Jan 12th 10
Posted by justin in CCR760
Readings from Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s Central Works in Technical Communication
- Miller, C. (1979, 2004). A humanistic rationale for technical communication. 47-54.
- Rutter, R. (1991, 2004). History, rhetoric, & humanism: Toward a more comprehensive definition of technical communication. 20-34.
- Sullivan, D.L. (1990, 2004). Political-ethical implications of defining technical communication as a practice. 211-219.
- Lay, M.M. (1991, 2004). Feminist theory and the redefinition of technical communication. 146-159.
- Slack, J.D., Miller, D.J., & Doak, J.D. (1993, 2004). The technical communicator as author: meaning, power, authority. 160-174.
“The Technical Communicator as Author” – Slack, Miller & Doak
- Slack notes that the fundamental insight of this piece is the “assertion that technical communicators, whether it is acknowledged or not, contribute to the articulation of meaning and thus implicated in relations of power and authority” (161).
- The author believes that technical communicators yearn for the “level of social responsibility” that their work deserves.
- Relying on Foucault, Slack notes that the concept of authorship renders some discourses less valuable than others – in particular, technical communication isn’t given the respect it deserves.
- Slack identifies three models of modes of communication: transmission (conveying meaning from one point to another – meaning is fixed, use of the technical writer as surrogate engineer, power is possessed by the sender), translation (similar to Latour’s notion, this is the constitution of meaning in the interpretation and reinterpretation of messages, power is negotiated, meaning is produced as an interaction between sender and receiver, miscommunication isn’t the result of poor encoding and decoding; rather, different frameworks of knowledge, production and technical infrastructure might be responsible for communication breakdown – in other words, different social practice. Also, the encoder holds the power in this understanding ), and articulation (the ongoing struggle to articulate and rearticulate meaning. Articulation seems to be a far larger way of understanding the communication process. In articulation, the sender and receiver are considered; however, so are the mediators or the channels of transmission. In this case, media and technologies. To some degree, articulation seems to be a recognition of multiplicity in the communication process – see top of 169).
- Ultimately, Slack is concerned with how to authorize technical communication. To do so, she focuses her work on the articulation aspect of communication and how the process of articulation is wrapped up in relations of power.
- Communication is inherently ideological and imbricated in power because of it’s roots as a technology designed to “exercise control over space and people faster and farther” (163).
- Translation finds many analogues with Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia.
- Slack’s discussion of “identity trains” seems to have a lot in common with Latour’s “immutable mobiles” – in other words, these are trains or associations that are stable enough to base ideas/things on them. Their meaning, while not fixed, is fairly static.
- Power in the articulation model works to fix multiplicity.
Sullivan – Political-ethical implications of defining technical communication as a practice
- Sullivan notes early on that composition has largely served the needs of capitalist/technological modes of production through objectivity, clarity, problem solving, etc. In this process, writing has ignored the social responsibility of writers.
- Sullivan relies heavily on Miller’s conception of tech comm. He notes that Miller’s work argues that “traditional technical writing instruction is based on the ‘windowpane’ theory of language, a theory that frames technical and scientific writing as ‘just a series of maneuvers for staying out of the way’” (213). Instead, Sullivan hopes that technical writing can be a “kind of enculturation” that helps students belong to a community.
- Sullivan notes that “genres define rhetorical situations” ; in effect, genres are kairotic.
- Sullivan argues that teaching standardized formats and forms enculturates students into the military-industrial complex. To me, this sounds absolutely true; however, is there an escape mechanism?
- Techne – skill to produce a product. Praxis – a practice of social action. Phronesis – the virtue of practical wisdom or prudence.
- To get out of the bind mentioned earlier, Sullivan advocates rhet/comp folks to “change my course so that it at once teaces the discourse appropriate for the technological world and makes students aware of the values embedded in such discourse and the dehumanizing effects of it” (215).
- Sullivan hopes to expand technical communication to political discourse and public discourses about technology to escape the genres of military-industrial domination in his classroom.
Rutter – History, Rhetoric, and Humanism
- Rutter is working to place technical communication in the fields of rhetoric and, more broadly, humanist education in this piece.
- Rutter reviews the humanist and rhetoric of science traditions to demonstrate how technical communication can learn a lot from both strands of education. He does this to demonstrate that all communication – even technical – needs the “theoretical” element – the imaginative element – to be useful and good. If not, it’s merely replication of power. . . something that Slack addresses when describing technical communication as transmission.
- On pp. 26-8 Rutter provides a nice intellectual history that provides the basis for understanding the development of technical writing courses at the university level.
- Rutter advocates a consideration of the same elements that Slack assigns to the process of translation and articulation – a technical communicator (and research in technical communication) must consider the writer, audience, mediators and social realities when composing technical writing. He calls it “culture” (30)
- A fantastic quote – “What we do need to understand is that majors and careers are by-products of education, not the purposes for which it should be sought” (32).
Miller – A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing
- At it’s core, this essay asks “could we argue that technical writing has humanistic value?”
- This essay – like Rutter and Slack especially – argues that technical communication ISN’T an act of transmission. It ISN’T in service to positivist dreams of complete replication of reality through writing.
- Miller contends that technical communication is often taught from the “windowpane” view that language is a reflection – completely and wholly – of reality. . . no missteps possible.
- Postivitism – the conviction that sensory data are the only permissible basis for knowledge (49).
- Miller addresses four problems in the teaching of positivist technical writing in this article: 1)unsystematic definitions of technical writing; 2) emphasis on style and organization in technical writing at the expense of invention; 3) insistence on certain characteristics of tone in technical writing; and 4) analysis of audience in terms of ‘level’ in technical writing (50).
- Miller is also aware of technical writing as an instrument of a capitalist military-industrial complex (52).
Lay – Feminist Theory and the Redefinition of Technical Communication
- Recognizing the positivist and androcentric tendencies of technical communication research and scholarship, Lay argues for a revaluation in this piece.
- This piece looks at how ethnography and collaborative writing provide new and interesting connections between technical communication research and feminist theory.
- Characteristics of feminist theory:
- Celebration of difference
- Theory activating social change
- Acknowledgement of scholars’ backgrounds and values
- Inclusion of women’s experiences
- Study of gaps and silences in traditional scholarship
- New sources of knowledge – perhaps a benefit of the five characteristics already listed
- Issues in feminist theory:
- Should feminists emphasize similarities or differences among men and women?
- Should these differences be located in cultural or biological traits?
- Should these first two issues promote or displace binary opposition?
- Technical communication is not objective; rather, Lay contends that the distinctions between science and rhetoric disappear when truth is conceived as agreement within a community.
- Because science is inherently masculine (until now anyway), it’s androcentric qualities will be difficult for many tech comm. Folks to recognize.
- Ethnography and feminist theory are described – especially the shared values toward researcher background, acknowledgement of researcher in research process, discovery of meaning and reflection on process. Also triangulation, thick description, and effect of ethnography on participants. All good ideas for researchers in tech comm. Researchers in corporate/organizational environments.
- Though a bit binaristic, Lay contends that male collaborators need to adopt female approaches toward conflict to conduct effective collaborative writing.
Nov 6th 09
Posted by justin in CCR691
Rice, Jeff. “Urban Mappings: A Rhetoric of the Network.” RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38 2 (2008): 198-218. Print.
- Rice begins with the contention that websites such as Google Maps and MapQuest are really sites of invention where new media is used for inventive practices of informational arrangements
- The “spaces” being mapped on the net are not only spatial. . . they are often ephemeral and personal. The “territories” where all this mapping occurs are databases. For Rice, the database is a place “that store and assemble vast amounts of information hosted by their own and related services” (199). As such, the database is, according to Rice, the place where space is mapped at the site of rhetoric.
- According to Rice, his articulation that databases are “emerging rhetoric” speaks to traditional rhetorical concerns regarding “arrangement, delivery, and space” (200). To demonstrate this, he notes how the database “gathers spaces of information (streets, routes, places), arranges information (brings them together in an interface), and delivers that information to a specific audience for a specific situation (the end user) (200).
- The database is a site for arrangement; however, it’s distinctly anti-Ramist because it allows for multiple hierarchies/structures/outlines that are determined by user content. In Rice’s words, the database remains “open to how information might be navigated or finally arranged by not dictating the exact structure of the arrangement” (202).
- This conception of the database is similar to Carolyn Miller’s notion of “novelty” in topos-bound invention.” According to Miller, the topos of degree – or of ways and means – “suggests a conceptual shape or realm where one may find – or create – a detail, a connection, a pattern that was not anticipated deductively by the topos itself. The topos is a conceptual space without fully specified or specifiable contents; it is a region of productive uncertainty” (Miller 141). When thought about this way, the database acts as a “novelty” of topoisic invention because of the ability to “search” or find your way through spaces to useful data.
- What Rice is calling database rhetoric “is not only what may allow a speaker, writer, or rhetoric to change or evoke different notions of self through various arrangements; it is also a way for a composition to be “stylized” in a “myriad” number of ways as well”. In other words, the user and the database construct the space for each individual interaction between the two. As such, arrangement isn’t replaced by invention in this process; rather, rice contends, they interacting – or networked.
- The economy of presence – or the ability via new media to see more than one set of data at one time – allows for multiple intersecting presences at the place where interactions intersect (205).
- Using Lyotard’s proscriptions as a framework, Rice argues that databases can be used to imaginatively connect information across boundaries - boundaries disciplinary, ideological, compositional, etc. The grand narrative is the opposite of Lyotards database – a place where “rhetorical turns, memory associations, spatial searches or travel metaphors” aren’t allowed presence.
- On 208 we get a specific reference to ANT when defining the network. Rice notes, “Networks. . . are bodies of relationships that shift as new bodies are introduced or subtracted. Networks are found in personal relationships, textual readings, political issues, the Web, and elsewhere” (208-9). As Bruno Latour notes, “Network is a concept, not a thing out there”
- Again relying on Latour, Rice contends that the “Network is a tool to help describe something, not what is being described” (209). Working from this definition of network – and the Latourian contention that the network is always changing to accommodate new kinds of informational relationships – Rice then travels through the “various network spaces” that compose Detroit.
- Rice uses the memory, imagination, history, space and other features of his brain – of his process of knowing Detroit to describe his “database” of the personal. The complex interaction of all of these features are what – for Rice – compose the space or the “informational scheme” he knows as Detroit.
- After reflecting on his own “database” of richly layered features, Rice reflects on the basically unchanged narratives of “renewal and rejuvenation” that tend to map city spaces in decline (213-4). Again using Latour’s notion of the ever-shifting network, Rice relies on his network to assemble Detroit. In this assembly process, Rice notes how database driven new media like Google Maps is not “wrong” but that it isn’t complete because it can’t take into account “personalized data.” As a generalization tool, it’s super useful; however, it’s important to note that it’s not “codified” or complete.
- All this personal databasing eventually leads to the moment of complexity a la Mark Taylor. Rice hopes that more full articulations of personal databases and their integration into networked systems can produce new ways of thinking about urban renewal, and the “rhetorical mapping of that urbanism” (217).
Sep 22nd 09
Posted by justin in CCR601
Genealogy Project
3rd Generation – 2nd Generation Author: Hawhee
Miller, Carolyn. “Opportunity, Opportunism, and Progress: Kairos in the Rhetoric of Technology.” Argumentation 8.1 (1994): 81-96. Print.
Executive Summary:
Miller claims that kairos serves “as both a powerful theme within technological discourse and as an analytical concept that explains some of the suasory force by which such discourse maintains itself and its position in our culture” (81). In pursuing this claim, she does a couple of things:
a. She discusses the difference between rhetoric as constructive vs. rhetoric as responsive. Miller views the kairotic moment as central to an understanding of rhetoric as constructive in that kairos explains the “dynamic relationship between discourse and situation, to the qualitative nature of the situation itself as it is shaped in and by discourse” (83).
b. Kairos as central to technology because it emphasizes change, development, progress – all notions central to the ways we conceptualize technology. (83)
c. As an analytic concept, kairos is useful because:
- a. It combines both realist and constructivist understandings of situation and emphasizes the interplay between the two.
- b. It can conceive of change as both continuous and discontinuous. Kairos’ ability to exploit the discontinuous places an emphasis on the epiphanic moment of miracle – the breakthrough. Kairos’ ability to exploit the continuous places an emphasis on the constructive nature of kairos to “make an opportunity at any time, from situational resources that can be constructed a variety of ways (83).
- c. Kairos has a temporal-spatial dimension in that it includes the potentialities of time and place.
d. She discusses the spatial (technology as “state of the art” “bottleneck” “barrier” “push/pull”)
- a. In extending this push/pull metaphor, Miller extends her analysis to argue that the push (scientific development) and the pull (market demand) are both kairotic in that they are justifiable in the kairotic moment.
e. She discusses the temporal (technological era, tech revolution, tech age)
- a. Miller’s discussion of the temporal relies on a discussion of the “S” curve.
f. In the discourse of technological change, there are some interesting conversations:
- a. Change is deterministic in that the “preceding technical situation alone is determinative” of future innovation (88) – and hence, out of control.
- b. Yet, change is not deterministic because of the existence of human interventions and acts of human genius.
g. To encapsulate this argument about technological progress, Miller notes that “the ideology of progress and the ideology of technology out-of-control are thus complementary kairotic constructions: they both read from a series of changing moments a trajectory into the future and a message about appropriate action at the present” (89)
h. After laying out the discourses of technological progress, Miller gets into a discussion of technological forecasting. In brief, technological forecasting is a self-justifying process whereby technologists, by speculating about the future, can shape the future of technology (and can also manage the forces that spin technology toward the brink of human annihilation). In this discussion, a couple of points arise:
- a. Technological forecasting “takes advantage of (or makes advantage of) the realist-constructivist ambivalence in kairos: the forecaster can threaten objectively inevitable future and simultaneously offer a way to reconstruct it.
- b. In this sense, technological forecasters are like sophists – they struggle with epistemological and political uncertainty and the need for reasoned action in the face of uncertainty (91).
- i. In reflecting on the piece, Miller contends “As a construction, the kairotic dimension of discourse offers both assurance about the unknown by extrapolation from the here and now and also control f the uncertain by opportunistic shaping of both present and future.
Cross-Talk:
1. Miller notes, “As an opening, kairos becomes a rhetorical void, a gap, a ‘problem-space’ that a rhetor can occupy for advantage” (84). This seems to talk to Hawhee’s notion of the “inbetweenness” and potential of the kairotic moment.
2. The kairotic location of maximum acceleration, when discussing the “S” curve of technological growth might have an analog in Shirkey’s “long tail.”
Methods/Methodology:
1. Close textual analysis
2. Metaphoric analysis
Major Influences:
1. Martino, Joseph P.: 1972b, ‘Forecasting the Progress of Technology,’ in Martino (ed.), 13-23.
2. Miller, Carolyn R.: 1992, ‘Kairos in the Rhetoric of Science,’ in Steven P. Witte, Neil Nakadate, and Roger Cherry (eds.) A Rhetoric of Doing: Essays Honoring James L. Kinneavy, SIU Press, 310-327.***
3. Poulakos, John: 1983, ‘Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric,’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 16, 35-48.***
4. Vatz, Richard E.: 1973, ‘The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 6, 154-161.
Key Questions/Concerns:
1. How is the Sophistic reading of kairos an appropriate concept for realizing technological discourses of change?
2. How do discourses of continuity and discontinuity play out in technological discourse? How are these discourses related to kairos?
