations and other statist/corporatist regimes to develop legitimacy through popularity instead of responding to critical-rational challenges.
- Parties move beyond critical-rational debate into mobilization regimes for ideological integration into party-lines (203)
- Interest-groups replace non-rational-critical debating citizens because the politicians no longer have to listen to the voters – just manage the media machine that provides the consumptive qualities. Interest-groups win (204).
- Social integration of rational-critical discourse is ultimately the hope of communication in the future instead of mass-culture domination. Hope for the future? (210)
Feb 5th 10
Posted by justin in CCR760
The first time I read through chapter five in Eileen’s class I became very, very frightened. I suppose my initial terror was directly tied to my now slowly deteriorating allegiance to Marxist modes of material production and the realities capitalist enterprise in the West’s progressively post-industrial age. The more and more I read about the changing nature of work in the 21st century – especially with respect to Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (it’s on the reading list ASAP!) – I am left in a bit of a crisis of conscience. It’s not that I was just longing for a socialist/communist state on the order of China, the USSR, or Vietnam; in fact, I think that their “socialism” and “communism” was really just a state-administered, extremely monopolistic brand of capitalism. What I’m realizing more and more is that capitalism on the order that Spinuzzi describes in chapter five is a lot different from any proprietary or managerial capitalism that preceded it. So in this new capitalism – often described as “support econonmy” or “distributed” – is there any more room for self-actualization and liberation from the modes of production that have long exploited labor or does it’s distributed nature simply increase the deleterious effects and leave consumers ever-questing toward more “authentic” consumption habits? Well, first I’ll try a bit of recap. . .
Before Spinuzzi demonstrates how networks are “enacted”, he describes the transfigurations that have occurred in the time period between the waning of the industrial age and the development (or negotiation) of what Castells has called “informational capitalism.” This new brand of capitalism is different from the modular form that Marx envisioned in that the “deskilling” that occurs when tasks are “broken down into easily learnable and repeatable components” is challenged. No more assembly lines and workers who can’t see the final products. Rather, in information capitalism the complete net work is interpenetrated, deeply rhizomatic: “it has multiple, multidirectional information flows” (137). Because of this characteristic, some folks claim that capitalism will move toward a more distributed form. Distributed capitalism will come to look a lot like shareholders in companies – distributed, desires for “unique support” from vendors, and trustworthy relations among consumers (think Amazon.com’s comment function). This process of co-configuration – whereby producer and consumers configure one another at all times reciprocally – will disrupt supply chains and create “advocates” or “professional relationship workers” who “assemble temporary ‘federations’ of suppliers for each transaction or service. In effect, the layer between producer and consumer will have an individualized shim. While these new ways to describe capitalist paradigms in the information age could be positive, they also have a negative side.
In the move toward this new distributed capitalism, Spinuzzi notes how some negative social practices could come into being. Working through Deleuze, we get a new picture of social interaction that moves society from a Foucauldian pantopticonicism rooted in systems of discipline from above toward a distributed, control-based horizontal & vertical social competition between all workers in the capitalist agora. In this new field of work, laborers who are able to participate in the information economy are in a constant state of competition that renders job security, benefits, and retirement static for only the most successful or sought-after workers. It seems natural that champions of neoliberal economic systems like Milton Friedman and his fellow Chicago School economists would eat this hyper-competitive, cream-rises-to-the-top labor model up . . . and as long as Friedmanites continue to occupy influential positions at the IMF, World Bank, and other organizations, this new model will likely be championed as the future of economic Development.
While I’m not naive enough to believe that unions and collective resistance have near the power that they once levied against big-business capitalism, I see distributed capitalism one of the last steps in the progressive deterioration of collective resistance in labor systems. Once Haraway’s “homework economy” blurs the boundaries between life and work (lifestreaming) and the quest for individual consumptive experiences dissolves mass production (which itself is pretty debatable if you’re a believer in the herd mentality), the consumer is left in a ecstatic state vis-a-vis the instant and constantly individual gratification of extreme commodity fetishism. All the while the worker – now left without affiliation and only existing in the network as a fluid, constantly re/de skilling cog – moves on to new “opportunities.”
I know I’m being a bit melodramatic here, but I do think that the changes in the way that consumption and production are occurring could have damaging consequences. I do feel like some capitalist entities are looking to offset the inherent contradictions of capitalism (capitalism can’t produce labor and non-renewable natural resources for example) through partnerships between capital entities and philanthropic organizations – this is a crude, but promising example. .. anyone know of anymore? That being said, the future of my work looks a lot different from the sort of things my folks did for a living.
I wonder though, am I as scared as Socrates of the quill & tablet or Zola of the factory? A little help here! 
Jan 27th 10
Posted by justin in CCR760
Digital Literacy for Technical Communication: 21st Century Theory and Practice – ed. Rachel Spilka
Introduction – Rachel Spilka
- The author notes that the collection is valuable because work contexts and modes of production have changes so much over recent memory. As technical communicators, Spilka notes that the need to adopt evolution is necessary to survive.
- Evolution not only in technical skill, but productive flow and socializing forces are necessary to be a technical communicator now and in the near future.
- She chooses the term “digital literacy” for the text because it “refers a bit more directly to the rise of computer techn0ology, and the introduction of computer technology” that led to the fundamental paradigm shift in tech comm.
- Structure of book:
- Part I: Transformations in work due to the digital environment
- Part II: New Foundational Knowledge: What knowledge is important for tech. comm. To learn in order to remain relevant?
- Part III: New Directions: This section is a collection of meditations on how we might revise existing theory and develop new theory to better understand how technology has transformed our work.
Computers and Technical Communication in the 21st Century – Saul Carliner
- The chapter describes the development of different communicative/publishing technologies and how that has transformed the work of technical communicators. Specifically, the author considers a couple of time periods:
- Late 1970s – Large systems, technical writers, field experience for education, wordsmithing tech documents is essential skill, worked on typewriters
- Mid to Late 1980s – Mid range systems and PCs, called “information developer,” required tech comm. Experience and possible university education, prepared information for end user, used automated text processing systems that resembled HTML
- Late 1990s to early 2000s – PCs, high-end software for commercial application, called “software engineers” and “technical writers,” degrees in computer science and wordsmithing experience, prepared information for end user, used web-based authoring systems, desktop publishing, no coding
- Early 2000s to now – Software for managing networks and information on networks, customization of networks, same names as previous category, required degrees and wordsmithing experience, also experience with CMSs, designing large databases is primary responsibility, used CMSs that work on DITA standards (Darwin Information Typing Architecture.
- The author grounds the development of technology in the same period of changing technological communication above in 5 phases:
- Automation of production tasks: use of typewriters, and more advanced printing mechanisms
- Desktop Revolution – Desktop publishing addressed issues of output on crappy printing, formatting of documents, and graphics
- The GUI Revolution – development of GUI to replace text based interfaces (think DOS to Windows)
- Web 1.0 – static web content is generated through scripting languages like HTML and PHP. Also the development and adoption of CMSs.
- Web 2.0 – CMS as a way to manage dynamic content, interactivity, elearning applications and creation, open source software and a strengthening of division between web designers and web coders/producers.
Chapter Two – The Effects of Digital Literacy on the Nature of Technical Communication Work – R. Stanley Dicks
- First, let me say that I may not agree with the article’s logic, but I LOVED this article.
- The author considers the changing nature of tech comm. In the context of a couple of different aspects:
- Economics – macro-changes in economic systems of distribution and production have changed the role of technical communicators.
- Management – new management theories over the past couple of years affect the role of technical communicator in reminding management of their relevance.
- Methodologies – the nature of “knowledge work” has changed dramatically. These new production methods have also affected the role of the technical communicator and their respective workspace.
- Economics – A lot of this information is covered in Spinuzzi’s explanation of changing work methods found here (see the section on Chapter Six: Is Our Network Learning?).
- The new movement to knowledge work is fundamentally wrapped up in a new value of customer experience and individualization. New products will be specific to specific people, no copies will proliferate. Mass production will die in favor of customizable products that meet multiple customer needs.
- This is referred to as the “support economy.” Because the customer-corporation relationship is currently poisoned, new modes of customer prioritization will appear (and are appearing). Web 2.0 technologies are allowing instant feedback mechanisms that will force companies to care about their customer in a much increased way.
- There are problems with this new model; most notably, because work will become a new experience each time it is performed (as opposed to production models), the knowledge worker will be left looking for new work at the completion of each individual project. This is a precarious place to be – especially in light of insurance, etc. Contractor agencies look like a future alternative for knowledge workers in a modular production model (Spinuzzi 2007).
- Management Principles – These come and go; however, tech. communicators need to know how to make themselves relevant in changing management paradigms.
- Value added – tech. communicators need to demonstrate how they add value to their company by highlighting how they can reduce costs, avoid costs, enhance revenue and by their intangible contributions.
- Reengineering – Think Office Space. You remember the mangament gurus that came in to evaluate how successful the company is? That’s “reingeneering.” It also goes by names like restructuring – Ford just did a bit of this, so did GM. The author traces reengineering to the transition from industrial capitalism to knowledge-work capitalism or post-capitalist models of distribution and consumption.
- To combat outsourcing, downsizing, and rightsizing, tech. communicators should make sure they are doing knowledge work and not commodity work.
- Globalization is changing things – REALLY? – to combat this tech. communicators need to move away from commodity work toward knowledge work (no filling out forms and getting into coding/design), develop more efficient technologies of development, and understand that translation and localization are the future (other languages, relevant to small contexts).
- Flattening – layers of management aren’t needed in post-production models. So, remove management and let teams perform complex tasks together. Sounds good in theory if everyone is an egalitarian!
- Methodologies – these are the new ways that technical communicators need to engage with their work of production, deployment, and teamwork to remain relevant:
- Single sourcing – a concept whereby individualized documentation will accompany products in the new support economy. Databases will query small amounts of information and reassemble them per the end document designers code. This is the future and highlights the split in workflow between documentation and presentation or writer/interface producer.
- Agile Development Methods – These are new ways of development that put the end user in the driver’s seat with respect to development. User-centered design, iterative design, agile development, extreme programming, and scrum all either develop criteria and develop from there (rather than via technical specifications), or use “stories” of end-users to dream new coding. Tech. communicators need to enmesh themselves in all these processes to remain relevant and be able to fully understand what they are expected to document in a team-based work atmosphere.
- Distributed work – because of the advance in communicative technologies and contract work, tech. communicators need to understand how to work in non co-located environments.
- Web 2.0 – This poses an interesting question for documentation specialists. Why not let the documentation get generated organically instead of exhaustively documenting everything? You can do this via blogs or user wikis with support. LOTS of companies are moving in this direction.
Chapter Three – Shaped and Shaping Tools: The Rhetorical Nature of Technical Communication Technologies – Dave Clark
- This chapter is about “how do technical communicators learn about and assess “broader implications” and “potential influence”? To answer this question, the author explores what methods and technological approaches have been articulated to consider the ways that technologies structure, shape, and influence the ways we communicate.
- The first section defines technology – or attempts to anyway. The author wants to get away from instrumentalist (tools to an end) conception of technology. The author also works hard to differentiate the rhetoric of technology from the rhetoric of science by noting how the rhetoric of technology is primarily concerned with human-made objects whereas the rhetoric of science often deals with “nature.” To differentiate between the two, Clark notes:
- Science produces mostly symbols through rhetorical means such as articles or grant proposals whereas technology aims at producing objects and material processes (but doesn’t science also?!?)
- Scientists validate their findings by outside professionals whereas technologists protect trade secrets and let market forces determine success
- Science has a “more closely bounded rhetorical terrain” whereas technologies must enlist the help of publics to be functional and carried through to fruition (91).
- Focuses and Approaches to the rhetoric of technology – the author notes that four modes/methods have been used to study technology rhetorically:
- Rhetorical analysis – a rhetorical perspective for analyzing the problems and issues raised by new technologies through an examination of public discourse.
- Technology transfer and diffusion – a really diverse field across disciplines, this considers how technologies are transported between populations. Interested in such things as technology adoption and practice in new contexts.
- Genre theory – focuses on the rhetorical construction of the writing produced and encouraged by particular tools. This deals with things like “genre ecologies” (Nardi) and Spinuzzi’s work on the role of genres in technical communication / organizational communication.
- Activity theory – a form of analysis that can provide a broad cultural understanding because it considers common language, structure, and context in understanding organizational cause-effect relationships.
Chapter Nine – Beyond Ethical Frames of Technical Relations: Digital Being in the Workplace World – Steven Katz and Vicki Rhodes
- This chapter considers how ethical frames define human-machine operations. In so doing it asks questions about : What are the relations? How are they shifting in digital communication? What are some of the professional implications of the digital relationships of machines and the humans who increasingly depend and exist alongside them in all walks of life? (231).
- Utilizing a successive framing method, the authors describe the following conceptions of technology and ethics:
- False frame – technology isn’t valuable, it’s just a form of indulgence and entertainment.
- Tool Frame – Technology is a means to an end – the instrumentalist approach – examples might be a calculator or a hammer.
- Means-End frame – Technology is both a means and the end of those means. An example might be something like a website to generate internet sales.
- Autonomous frame – technology becomes a value system whereby means-ends relationships are conceived as operating unto themselves. In this sense, technology produces moral codes (productivity, speed, efficiency). “Societies whose economic goals are the accumulation of material things, wealth, and power, require and enforce the complementary ethical values of speed, productivity, and efficiency as ends as well as means” (234).
- Thought frame – technology as rational calculation – In this frame, technological rationality through the assistive technologies of something like Microsoft Word are important because they have become integrated into the composing process. They are technologically embedded to a really high degree. Examples are uses of terminology that permeates everything.
- Being frame – this is when technological thoughts become the dominant mode of consciousness. Modern technology becomes a way to order nature and our relation to it. This considers humans as resources or a “standing reserve” to be harvested. In this process of Enframing (we only understand being in the world through technological ways – Heidegger), the personal is the technological. . . not just business. Think of iPhones, Blackberries, Facebook, etc. We exist everywhere with technology as technology; we stand with resources as a reserve. Think of the department “human resources!”
- Digital being – This is the accumulation of all frames of being. It rationalizes the technological order and naturalizes it so that it can only increase.
- To combat these frames, the authors argue for “human-machine sanctity” or the constitution of a new frame that encompasses all previous frames but also values the “I-Thou” technological relation as one based on reciprocity and mutual respect. This is a reintroduction of the human to the technological.
- “Because human-machine sanctity, ideally, would be based on non-technical relations – not on means-end, but on reverence and caring for the whole – it would directly improve relations between: employee and employer, employee and machine (equipment), company and clients, and company and nature (conservation).
