760: on dicks’ the effects of digital literacy on the nature of technical communication work

I wish I’d had Dick’s perspectives when I was trying to work through Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Theory and how it might apply to the information products created by technical communicators.

As I worked through Dick’s narrative about factors that changed and continue to shape technical communication, I kept coming back to this theme of preparation – of what we should be doing to better prepare technical communicators (and others) to be effective and successful communicators. I very much agree with Dick’s introductory claim that we should remember, “when discussing current and coming trend in the discipline, that they largely have to do with the tools and technologies associated with the discipline, and not with the core competency skills that the discipline continues to require” (52).

It seems that if we are to prepare technical communicators to see themselves as “symbolic-analytic workers,” that we need to do more than teach “technologies and methodologies such as single-sourcing and information, content, and knowledge management” and how to optimize “information development for multiple formats and media” (55). It seems that we’re calling for a more tools-based approach to teaching, and yet at the same time requiring technical communicators to understand the rhetorical, linguistic, and social aspects of what they are doing and the information products they are producing.

How does teaching tools and technologies prepare a technical communicator to “move across disciplines, constantly learning and performing a variety of job tasks and doing the symbolic-analytic work” (57) Dick and others have described?

Another aspect of this “tools and technologies” theme is the cost (real and otherwise) of continuous retraining. In describing management and business principles that affect the role and purpose of technical communicators, Dick restates the growing trend to outsource symbolic-analytic work to contractors. While working as a contract technical communicator appeals to some, I have never met a single freelancer who didn’t bemoan the costs of staying ahead of the latest tools and technologies.

As Carliner noted and Dick reasserts, “Not only is what technical communicators write about more complex, but so are the tools and methods they use for doing their work” (77). It’s that “write about” piece that I worry about. A technologist is not necessarily a technical communicator, although as we’ve seen, they are regularly asked to do the symbolic-analytic work demanded by modern organizations, industries, customers, etc. Similarly, I’m concerned with this flattening or stretching of the technical communicator. The demand for specialization in tools and technologies competes with the demand for generalization in composition, rhetoric, language, communication, and culture. When the tool trumps the art and craft of technical communication, I think the discipline of technical communication loses something that will be difficult to recover.