Note: Following is a quick transcription of a paper presented at CCCC 1997. It's linear; get over it.
I want to start this with a small narrative fragment. In late 1993, I was editing a background report prepared for a public policy meeting of the organization New Mexico First, a joint university-corporate coalition that organizes yearly meetings at which a wide range of people discuss social, political, and economic issues affecting New Mexico. The group includes people from many different areas, from politicians seeking both photo ops and social change to community workers, educators, corporate outreach directors and executives, political consultants, and community activitists. The topic of the meeting changes each year, varying from small-business development to environmental issues to racial and ethnic relations. The document I worked on-from which the Table on the overhead is drawn-was about economic development issues in New Mexico. This document was distributed to participants a month before the meeting as a backgrounder, a text designed to help interested citizens come up to speed on an issue.
The table was accompanied by two pages of text in which Peter Anselmo, an Economics Professor at New Mexico Tech who was the primary author of the document, attempted to explain the categories in the table.
The category White* is a category consisting of households that identify themselves as White less households identifying themselves as Hispanic within a given income range. All householders identifying themselves as White comprise the un-asterisked White category. However, many Hispanic householders identify themselves as both White and Hispanic. Thus, we subtracted householders identified as Hispanic from the overall white category to get the White* catagory. it is worth noting that the US Census Bureau is also grappling with ways of dealing with the problem of ethnicity via census forms.
But let's leave this for a few minutes, because it's not what I intended to talk about today; in constructing the talk, it became what I wanted to talk about, so it will take me a few minutes to get from the point I thought I swas going to make to the point I end up making, the point that explains the fragment I just showed and talked through.
What I wanted to talk about was the ways that we value and think about information in our culture, and how those values (even when we don't realize we hold them-especially when we don't realize we hold them) affect in profound ways how we work, learn, and live together.
I should warn you that I'm not going to say anything new. In fact, that's part of my point: the act of connecting up previously said things is an important political and rhetorical act, perhaps the most important political and rhetorical act as we enter the 21st Century.
The best performativity ... comes ... from arranging the data in a new way, which is what constitutes a "move" properly speaking. This new arrangement is usually achieved by connecting together a series of data that were previously held to be independent. This capacity to articulate what used to be separate can be called imagination....
If education must not only provide for the reproduction of skills, but also for their progress, then it follows that the transmission of knowledge should not be limited to the transmission of information, but should also include training in all of the procedures that can increase one's ability to connect fields jealously guarded from one another by traditional structures of knowledge.
- Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 51-52
And ....
On Mon, 24 Feb 1997
jonesde@smtplink.laccd.edu wrote:> How many of you would agree that a
> homepage containing nothing but links
> to other pages which frequently are
> nothing by links is poor design?> David Jones
> Los Angeles Mission College
> jonesde@laccd.edu
David Jones' question is a common one, and the debate on the email list interpreted the value of simple lists in many ways. Personally, I was glad the topic was even being publicly discussed-to many people, it would seem silly to consider a list as something valuable in itself. Our culture tends to downplay the political and rhetorical importance of information arrangement because it's seen as straightforward, objective, and mechanical. Foucault asks the question, for example, of whether or not a publication of Nietzsche's "works" should include a laundry list ("What is an Author," 103). Like most of Focault's questions, this one is useful precisely because it is also ludicrous-our culture automatically would value Also Sprach Zarasthustra over the economically phrased 3 shirts, extra starch. The first text is a philosophical masterwork; the second, let us admit it, an everyday example of technical communication.
But if we are uncomfortable with this comparison, we can find comfort, perhaps, in postmodern capitalism, which (as Lyotard correctly analyzed) values the ability to connect up new pieces of information in unique ways as much-and perhaps more than-the ability to generate "new" content; rather than "creation" we value "articulation," to use Stuart Hall's term. Robert Riech speaks of the symbolic-analytic worker as the newest large professional class.
Symbolic analysts solve, identify, and broker problems by manipulating symbols. They simplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and then, eventually, transformed back into reality.
Robert B. Reich,
The Work of Nations p. 178
Although postmodernism is still frequently of as either a buzzword past the point of cultural saturation or a marginal art movement, the basic themes play themselves out in nearly every discipline-not merely literary theory but also architecture, music, management, economics, and sciences.
To return briefly to the question of lists on web pages, we can see a shift in types of uses of information space on the World Wide Web. In one sense, the shift is from modernism to postmodernism, from locating design value in what's behind the information to the ability to rearrange and navigate information.
This page, taken from the Professional Writing Program's site at Purdue
University, provides a list of links to online sources students and faculty
in technical writing might call on for course projects and activities. Like
most lists in this genre, on the surface the whole thing looks rather trivial.
If you've constructed one, though, you know the task can be extremely difficult.
How do you decide which search engines to include? Although novices sometimes
assume they all operate the same way, experts know each site holds its complex
array of concerns about how the space was constructed (search robot, human
indexer, self-selection, etc.), how search terms are constructed (boolean,
plain English, example, etc.), whether image-data is somehow covered, how
frequently the index is updated, etc. The engine at the top of any list will
probably get the most traffic-so what to put first.
The problem became so complex, in fact, that we still haven't solved the issue. We put Alta Vista on top temporarily while we do more research on how our students use the search engines for their own work.
But perhaps
the problem here isn't just in audience analysis, but in the whole notion
that we can find the best search engine.But from a postmodernist stance, there
is no "best" engine, merely different ways of responding to inquiries
on the fly. A postmodernist list avoids the whole issue of "best"
by avoiding the whole notion of "list"-a long path to travel-and
instead turning into a a "hyperspace" in the strict definition of
the term, an immensely large space that can be traversed through wormholes
that connect apparently widely separated spaces through n-dimensional shortcuts.
Sites like Alta Vista perfect capitalism; information is not merely is not
an uncreative serial list, but a space, a space of unimpeded movement that
can be moved through by the expert entry of search queries. The "list"
in Alta Vista become so vast that it disappears, leaving behind the Chesire-cat-smile
of the search-query entry field. Information is not a list but a decentered,
n-dimensional flow.
This capability, after all, is what capitalism is about-the movement of information to generate surplus value. Although management theorist Peter Drucker persists in calling this "post-capitalism," it is more properly called "late capitalism" or "postmodern capitalism" because capital has not been surpassed but perfected. Most traditional technical communication texts, especially instructional texts, fit well into late capitalism because they tend to value the removal of "extraneous information"-things that are frequently declared "wordy" or "off topic"; our dictum is "less is more." Information, in technical communication, is traditionally stripped down, its rough edges ground off, its surfaces rounded and polished until it not merely shines but is invisible. The contexts of designing and writing texts as well as the contexts of use are routinely decontextualized to make them more amenable to circulation in the circuits of late capitalism.
Here's my disclaimer: I'm not arguing that circulation is evil or that profit is bad. But I want to suggest that the process of decontextualization not only enables "technically efficient" circulation but also short-circuits a number of very necessary and important considerations.
As I warned you earlier, this critique is not a new one-a number of other people have noted this problem in technical communcation. But I want to frame the problem here in a slightly different perspective, one that I think suggests some new ways of responding. I talked earlier about the notion that creativity is increasingly seen as the ability to filter, extract, rearrange and structure disparate pieces of information; in other words, the ability to both break down and reconstruct contexts of use. Most of us have done a good job of learning how to do the first step-decontextualization-because it has come to be the hallmark by which technical communication is judged. We're not as good yet at doing-or even understanding-how to create effective new contexts. By "effective" here I mean not only "efficient" but also powerful, equitable, compassionate, and ethical.
The aim of a theoretically-informed political practice must surely be to bring about or construct the articulation between social or economic forces and those forms of politics and ideology that might lead them in practice to intervene in history in a progressive way-an articulation which has to be constructed through practice precisely because it is not guaranteed by how those forces are constituted in the first place.
Stuart Hall,
"Signification, Representation, Ideology" p. 95
As a starting point, I want to return to the story fragment I began this talk with. I think from the standpoint of traditional technical communication, this table is a poor device: it is difficult to follow, the information might be more clearly laid out as a graphic (pie chart or bar charts), and the labels on the columns are so obtuse that the author has to spend two full pages (which I've only excerpted here) explaining the distinctions between the various categories of White, White*, Hispanic, etc. Judged from the simple decontextualization standpoint, this table doesn't do very well.
But I would argue there are different ways to consider this table and the text surrounding it. What the authors do here, what they explain in the text, is to break down US Census data and reconstruct it in ways that illustrate biases and inequalities in racial economies in New Mexico. The report was written for use at a public policy meeting among a wide range of people in New Mexico with an interest in economic development, from community outreach and social workers through politicians and corporate executives. Although the meeting would not be used to set specific public policies, it would contribute in important ways to the tone and content of the debate raging over economic development in New Mexico.
The category White* is a category consisting of households that identify themselves as White less households identifying themselves as Hispanic within a given income range. All householders identifying themselves as White comprise the un-asterisked White category. However, many Hispanic householders identify themselves as both White and Hispanic. Thus, we subtracted householders identified as Hispanic from the overall White category to get the White* catagory. It is worth noting that the US Census Bureau is also grappling with ways of dealing with the problem of ethnicity via census forms.
From an ethnic perspective, the best word to identify the income distribution in New Mexico is unequal. American Indians,[122] Hispanics, and Blacks fare much worse than Whites. Blacks have made gains in the period 1969-1989, but only in the sense of going from very impoverished to slightly less impoverished. Asians/Pacific Islanders fare slightly worse than Whites, but noticably better than the other three groups. Although we include the "Other" census category in our table, we will omit this category from much of the discussion because of the difficulty in defining those who comprise this category.[123]
______________
[122] The actual category is American Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut.
[123] Many of those who identify themselves as "Other" include
For this document, then, the authors move through a series of recognitions, deconstructions, and-importantly-reconstructions and recontextualizations of information in order to make an ethical point about economics. First, Anselmo recognizes that social pressures sometimes encourage mixed-blood citizens to publicly identify themselves as White rather than Hispanic. Given the experience of Hispanics in New Mexico over the past few centuries, this is an unfortunate by understandable survival strategy.
Second, the author understands that this social and cultural conflict is effectively hidden, with the official composition of "White" leveling slightly to minimize the apparent disparity between what many of the readers will see as White (gringos) and Hispanics. Third, he rearranges and recombines the data in order to recontextualize the representation of income among citizens, coming up with the category that is now commonly referred to as "White, non-Hispanic." The categories are not "clean," in a technical sense, because White*, White, and Hispanic do not neatly add up-but rather than cooking the information or somehow making it invisible, Anselmo just shows the conflicts. In text later, he also confesses that the authors have not figured out how to process the catch-all category of "Other," and cannot therefore make any claims about how that population is composed or positioned economically and politically in New Mexico. This is messy and not very satisfying, but at the same time it prevents readers from easily absorbing information-the recontextualization asks questions it cannot answer, and that is its strength.
Although we could argue that the whole discussion of White vs. White*, etc., could be more efficiently (and even effectively) handled through a snappier, more professional looking graphic, I don't really think that should be a major consideration; in many ways, spending time and effort on that issue is disabling, because it values ease in communication. But the only "clear" thing about this whole situation is that it does not have an easy answer. If we judge the table primarily on how easy it is to read, we miss the whole point.
The text and table did succeed at making important, powerful, and difficult connections for the readers. Admittedly, these points were perhaps too well understood by the readers. At previous meetings, the authors of the background document were presented to the attendees at a keynote banquet. But after receiving the background document we had written, the institutional sponsors of the meeting informed us that we wouldn't be invited (and funded) guests at the meeting, to be held at a posh ski resort in Angel Fire, New Mexico. (So much for "We have nothing to lose but our chains.")
This example is relatively straightforward, but it suggests some crucial ways in which technical communication teachers, pratitioners, and students can begin focusing on selection, filtering, arrangement, and the creation of new contexts. Our field already has a much needed start in this area. The sheet that I sent around contains a selected list of works that are useful in this regard; Brasseur's work on charting software; Mirel's work on the rhetoric of database design; and Sullivan and Porter's work on postmodern geographies are very useful for thinking about and teaching new ways of construction professional and technical communication.
In the classroom at Purdue, we've found that case approaches offer, among other things, the opportunity to help students see technical communication as much more than "writing with clarity." Cases-which we articulate as including both realworld projects such as the one Colleen Reilly will discuss later in this panel as well as large, complex, fictional scenarios, encourage students to understand the richness, complexity, and contingency of the rhetorical situations in which they're working.
In the United Drill case, for example, which Pat Sullivan
developed, students are confronted with the task of writing policies on sexual
discrimination and harassment; their context is a supervisor who is not in
favor of such a policy but has been asked by their supervisor to offer policy.
So the situation is contingent and not easy to address. In addition, the writers
start by working with a mass of EEOC data that is relatively undifferentiated.
The writer's job then involves not merely the ability to write efficiently,
but to analyze a complex rhetorical situation, to understand the ethical,
social, and political forces at play in that situation, to understand (in
some always incomplete way) an enormous body of information, to attempt to
supplement or complicate that with other information, and finally to select/filter/rearrange
all of this in an attempt to construct a satisfactory policy statement for
their company. As you might expect, there are a wide range of documents resulting
from the case; part of what students learn in their own work and in their
work with peers also working on the same case, is that there are no single
right answers, but only re-representations and different recontextualizations
or reconstructions of the problem.
In another case being implemented in class at Purdue
this semster, Jeff Grabill and Michele Simmons developed a risks management
case around the fictional Schaub Chemical's attempts to expand drug manufacturing
in a small community. The case includes corporate histories, technical documents
on toxic waste disposal, letters to the editor of the town newspaper, maps,
and more. As with the United Drill case, student are not given the impression
that they are looking for a pre-destined solution. Rather, the rhetorical
contexts of the scenario ask them to explore, deconstruct, rearrange, and
reconstruct positions both with and within this information in order to write
appropriate (not "correct") texts.
The value of all of these works-from the New Mexico First Economic Development Report through Alta Vista spaces, sexual harassment policy, and risk management communication-the value of these cases lies in the way they help us balance between modernism and postmodernism, creation and arrangment. Beyond postmodernism, they construct a new political space, one that practices both decontextualization and context-building in ethical ways. The texts and writers I've talked about here-the term "writer" seems now unsuitable, perhaps "architect" or "articulator"-they highlight the politics of information, the ethical choices involved in selecting, deconstructing, and arranging information. It is not enough to recognize-as technical communicators have for years-the values of breaking down contexts, of representing information in ways that any audience can understand, in endeavoring to be clear and plain. Although decontextualizing skills are useful, they must be balanced-orchestrated, in fact-by attempts to understand the ethical dimensions of information and communication. In addition, this ethics is necessarily postmodern because the decontexualizations tend to objectify information in ways that prevent ethical considerations. Our ethics must look beynd the romantic location of value in solitary (or even collaborative) geniuses from whose minds great ideas spring. People are not free to combine fragments in any way they like to make any meaning, as extreme postmodernist might have us believe; the situation is much more complex. Instead, people operate with-and to some degree are themselves constructed by-numerous social forces of varying degrees. We can articulate new connections or strengthen or weak existing social forces, but we do not have complete freedom to do whatever we want (that model is merely a retreat into individual genius). As Stuart Hall points, there are always structures, but never guarantees one meaning and use; there is always room for movement and change, but always based on and within existing conditons. Expert communicators and social actors both know how to manipulate, how to disarticulate and rearticulate information structures and processes strategically and tactically.
As I said back at the start of this talk, the selection and arrangement of information is rapidly becoming one of the most important rhetorical and political activities. If we recognize this shift, if we begin researching and teaching these skills as rhetorical and political activies, we can help our students (and ourselves) see that technical writing is always about more than information: technical communications are, in the broadest senses, instructions of the most important sort: they are instructions about how to think and how to live.
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