760: on spinuzzi chapter 5

Whoa!! That’s some serious field work. I like this text because Spinuzzi is accessible. Without over theorizing, he makes his analysis work because it is grounded in observed activity.

The concept of “net work” complicates some of the calls we worked through last week. For example, if the application of knowledge and information is what characterizes the technological revolution and information capitalism, what are we doing to prepare our students? Are we equipping them to understand, navigate and exploit the new distributed economy? "...negotiation becomes an essential skill" (143). Where are students getting exposed to these new life skills? Can we expect students to “skilled-up” in their humanities courses? I see in Spinuzzi’s analysis a case for rhetorical instruction. "It means making connections and circulating things: texts, money and its many representations, heterogeneous resources, and people. It means bringing different trades and activities into contact: massive influxes of social languages, genres, and chronotypes" (144).

Specific to technical communications, is there an argument to be made that all workers in the socio-technical network are performing the work of technical communication? Across the scenarios that Spinuzzi provides in chapter 5, we see workers in various roles performing the symbolic-analytic activities of trained technical communicators (activities we identified in last week’s readings).

The prominence of "texts" in the net worked organization (or, at the very least, in Telecorp) requires that all workers be symbolic-analytical workers. The net work enables socio-technical networks. Texts, in all of their various genres, function as sets of transformations, helping “to hold together and form dense interconnections” across the network (137). I don’t want to over-simply Spinuzzi’s claim here, but can we not use his argument to support a mandate to immerse writing and rhetorical analysis in the curriculum – any curriculum? “Texts are inscriptions that represent phenomena, belong to genres that construct relatively stable relationships, and function as boundary objects that bridge among different activities" (148). Does that statement not ooze big “R” and little “r” rhetoric with a good dose of Composition?

I realize it was necessary to link the field work and the analysis to broader concepts of economics, production, and the changing nature of work in an increasingly technology-enhanced world. However, in some ways I see the work in the scenarios as not that different from the work one would observe in, say, Thomas Edison’s laboratories during the early part of the 20th century (see Bazerman’s The Languages of Edison’s Light). The flow diagrams Spinuzzi includes in the chapter all seem to illustrate a modular approach to production rather than the net worked activities of sociotechnical network. In fact, the genre ecology diagram on 160 simply seems to illustrate how worker roles are connected through the circulation of common documents. Are we really seeing net work here? I’m certain it’s a perspective and I’ve missed something in the reading, but I’m struggling to see how different the processes and activities in the scenarios differ from the processes and activities of companies dating back well before the information age. What I do see in the scenarios is exactly the type of symbolic-analytic work we discussed last week. Spinuzzi identifies workers and roles with varying illiteracies, competencies, and access to tools and technologies.