I wanted to bring in some notes from this text simply as a means to create continuity with my previous placements of Johnson-Eilola’s work across my major exam. In supporting my minor exam efforts, Johnson-Eilola (JE) provides a lens through which we can consider the activities of information-based (actually, information-saturated) cultures. From this expansive position, we can narrow the focus to individuals (symbolic-analytic workers) who perform specific meaning making activities.
JE is asking us to see culture and technology as contingent, multi-dimensional, fragmented and constructed locally rather than universally. “Technologies are not isolated and neutral things that can be moved from context to context without change. “…technological inventions are not simply dropped from the sky… we integrate them into our specific, local situations. We create, import, use, and misuse them… often for purposes their inventors never intended.” – Spinuzzi’s point in his ethnography of DMV workers; Brooke’s point about why we need to understand the rhetorical nature of modern technologies and the way they shape and are shaped by culture. In direct alignment with Brooke’s rhetorical performances, JE claims “Information is not a tool, record, or plan of work: It is the environment for work and the work itself: the datacloud. Moreover, information is not something to be rigorously controlled and structured: it is not something to be easily understood: it is something to be played with, challenged, and confused by, experimented with and transformed. These are all aspects of postmodern work.”
Technology creates profound shapes and patterns of working, living, and communicating. Akin to Spinuzzi’s workplace analysis and ethnographies… “We have come to work with information as a primary environment and resource… Rather than established frameworks and ground rules early on, users [learn and create] on the fly… the users manipulate preexisting data, filter, cut, paste, and move…” – My point exactly in regard to the ubiquity of technology and the devaluation of the TCer’s position.
The necessity for Information Architecture as a modern practice and discipline? “We live in a cloud of data – the datacloud – a shifting and only slightly contingently structured information space. In that space, we work with information, rearranging, filtering, breaking down and combining. We are not looking for simplicity, but interested in juxtapositions and commonalities.” The knowledge worker as practicing IAer.
For my purposes, I want to focus on JE’s use of symbolic-analytic work in his framework. “People in this type of work identify, rearrange, circulate, abstract, and broker information and symbols to produce reports, plans, and proposals.” Pre-1990s this was a functional description of the TCer. Recently, this is a job description for an IAer. Practically speaking, this is what every knowledge worker in an information economy does. There should be no surprise why scholars such as Albers, Still, Mazur, and Carliner continually seek ways to re-value TC as a practice.
JE uses a simple observation to make an important point: How we use computers has changed dramatically in the last 50 years. Specific to his position, JE is demonstrating hwo the “space” of the computer interface has changed the way we interact with information – how we shape and are shaped by various conceptual objects that are tangible and ephemeral, present and inferred, explicit and implied.
Specific to my focus and reading, I want to make an equally important point: Who uses computers has changed dramatically in the past 50 years. The ubiquity of computer-mediated communication, information processing, and knowledge creation has led to the rise of the symbolic-analytic worker and the skills such a worker needs to function. My claim is that these skills were in the traditional toolkit of the TCer. As the toolkit became democratized, TCers began to look for alternate specialized skills. Hence, the move toward IA and UX, among other practices and disciplines.
“Where previously work was enmeshed in a social context – and learning how to work involved a process of education over time – work now is increasingly fragmented and flattened… In effect the interface is not simply a tool, but a structure for work…”
“Nearly every type of symbolic-analytic or articulation work requires the ability to work at an advanced level with information spaces… Unfortunately, formal education often fails to provide the complex environments necessary to teach students these skills.”
Specific to my exam: IA as a means of exploring the new information spaces of work. IAers bring order to space, balance form and function. “Yet information architecture… is not capable of providing and environment proper for articulating symbolic-analytic work in the datacloud.” IA’s short-comings: IAers work “under the assumption that order can and should be brought to chaotic information… Symbolic-analytic work is an ongoing oscillation between chaos and order.”
IA provides a starting point – it is not the goal.
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