760: on hackos’ foreword in spilka

Before looking at Spilka’s introduction, I want to take up a claim that Joann Hakos makes in the foreword. Hakos states, “Part of the resistance to computer-mediated structured authoring … appears to be based not so much on the technology but on a cultural change that the technology demands and fosters… The cultural change required of technical communicators is a product of cost-reduction strategies developed in a competitive business environment” (viii).

Let me just state that, from my humble perspective, it's not a resistance to the technology, it's the time and cost associated with keeping pace with the technology. Joann Hakos is an extremely successful industry consultant. She has lucrative contracts with fortune 500 companies around the globe. She is paid handsomely to speak at technical and scientific communication events. The seminars and workshops her company (Comtech) delivers here and in Europe start at just under $2,000.000 a pop per person. So to hear her tying resistance to cultural change to cost-reduction strategies comes off a bit hollow.

Not all organizations can afford to send their technical communicators to workshops in San Jose or Heidelberg so the communicators can better “adhere to standards and work in highly collaborative environments… [to] work collectively and to submit their work to constant review for compliance with standards” (viii) – stated as if compliance to standards is a bad thing! Why is constant review of one’s work a problem?

Joann Hakos has long practiced what she preaches. For at least the last 25 years (likely longer), she has been an active voice in tech comm – an advocate for professionalization and recognition of the discipline. Here, however, I think she makes a sloppy rhetorical move by setting issues of digital literacy into an “us vs. them” binary. That’s not fair to technology, progress, or the organizations and industries in which technical communicators work. Most importantly, it's not fair to technical communicators who actively seek change (cultural or otherwise) for the right reasons.