Easy to use computer systems present us with a paradox: We don't want to have to spend time in our classes or in our lives struggling to master arcane command names and codes. At the same time, we spend much of our lives talking about the idea that communication is a complex, recursive set of processes involving writers, readers, and their contexts; not only that, but we find it increasingly difficult to accept the idea of single, permanent meanings and instead talk frequently about contingency, contradiction, and sliding signification.
So we insist that the Shannon and Weaver model is outdated, but we reaffirm it constantly. It works, because we accept a narrow vision of how to measure the success of these texts. This should be our first clue: We think of "real" writing as extended, humanisitic, collaborative, recursive, constructive. Documentation, on the other hand, escapes our notice (only to be commented upon when it fails). In this paradox falls the public perception of academics as removed from realworld concerns. Kristin Woolever and Helen Loeb, in their textbook Writing for the Computer Industry, admit that writing is a complex set of processes but then immediately assert that people in the realworld don't have time to complete multiple drafts, that writers should learn to plan carefully enough to complete the task in a single draft. Everyone knows that what goes on in the writing classroom is all well and good for a writing classroom, but those spaces are overprotected, removed from realworld concerns.
This doesn't mean that we should drop our complicated, messy models and pedagogies, but that we need to articulate our concerns more carefully to the realworld. We have to admit the usefulness of sometimes pretending that signification isn't constantly slipping, of acting as if there were single, unified, self-present meanings. But we also have to start attempting to think a way in which the discourses we've simplified can be opened back up to critical reflection without negating completely that fact that these discourses work. We need to question without denial.