The Rhetorical Self Fashioning of Technical Communication, 1984-1994 by Chris Werry San Diego State University

Introduction

In the last fifteen years technical communication[1] has undergone an explosive phase of growth both as a professional practice and as a field of academic inquiry.  In industry, U.S. labor department reports show technical communication to be among the fastest growing professions in the country.[2] Within the university, the increase has also been marked.  In 1976 only 19 institutions were listed as offering academic programs in technical communication (Kelly et al, Academic Programs in Technical Communication).  By 1985 that figure had almost tripled, reaching 56.  Since 1985 this rate of growth has only increased.    In the last few years alone the number of doctoral programs in technical communication has quadrupled. According to a study by Theresa Enos, technical communication has become ‘the fastest growing area in English departments, if not the fastest growth area in the entire university curriculum’.  (Enos, page 95)

The field’s growth has been accompanied in recent years by a struggle to achieve disciplinary legitimacy.  Technical communication provides a striking example of an academic field in the midst of disciplinary self-fashioning, fighting to establish and shore up the core components of disciplinarity.  As such, it has tended to exhibit a remarkable degree of self-consciousness about the mechanisms by which disciplinarity is achieved.  In journals and academic forums, discussions about professionalism and disciplinarity have been in the foreground for some time now.  However, little attention has been paid to this process, despite its relevance to the fields of Rhetoric, Composition, and English studies. This paper begins the job of constructing a historical sketch of an important period of transformation in technical communication.  In particular, the paper focuses on a series of key moments between 1984 and 1994 that represent significant shifts in the constitution if technical communication as an academic field.

1985-1989:  Beginnings

David Russell has argued that it is really only after WWII that technical communication in the U.S. emerges as an identifiable field, both inside and outside the academy (Russell, 250).  Rapid technological growth coupled with the postwar economic boom led to a strong demand for technical writers in government and in industry, fueling an increase in technical communication courses and teaching staff.  Russell notes that it is in the 1950′s that the first professional organization (the Society for Technical Communication), the first journals and the first graduate program came into being.  In the decades that followed the field continued to grow at a steady pace.  By 1973 there were 3 main journals (Technical CommunicationTechnical Writing TeacherJournal of Technical Writing and Communication) and an academic professional society (the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing).  Wilcox cites a 1973 survey which found that 32.9% of English departments in the U.S. offered courses in technical communication, (Wilcox, page 59) and it is also in the early 1970′s that the first majors in technical communication are offered in English departments[3].

However, while a certain degree of growth is evident in the decades after the war and some noticeable changes in the field do occur, I would argue that the character of knowledge production remains largely unchanged until around 1985, and that the central components of a disciplinary apparatus are absent.  Until the mid-1980′s there were no doctoral programs in technical communication, and relatively few Masters programs.  There were few professional meetings at the academic level; there was no body of research and hardly any theory.   The field’s journals contained significant percentages of articles by nonacademics and consisted largely of tips, teaching pointers and other forms of what North classifies as ‘lore’.  Furthermore, even academic authors of journal articles tended to see their audience as located as much outside the university as inside it, and it is perhaps significant that most university libraries only begin holding the field’s major journals from around 1985 onwards.  As a field, technical communication held a precarious institutional position both within the university and the English departments (where it was most often housed), lacking an established system of promotion, tenure and certification. In short, the condition and forms of knowledge production identifiable prior to the mid-1980′s are best described as ‘pre-disciplinary’[4].

In the early to mid-1980′s the field underwent some profound changes. To begin with, there was a radical increase in the number of professional writers, (caused in part by new computing technologies) and in the number of courses offered in Rhetoric programs and in English departments.  By 1984, 63% of all English departments offered undergraduate courses in the subject, 31% offered degree programs and 3% offered doctoral programs (Huber, 173). MLA surveys in 1983-4, and 1986 show technical communication as the highest growth area for English majors (cited in Porter, 400).  Of some significance is the role English departments start taking in the accrediting of technical communication specialists during this period.  In 1971, only 15% of members of the Society for Technical Communication were English majors, and 40% were without any university degree at all.  By 1988, 65% of STC members had degrees in English (often with majors in technical communication or Professional Writing) and only 8% lacked university degrees.[5]  This stronger departmental affiliation with English was added to through an increase in programs offering a major in technical communication (roughly one third of English departments in 1984).  The growth of the major enhanced the curricular status of technical communication and marks a significant point in the field’s development.  Porter goes so far as to argue that the establishment of the undergraduate major at this time was crucially important to the disciplinary trajectory of technical communication.  He writes:

The status of major is institutionally and curricularly important. When a group has a major, it can develop and control content of a series of courses for undergraduates, it can argue for new staff and determine their qualifications, it can defensibly conduct research in the area for the purposes of tenure and promotion, and it can argue for graduate programs to educate the faculty to be hired in other like majors. (Porter, 406)

Porter is certainly right to identify the major as helping provide a firmer institutional position for technical communication in the mid-eighties (406), a position that was indeed important in enabling research, greater academic security and the demand for more graduate courses.  However he perhaps overestimates the extent to which the growth of the field can be linked to the emergence of undergraduate majors alone.  A number of other factors must be taken into account.  For example, also of importance was the success of Rhetoric and Composition during the eighties in establishing a research base, a body of theory, a set of doctoral programs (from which many of technical communication’s best known writers came[6]), and in legitimating the study of nonacademic writing as a serious field of academic endeavor.

By the mid-eighties a number of changes are also identifiable in the field’s journals.  There is a pronounced decrease in articles by nonacademic writers, and an increase in those by academics.  An intensive period of discussion takes place concerning technical communication’s status and how it might best be transformed into a ‘proper’ discipline.   And most obviously, there is a dramatic turn towards theory, rhetoric and research as means of authorizing the field’s practices.  Particularly striking is the shift toward research that takes over the field.  Symptomatic of this is a 1985 edition of Technical Communication  which announces a significant change in direction for the journal.[7]  It begins with an address by the president of the Society for Professional Communication, Frank Smith, who writes:

From the earliest days of our profession (discipline? occupation?), practitioners have been solving problems the direct, brute force way…Typically, we work on the basis of intuition and folklore, and when a client asks us why we want to change his expression or his table or his organization, our only answer is that we THINK it’s more effective our way.  The client is perfectly justified in that case to say that HE thinks it isn’t.  We need to be able to say that…research has proven conclusively that our recommended approach is superior (4-5)

Smith’s piece immediately registers a tone of crisis in its uncertainty about what to call the field, and dramatizes nicely the anxiety felt by many at this time about the field’s status.  Smith makes it clear that what is at stake in the elaboration of a body of specialized theory and research is the power and control it affords professionals over their clients.  In Smith’s article the production of research based academic knowledge is seen as essential for claims of professional legitimacy, expertise and jurisdiction[8].  Smith goes on to complain that such professional control is impossible due to the ‘infantile’ state of the field, and concludes that the addition of research will help significantly in this respect. (5)

The presidential address is followed by Thomas Pinelli’s editorial, which begins by echoing Smith’s argument about the status of technical communication:

At present, technical communication is considered to be a field of endeavor to many and a profession to some, but not a discipline.  It is time for technical communication to assume its rightful place with the other academic disciplines.  A body of knowledge derived from research is the key to attaining that position.  To make this transition in status, members of this field must begin to apply the scientific method. (6)

While Smith and Pinelli’s articles differ in emphasis (Smith is more concerned with how an overhauled technical communication will benefit practitioners in industry, while Pinelli focuses more on its status in academia) both seem to share a similar vision of what a ‘respectable’ discipline is.  Both associate true disciplinary status with having a unified research base and following ‘the scientific method’ (4-7).  Both see disciplines as automatically maturing over time through the accumulation of research.  For example Smith talks about disciplines as going through states of infancy, adolescence and finally maturity, which is achieved when a ‘critical mass’ of research exists (5).  Pinelli provides a similar account, but couches it in more explicitly inductivist language.  He writes that ‘each investigation contributes to the expansion of the overall knowledge of the discipline.  The cumulative effort of this gradual process leads to verification; spurious information is identified and replaced by more accurate information’ (6) Such assumptions about what disciplines are and how they function are evident throughout much of the literature in the field at this point in time.

Both Smith and Pinelli’s articles mark the beginning of an assault on lore in the journal.   Smith complains that too much work in the field is ‘intuition and folklore’, little more than the ‘collected experience of a generation of cut-and-tryers’, as opposed to ‘facts and data based on controlled scientific research.’ (4) Pinelli writes that too much of what appears in journals and conference proceedings is based on ‘personal and often limited experiences and preferences.’ (6) This complaint against lore becomes an increasingly common refrain in technical communication circles from this point on.

Smith and Pinelli’s articles also announce the start of several new measures that will have a significant impact on both the journal’s trajectory and that of the wider field.  To begin with, Smith describes a new section to be added to the journal, called ‘Current Research in Technical Communication’, edited by Steven Doheny-Farina[9].  This section marks the start of a new emphasis in the journal, one that will expand significantly over time with the addition of other sections devoted to research.  Further, Pinelli’s editorial lists a series of steps to be taken by the journal and by the Society for Technical Communication to produce the research necessary in the coming years.  He suggests that the society increase funding to scholarly research in the universities via the research grants program set up in 1983.  He argues that STC start lobbying for more graduate programs in technical communication, for more research oriented courses in these programs, and that Technical Communication increase its publication of the products of such programs.  He also proposes the establishment of a category of awards for scholarly research, and that STC start accrediting technical communication programs[10].  As far as I can tell from examining the following issues of Technical Communication, most of Pinelli’s proposals were carried out in some form or other over the next few years (a notable exception being STC’s attempt to set up a formal system of accreditation for professional writers, which was abandoned in 1987) and had an important impetus on the field’s move towards a research orientation.  Finally, Smith and Pinelli’s 1985 articles make it clear that during the mid-eighties the push towards establishing a research literature was driven to a significant extent (in the early stages, at least) by practitioners working outside the university as well as by those inside it (thus differentiating it from the situation in Composition Studies described by North).

If one looks again at Technical Communication  four years later, in 1989, the results of the shift in direction announced by Smith, Pinelli, Doheny-Farina and others is visible.  Graduates from doctoral programs in technical communication and rhetoric have taken up key positions in the journal. Practical, lore-based concerns have given a large amount of ground to theory, empirical research and issues relating to the disciplinary status of technical communication.  Scholarly research appears to have been successfully installed as the dominant practice.  An important figure with respect to this last development is Stephen Doheny-Farina. During the eighties Doheny-Farina, in his capacity as editor of the ‘Current Research in Technical Communication’ section had done much to advocate the importance of research[11].  In the third issue of the 1989 volume he and his collaborators John Beard and David Williams wrote an article analyzing the results of a survey of STC members they had carried out.  The aim of the survey was to find out just how important research had become to working professionals since it had started being published in the journal in 1985.  Doheny-Farina et al claim that ‘the results of this study strongly support the view that practitioners do value and use research’.  They go on to argue for the importance to the field of developing a clearly defined research agenda, and end the study with the following conclusion:

Smith and Pinelli have argued that technical communication will evolve into a substantial discipline only when it develops a substantial body of research.  They call for an accelerated research program in technical communication.  Clearly, the respondents in our study see the value of research and would concur with these authors. (193)

While I would argue that the survey itself was as much part of an ongoing attempt to actively shape the perceptions of readers as it was an accurate measure of their perceptions, it does go some way to showing how widespread acceptance of the research focus had become in the 4 years since Smith and Pinelli’s initial call to arms, and how successful the struggle against lore had been.

The following issue of Technical Communication  (30, 1989) features Karen Schriver as guest editor.  The focus of the edition is on Document Design.  Schriver’s article brings together a set of issues and concerns that had been gaining increasing attention in Technical Communication, as well as in the field’s other journals.  For example she stresses the importance of rhetoric as a source of theoretical knowledge for technical communication.  Schriver writes that rhetoric ‘is providing us with a very powerful historical and theoretical framework for considering how people construct meaning.’ (317).  She goes on to cite Richard Young’s analysis of the shortcomings of technical communication:

The teaching and practice of technical writing has been by and large an ahistorical, atheoretical enterprise, with only the weakest of ties to rhetorical studies. (323)

Schriver’s article makes the argument that it is precisely by strengthening the ties between the two fields that such deficiencies will be overcome.  She also notes the support rhetoric and composition offer the field:  ’Faculty members from Rhetoric have always supported research in both academic and non-academic writing.  Thus, with the rise in status of rhetoric and composition, document design has been nurtured’. (324)

In line with previous issues of Technical Communication, and with Doheny-Farina et al’s survey, Schriver’s article defines the field in terms of an evolving research agenda.  Her review of the decade long history of document design in the US is presented exclusively in terms of theory and research. Everything else simply drops out of the account.  For example, talking about a previous review of the literature she and some others had done at Carnegie Mellon a few years earlier (and on which her article is based) Schriver writes that ‘we excluded anything that did not have an empirical base’.  (318) Schriver’s article ends by proposing a unified agenda for the 90′s, oriented around rhetorical theory and a coherent set of research questions that will ‘put document design on the research map’, and concludes optimistically with the assertion that ‘before long other disciplines will look to our work for ideas.’ (325)

The articles by Schriver and Doheny-Farina provide examples of an emerging set of concerns and directions that technical communication is firmly oriented around by the early 1990′s  (while momentum for these developments had gathered in the eighties, they do not appear to become significantly widespread at the level of practice until the end of the decade.) They also nicely illustrate the strong institutional influence exerted by Carnegie Mellon and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at this time.  During the late eighties and early nineties articles by people coming out of CMU and RPI become an increasingly common occurrence, not only in Technical Communication, but in the field’s other journals.   It is worth noting that when Doheny-Farina (who is from RPI) leaves as section editor of ‘Current Research in Technical Communication’ in 1991, he is replaced by Davida Charney, a graduate of CMU.

1990-1994:  Disciplinary self-fashioning

By 1990 a Masters degree in technical communication was a serious requirement for certification in the work place, (this can be seen in many of the job listings for technical writers) thus increasing the demand for Masters programs, strengthening the field’s role in training and credentialing future practitioners, and providing a stronger base for the establishment of graduate work in technical communication.  It is also at this time that graduates from doctoral programs in technical communication and rhetoric take up positions in universities across the country in significant numbers,[12] and begin making their presence felt in the field’s leading journals, conferences and associations. Between 1989 and 1992, 6 new doctoral programs in technical communication were initiated (Michigan Tech, New Mexico State, Ohio State, Purdue, Iowa State, Minnesota). Furthermore, it is around this time that sections devoted to technical communication begin to appear with increasing regularity in academic conferences such as MLA and CCCC.   A significant number of changes (most with their beginnings in the mid eighties) that bear on technical communication’s disciplinary configuration start becoming more widely visible.  Four areas that can be identified are: the construction of a history of technical writing; closer alignment with rhetoric; a questioning of the way technical communication defines itself in relation to its traditional audience in industry; the reconstruction of the field’s leading journal.  Each of these areas will next be examined.

Since the late eighties, many in the field have argued that it is necessary to produce a history of technical communication.  These calls often make an explicit link between producing a unifying historical account of technical communication, and its status as an academic field.  One of the most ambitious attempts to take up the challenge was produced in the second issue of TCQ   by Tebeau & Killingsworth.  In ‘Expanding and Redirecting Historical Research in Technical Writing: In Search of our Past’, the authors present what they describe as a first step in the production of a history of technical writing[13].

Tebeau & Killingsworth begin their article with the often made observation that ‘we do not yet have either history or historiography of technical communication’. (5)  They propose to begin this task by producing a historical analysis of technical writing as it existed in the English Renaissance, 1475-1640.  To this end they examine all manner of works on medicine, gardening, beekeeping, navigation, household maintenance, etc.  While they do not explicitly address the disciplinary importance of producing such a history (given the context of statements regarding the importance of this it can perhaps be taken for granted), their history makes a number of claims that have obvious relevance.   To begin with, they identify an object that can form the stable center of the disciplinary enterprise.  They claim at the outset of their article that ‘technical writing is oriented toward performance:  it is writing that adapts technology to its users.  Thus, technical writing, in any age, will be writing that enables readers to perform tasks associated with their work in a particular society.’ (8) Given the circularity of such a claim it is not surprising to learn that they discover remarkable similarities between past examples of technical writing and present day material.  They divide their analysis of the Renaissance texts into a series of section headings that clearly reflect modern categories (‘Listing and Spatial Diagrams’, ‘Headings’, ‘Page Design’, etc.), which tends to make the texts seem more familiar and related to present day technical writing than they otherwise might (especially since the categorizations don’t come from handbooks of the periods but are inferred from their appearance).  The article argues further that ‘as all the figures in this article reveal, many of the works’ presentation techniques parallel methods used by modern technical writing’. (11) (The awkwardness of this phrasing in its juxtaposition of ‘all’ and ‘many’ perhaps indicates the stretch that is involved).  To further isolate a disciplinary object they spend quite a bit of time pointing out how technical writing during the entire period can be distinguished from other types of writing such as scientific and religious discourse.  They argue that one of the research questions that a historiography of technical communication must ask is ‘how technical writing differed from other forms of writing of the period..how did it differ from literary, scientific, and religious discourse’ (27)  Here one can ascertain an example of what Shumway and Messer-Davidow call ‘boundary work’, in the construction and regulation of a division between what is a ‘technical writing text’, and what lies outside this concept.  Such work is evident in passages such as the following:

Therefore, we can see that technical writing was a distinct kind of writing and that many concerns of English Renaissance technical writers – page design, format, style, readability, and clarity – that would be shared by technical writers in later centuries had already been established (10)

Such a history has the effect of constructing a distinct subject matter and a stable set of concepts around which scholarly work in the discipline can be organized. In spite of a few gestures toward contextualization, a continuous, uninterrupted narrative is set up whose telos  is technical communication’s present.  The teleological character of the project is evident both in the title of the article, as well in its conclusion:  ’We will continue our research using the same methods to locate, define, and analyze technical writing in the remaining seventeenth century, the eighteenth century, and then the nineteenth century.  We invite you to join us in a search for our past’ (29) Their approach would seem a good example of what Foucault describes as ‘traditional’ history, in that it involves above all the ‘consoling play of recognitions.’[14]  In Tebeau and Killingworth’s account the past is just ‘there’, waiting to be recovered like a sunken wreck. There is little sense of it as something that must be actively produced within specific institutional and disciplinary conditions.

Since the early 1980′s occasional attempts had been made to import (and sometimes export) rhetorical theory into technical communication.[15] By 1990 rhetoric had become secured as the central source of theory for technical communication[16].   Along with empirical research, which rhetoric provided important models for, rhetorical theory played an important role in authorizing work in technical communication (Porter, 399).  Moreover, the connections between rhetoric and technical communication had become increasingly strong at the curricular level, with many graduate programs in both fields linking the two areas (for example Minnesota’s PhD program in ‘Rhetoric,  Science and Technical Communication’, and Iowa State’s program in ‘Rhetoric and Professional Communication’).  The model that becomes most commonly invoked to describe the relationship between rhetoric and technical communication is that of theory and application, or ‘science and engineering’ (Sides, 4).  While the subordination implicit in such a relationship has been resisted by some, it remains nonetheless the dominant one.   Michael Mendelson’s article ‘Professional Communciation and the Politics of English Studies’ clearly marks out such a position for the field.  He describes technical communication as a subsection of Rhetoric (‘Our subject is essentially Rhetoric: the study of discourse and the complex of activities that surround the creation and reception of meaning within working cultures’ 10).  Furthermore, he describes technical communication’s fate as inescapably tied to the ‘parent discipline of rhetoric’ (13), which leads him to claim that it ought thus to be accorded the same disciplinary respectability:

This essay is based on the proposition that professional writing belongs on equal footing with other courses in the English curriculum.  Distilled into its most compact form, the proposition rests on the logic of the following syllogism:
Rhetoric embraces writing in the workplace; English Studies includes rhetoric as well as literature; Therefore, English studies extends (or ought to) to writing in the work place.  (7)

Mendelson proposes an ‘integrated’ curriculum in which technical communication and rhetoric work out a tighter relationship between their courses.  According to Mendelson, this will help provide a disciplinary anchor for technical communication, which otherwise may ‘float about in some ignored eddy of the writing program, totally without mooring in the curriculum and without causeways to an from other courses.’  (9) The metaphors he uses to describe both the status of rhetoric and technical communication’s relationship to it are redolent with images of colonization and struggle, with technical communication occupying a curiously double position: as both a ‘territory’ that rhetoric can explore, and as an ally in the cold war between poetics and rhetoric[17]. For example, Mendelson cites Donald Stewart’s comment that programs in advanced study of rhetoric are ‘islands in the wilderness far ahead of the frontier of the profession and in danger of being destroyed by hostile forces’ (13) Having acknowledged the precariousness of this situation, he goes on to outline a formula by which the situation can be made less precarious. This consists largely of integration between the two fields, the adoption of curricula reform, and the production of theoretical research coupled with historical work. The article ends on an optimistic note by remarking that what is perhaps most appealing is that the field is a kind of disciplinary New World.[18].  Mendelson writes that latter day explorers will find that there is a

whole continent of composition practice out there waiting to be mapped…What we need to do now is to take the additional step of opening up English department curricula to a range of discourse that our research has identified as exciting territory for rhetorical studies.  There is no longer any reason to declare such territory off-limits to our own majors nor as too alien to be surveyed by our tenure-line faculty. (16)

The way technical communication has defined itself in relation to its traditional source of authority, the workplace, can be seen to run into increasing conflict with the effort to build its disciplinary authority.  This has become an important issue in discussions about the field’s future. In the 1990s writers have started questioning technical communication’s focus on the occupational world (for example Tebeau, page 15). This trend is perhaps best epitomized in an article by Gerald Parsons entitled ‘Why I don’t Believe in the “Real World” any more’. Parsons argues that the term ‘real world’ is to be found everywhere in technical communication circles, from journal articles and textbooks to student-teacher dialogues.  He stresses that this usage and the dichotomy it implies severely damages the authority of technical communication as a discipline.  Talking about ‘the real world’ betrays not only epistemological naiveté, but also, in its positivism, makes writing seem merely a process of transcription, and thus a largely trivial affair.  Parsons states that talking about ‘the real world’ privileges the world outside the academy, making it seem as if teachers of technical communication want to disassociate themselves ‘from the very community of which we are part’ (45) He argues that in positioning itself ‘mid-way between the “intellectuals” of academia and the “pragmatists” of the business world’ technical communication risks ending up in no-mans land, and of undercutting its avowed aim of producing respected scholarly research. (45) The worst problem with the term is that it:

establishes as the evaluative norm of any academic course an external authority, rather than some internal, coherent standard of measurement, against which its mission and purpose will be judged.  In short, academic institutions must be the most appropriate bodies for determining the value of any course offering against the larger purpose and reality toward which its curricula is offered.   (49)

The answer for Parsons is to turn inwards, to stress the self-sufficiency and autonomy of the knowledge that technical communication deals in:

Locating the purpose for our teaching within ourselves gives us an autonomy and an authority that the notion of ‘teaching for the real world’ denies. (46)
Although Parsons never actually uses the term ‘discipline’ or refers to postmodern theorists like Foucault, his account of the issue ends up being similar to Foucault’s in certain respects[19].  For he seems to recognize that what is at stake in technical communication redefining its relationship to the world outside is precisely its authority and status as a discipline, its ability to authorize and evaluate scholarly practice relative to a set of ‘anonymous’ disciplinary rules, norms and procedures[20].  Furthermore, while Parson’s solution of editing out references to the real world perhaps seems unworkable (‘we will improve our credibility and professional status among colleagues, I believe, by excising from our discourse such meaningless and hackneyed terms as “real world” ‘. 50) what is interesting is the gains in disciplinary status and jurisdiction that he sees afforded by a more sophisticated theory of language and knowledge.  Many other writers in the field have advanced such a position.  For example Tebeau[21] articulates a similar position to Parson’s, arguing explicitly for the adoption of poststructural theory into technical communication. This perhaps goes some way to explain the popularity that poststructuralist theory has seen in technical communication in the last few years (see for example the last two issues of TCQ).  This has led to some hostility on the part of those who see the use of such theory as divorcing technical communication from the ‘real world’, and from its connection to the work place.  In response to TCQ’s last few issues (and in particular to Tebeau’s suggestion of bringing poststructural theory the curricula of technical communication) Sides writes:
One can imagine the reaction of high-tech professionals if literary scholars cum  technical writing instructors tried to convince them that any interpretation of a Patriot missile deployment manual was possible, even valid.  (3)

This issue remains a controversial one, and the field remains somewhat split on just how much it pays to go postmodern.

One of the most visible signs of the reconstruction that has gone on in the field can be seen in the changes that took place in the journal The Technical Writing Teacher in 1992.   This was the field’s most important academic journal, the one in which the most ambitious claims for disciplinary status could be heard.  In 1992 this journal was renamed Technical Communication Quarterlyor TCQ , and a complete overhaul was done of it.  The first edition of the new journal both announces and embodies changes that are clearly aimed at making the journal appear more representative of a ‘proper’ discipline.  To begin with, there is the change in title.  The old title, ‘The Technical Writing Teacher’, is connotative of a pedagogical orientation, assuming an audience of teachers rather than researchers.  The new journal title emphasizes instead the discipline. Furthermore, its subject is technical communication as opposed to technical writing, bringing together a set of related research topics into a single coherent agenda.   Perhaps most striking however, is the change in the appearance of the old journal. The old journal is rather poorly designed; the title page displays the journal name in a large, low resolution sans serif font.  In contrast, the new journal is well designed. The title page is rendered in a glossy, elegant, minimalist style. Inside, a number of significant changes in format and design have been made.  The old journal’s table of contents had no section headings, just a single list of article titles and author names, whereas TCQ   is divided into sections for the editor, articles and reviews.  In the old journal book reviews occurred haphazardly, while they are a regular feature of the new journal. Technical Writing Teacher frequently began with ‘The President’s Message’, consisting of an address by the president of ATTW (the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing).  This aligned it with a journal like Technical Communication  (the industry journal) that begins similarly with an address from the president of STC.  It thus acts as another sign that the journal’s focus is both pedagogical and centered around an organization, as opposed to a discipline.   In contrast, TCQ opens with the editor’s column.  The older journal is not peer reviewed, while the new one is.

In terms of content, a number of important changes also take place. While The Technical Writing Teacher had been getting more theoretically sophisticated during the 80′s and early 90′s, it continued to contain many articles with titles such as ‘Teaching Technical Communication in Two-year Colleges’, ‘Applications of Kenneth Burke’s Theories to Technical Writing’ and ‘Using Case Studies to Teach Courtesy Strategies’ (all in the winter 1990 issue.)  Articles of such a practical, pedagogic character become extremely rare in TCQ, and the words ‘Applications of’, ‘Using’ and ‘Teaching’ start to disappear.  Also of significance, the first couple of editions of the new journal feature papers presented at the 1990 MLA conference, which had begun to devote a larger number of sessions to technical communication around this time.

The changes evident in the field’s leading journal indicate one more dimension of moves made in the 90s aimed at strengthening technical communication’s status as a discipline. Recently, the journal has published articles that not only describe the path to disciplinary respectability, but which argue that the day has arrived.  For example at the end of 1993, Ornatowski and Staples, guest editors of TCQ could argue that ‘the increasing theoretical sophistication and scope of technical communication have brought the discipline a new respectability’ (245).  The articles featured in this edition of TCQ, and the language used to talk about the field are a long way from the insecurity and despair that could be heard all across the field in the mid eighties, and suggest that a significant change has indeed taken place.

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Foucault, Michel, ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Robert Young,(ed), Untying the Text, Routledge, 1987.

Gere, Anne.  Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications.  Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

Harkin, Patricia, and Schilb, John, (eds) Contending with words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age.  MLA 1991.

Hartzog, Carol. Composition and the Acadamy: A Study of Writying Program Administration.  MLA 1986.

Herrington, Ann and Moran, Charles.  Writing, Teaching, and Learning in the Disciplines.  MLA 1992.

Huber, Bettina.  ’A Report on the 1986 Survey of English Doctoral Programs in Writing and Literature’, in The Future of Doctoral Studies in English.  Ed, Andrea Lunsford et al.

Kelly, Patrick et al. Academic Programs in Technical Communication. Washington: Society for Technical Communication, 1985.

Maddox, Robert.  Cross Cultural Problems in International Business: the Role of the Cultural Integration Function.  1993.

Mendelson, Michael.  ’Professional Communication and the Politics of English Studies’.  WPA, vol 17 (3) 1994.

Odell, Lee, ad Goswami, Dixie (eds). Writing in Non-academic Settings. Guilford Press 1985.

Ornatowski, Cezar, and Staples, Katherine, ‘Teaching Technical Communication in the 1990s: Challenges and Perspectives’.  TCQ, vol 2, no. 3, 1993.

Parsons, Gerald.  ’Why I Don’t Believe in the “Real World” Anymore’. Technical Writing Teacher,  vol 16(1) 1989.

Porter, James, and Sullivan, Patricia.  ’Remapping Curricular Geography: Professional Writing in/and English’.  Journal of Business and Technical Communication.  vol 7 (4) 1993.

Roberts, Richard, and Good, James.  The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences.  Knowledge: Disciplinarity and Beyond series.  University Press of Virginia, 1993.

Russell, David,  Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990.  Southern Illinois University Press,  1991.

Shumway, David et al  Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies of Disciplinarity.  Knowledge: Disciplinarity and Beyond series.  University Press of Virginia, 1993.

Shumway, David, and Messer-Davidow, Ellen,  ’Disciplinarity: An Introduction.’ Poetics Today, 12:2, 1991.

Sides, Charles.  ’Quo Vadis, Technical Communication?’  Journal of Technical Writing and Communication,  vol 24(1) 1994.

Tate, Gary.  Teaching Composition, Texas Christian University Press, 1987.

Tebeau, Elizabeth.  ’Technical Communication, Literary Theory, and English Studies.’  Technical Writing Teacher,  18(1), 1991.

Tebeau, Elizabeth, and Killingsworth, Jimmie.  ’Expanding and Redirecting Historical Research in Technical Writing: In Search of Our Past.’  TCQ,  vol 1(2) 1992.

Wilcox, Thomas, The Anatomy of English.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973.



[1]The names for the field I examine vary somewhat.  In some articles the terms ‘technical communication’,  ’professional writing’, ‘technical writing’ are used almost interchangably.  In the last few years there has been more of a tendency to talk about the field of professional or technical communication, thus broadening the scope from just writing to all kinds of visual and verbal text (indicated for example in the field’s leading  journal changing its name fromTechnical Writing Teacher,  to Technical Communication Quarterly.)  I will thus use the term  ’technical communication’, in spite of the fact that a few of the articles I cite use different terms.

[2]A number of reports have projected it as the  fastest growing profession.  For example see Carliner page 187.

[3]Brereton provides an account of the first programs with a major in technical communication.

[4]I rely on the definition provided by Foucault of what constitutes a ‘discipline’ (‘The Order of Discourse’,  Foucault 1987, pp 58-62, and Discipline and Punish,  pp 170-194.    I also follow the elaboration of this definition as set out in Shumway and Messer-Davidow’s ‘Disciplinarity: An Introduction’.

[5]Figures from Technical Communication  18, 1971 pp 4-8 ‘Membership Profile of the Society for Technical Communication.

[6]For example Tate’s survey shows that by 1987 there were 53 doctoral programs in Composition and Rhetoric.  To date, many of the field’s leading writers have come out of doctoral programs in Composition and Rhetoric. At schools such as Carnegie Mellon, quite a few doctoral students come out of Technical Communication backgrounds, and a significant number have produced dissertations in the area.

[7]Although such changes are evident across a range of journals, I have chosen to look at Technical Communication , which is directed more towards professionals in industry,   since this demonstrates two things:  firstly, the extent to which the  emphasis on research had permeated even a non-academic publication.  Secondly, that the call for research (in its early stages at least) was not entirely ‘top down’, imposed on practitioners from above by a band of elite academicians.

[8]One can see in Smith’s editorial evidence of Abbott’s assertion that ‘the ability of a profession to sustain jurisdiction lies partly in the power and prestige of its academic knowledge’ (53-4)

[9]Doheny-Farina was (and  is) one of the most important researchers in the field, and worked hard to raise the status of Technical Communication.  In 1986 he became MLA liason officer for ATTW, in its capacity as an allied organization of the MLA.

[10]Technical Communication, 30:4, page 7.

[11]Doheny-Farina was becoming increasingly influential. He had just won the NCTE  award for best article reporting formal research in technical and scientific writing, and in 1988 had published a book called Effective Documentation: What We Have Learned From Research which was one of the few book length works on research in the field.

[12]For example CMU graduated only 2 Ph.D students between 1984 and 1986, but by 1989 had  graduated 24 Ph.D’s.  Several of these students (such as Rachel Spilka and Karen Schriver) quickly become some of the most important names in the field.

[13] Tebeau & Killingsworth’s article has received much attention,  and is the first of numerous related articles that Tebeau has written on the subject in the last few  years.  Tebeau has a book in press that will provide a ‘complete’ history from the ancient Greeks to the present.  Tebeau’s position in the field is significant – she is the chair of the CCCC Commitee on Technical Communication and vice president of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing.

[14]Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,  page 153.

[15]Two examples of this tendecy are Edward Corbett ‘A Rhetorician Looks at Technical Communication’ Technical Communication Perspectives for the Eighties, 1981 and  Ardner Cheshire, ‘Teaching Invention: Using Topical Categories in the Technical Wrinting Class’ Technical Wrinting Teacher  8, 1980.

[16]It was also largely through rhetoric that theoretical work in other fields such as cognitive psychology was introduced.

[17]Mendelson claims that curricular reform of technical communication courses will only be possible on a wide scale once the battle between poetics and rhetoric has been resolved (17).

[18]Another common move made by writers in both technical communication and rhetoric is to argue that technical communication ought to follow the disciplinary blueprint drawn up by rhetoric.  This often leads to a related claim, that technical writing is in fact just where these other fields were in disciplinary terms 5 or 10 years ago[18].  In this scenario rhetoric’s history is seen as ‘anticipating’ the present of technical communication.

[19]Compare for example Parsons comments with Foucault 1977, pages 59-61.

[20]Foucault 1977, page 59.

[21]Tebeau writes that ‘modern critical theory suggests ways that technical communication can become a legitimate, recognized member of English studies’. (25)

Review – Interface Culture: An Investigation of How the Modern Interface Influences Our Society by Anne Tropeano

The computer interface is the software that translates digital information into a symbolic system we can understand. Steven Johnson’s Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate traces the evolution of interface design and explores its broad cultural and social impacts on our lives. We also learn the limitations of the current interface and catch a glimpse of its future directions.  Building his argument with analogies to literature and art, Johnson renders a startling vision that situates interface design as the foremost technological innovation shaping our cognition and our interaction with one another.

Interface Culture has three central claims: (1) modern interface design has broad creative, cultural, and social impacts on human communication; (2) the visual metaphors used in interface design are as important as the functions they signify; and (3) a new type of criticism must emerge to fully grasp the societal effects of the interface. Johnson supports these claims by probing five aspects of the interface: the desktop, windows, links, text, and intelligent agents.

Interface Culture speaks to two audiences — the general computer user and the expert programmer. Johnson provides a history of interface design that is useful to both, and asks us to survey the cultural consequences of the design choices made by those in the industry. Because Johnson focuses on the social impact of technology, he doesn’t alienate the general user with esoteric terminology. However, techies won’t be bored; Johnson distinguishes design work as some of the most important computer development to date. He contextualizes these technologies with cultural analogies to the Dickens novel, the invention of the automobile, and Gothic architecture. He elevates the interface to an art, and, in so doing, provokes programmers to think in new ways.


Summary

Broad creative, social, and cultural impact. Johnson argues throughoutInterface Culture that interface design impacts our society in both minor and momentous ways. For example, the significance of the first modern interface, invented by Doug Engelbart in 1968, is that it represented the computer for the first time as a spatial environment. Engelbart invented the window, significantly changing our cognition; information space was transformed from an abstract idea (in the days of the C prompt) into a landscape. In addition, Engelbart affords us representation in this landscape in the form of a cursor that is controlled by a mouse. The mouse provides us with the illusion of direct manipulation; instead of telling the computer to perform an action, we appear to do it ourselves (e.g., open a file). With windows and direct manipulation, Johnson regards Engelbart gave us what Johnson regards as “the first machine worth living in” (p. 25).

Secondly, Alan Kay gave Engelbart’s spatial environment the most effective metaphor to date: the desktop. Our cognition of information space was altered again; the landscape now had an illusion of depth enacted by overlapping windows.  Macintosh enriched Kay’s initial metaphor by adding “personality and playfulness” (p. 49), manifested in windows that zoomed open, charming icons, and an appealing graphic design. This desktop metaphor had a vast social impact: the once cryptic command line was replaced by a metaphor far less intimidating, which, in turn, made the computer more appealing to a widespread demographic. The personal computer revolution ensued, and our lives began their irrevocable shift into the desktop landscape.

The import of visual metaphors. Because the interface is the filter through which we view information space, Johnson reasons that its visual illusions are as important as the functions they signify. We cannot understand raw digital data; it is translated through the metaphors imagined by interface designers. Currently, the architectural metaphor shapes our concept of the Internet. The Palace site, for example, added a spatial element to the textual chat room genre by providing visitors a three-dimensional “visual presence” that floats through a palace setting. The architectural metaphor is pushed one step further by the video game Quake where users build their own three-dimensional environments and share them with others. For Johnson, the lens of the architectural metaphor influences how virtual communities are built as much as the building itself. Users see a graphical representation of themselves interacting in a particular scene; certainly, even if the same information were transmitted, the encounter would differ if, say, it were experienced in a redwood forest as opposed to an urban downtown.

Secondly, Johnson argues that windows are not spatially organized but instead provide us with only the beginnings of such an illusion. Users still generally think of files in textual terms; “we pretend that we’re remembering ‘where’ we put the file, but what we’re remembering is the name of the folder that contains it” (p. 78). In contrast, Apple’s Planet X imagines the data as a galaxy where the documents and folders float around planets. The user therefore relies on remembering the spatial location of a file. Johnson states: “At a few, enthralling moments, I found myself thinking … its back there somewhere, up and to the left a little, about two or three planets deep” (p. 80). Applying a more spatial metaphor would exercise our “innate capacity for visual memory” (p. 76), possibly making us more efficient users.

Johnson also asserts that the role of text in our current interface has been sorely ignored due to our preoccupation with graphics. To indicate the possibilities, Johnson notes Apple’s V-Twin software, which achieved a creative breakthrough by using text to organize our data by meaning.  V-Twin uses text pattern recognition programs to statistically detect linguistic attributes, such as word choice frequency (i.e., how many times specific words — unique to the document analyzed — are used). We enter in textual criteria into V-Twin, then the software creates a View folder that contains files matching our stipulations. In this case, the perception of organization, the function signified, is altered by the metaphorical shift from an illusion of location to an illusion of meaning. Each metaphor has benefits, and these benefits emerge precisely because of the metaphor’s design.

A new type of criticism. Johnson calls for a new type of criticism that can only spring from a raised consciousness regarding interface design. The interface affects many aspects of our lives; therefore, this new type of criticism must extend beyond the realm of interface design to explore legal and ethical issues. For example, web frames, which carve up windows into separate units (usually separated by a scroll bar), have sparked a struggle for intellectual property rights. A frame within a web site can point directly to another site without asking permission:

If I show you a copy of Newsweek through my personal window, is that like selling a tape of the World Series without the ‘express written consent of Major League Baseball’? Or is it like inviting friends over to watch a ball game from an apartment that happens to overlook Comiskey Park? (p. 96)

Furthermore, the ethics by which companies conduct business must be explicitly defined. Johnson points out an egregious ethics violation that went unnoticed by the general public. The Wall Street Journal struck a deal with Microsoft to waive the Journal’s annual web site fee if users accessed it with Microsoft Explorer. This pact clearly violated their journalistic integrity, as the Journalclaimed to be objectively covering the browser war between Microsoft and Netscape. Without new type of criticism to explore such unfamiliar territory, Johnson believes we will not be able to adequately resolve issues that threaten honesty, integrity, and fair play.

This new type of criticism will also benefit in the evaluation of intelligent agents. Intelligent agents are programs designed to partially mimic human intelligence by anticipating our needs. For example, traveling agents, which represent us in dealing with other agents, are dispatched from the user’s computer on a mission (such as to purchase the lowest priced airline tickets). The significance of operating the traveling agent stems from the forfeiture of our authority that is required for the computer to make decisions on our behalf. Because agents cannot distinguish our subjective tastes, they could return volumes of information that, in fact, do not meet our tastes or requests. For instance, “you might be a huge Dickens fan, but that doesn’t make you a lover of Victorian serial novels written by men” (p. 193). In addition, corporations will design their own traveling agents, causing advertising to “transform into the art of controlling agents” (p. 183). As a result, we will receive scores of “push” media — information sent to us by agents that anticipate our need before we ask for it. Johnson concludes that these agents are “an excuse for poor interface design” (p. 191); instead, we should be focusing on “better ways to pull” (p. 191) information. Johnson warns that if we don’t begin this dialogue, we are bound for junk mail purgatory.

 

Review

Interface Culture’s principal strength is the originality of Johnson’s decision to investigate interface design in the context of our larger culture. Computers have permeated every aspect of our daily lives; they have changed our workplace, the way we bank, the way we teach, and how we converse with our loved ones. Like architecture, “each design decision echoes and amplifies a set of values” (p. 44) and because “there is no such thing as digital information without filters” (p. 38), we must analyze interface design in a larger sociological framework.

The web is particularly significant because it has created new relationships between individuals and businesses. We currently appear to be judging the web by the same standards as print: freedom of speech protects our rights to place any idea in the public domain. However, the difference is becoming increasingly clear — the web is a virtual world with virtual communities. Therefore, “how we choose to imagine these new online communities is obviously a matter of great social and political significance” (p. 19).  What we read in a newspaper may greatly affect us, but we are not experiencing it directly. In contrast, as technology becomes increasingly more realistic and the experience more authentic, how will we handle sites that, say, offer a virtual experience of raping and torturing a woman or molesting a child? If it looks like a crime, and feels like a crime, is it a crime? Will we legislate criminal laws for the web, establish Internet policing agencies? Johnson does not bring the discussion to this point; yet, it is appropriate as his most compelling argument is our need to awaken an awareness while these technologies are still in their infancy, so that we may make better informed decisions regarding their development and implementation.

Another strength of the piece is Johnson’s foresight of a more effective interface. He has a remarkable grasp of the limitations of the current interface, and provides us with a sense of vision. For example, Johnson resurrects Vannevar Bush’s Memex machine, a hybrid microfilm computer developed in the forties. Johnson praises its radical method of categorizing information; Bush regarded information as valuable not because of the group it belonged to, but because of “the connections it had to other data” (p. 119). In contrast to our current method of bookmarking singular sites without tracking the thought process that leads us to those sites, the Memex allowed users to build their own trails of interest, which were retained in the machine’s memory. Johnson encourages us to adopt these benefits of the Memex, to use the web “as a way of seeing new relationships, connecting things that might have otherwise been kept separate” (p. 123).

Johnson also dares us to be more creative with our links, possibly integrating hypertext as active parts of a sentence. Johnson probes Suck web site, which approached links quite differently from the typical homepage: instead of providing a link as an addendum that leaves the site’s message essentially intact, the Sucksters use links to withhold information from the reader. The links, integrated into the sentence structure, provide important context to the web site’s message; without them, the article reads differently. Therefore, the links are “like modifiers, like punctuation – something hardwired into the sentence itself…the links [are] a way of cracking the code of the sentences; the more you [know] about the site on the other end of the link, the more meaningful the sentence [becomes]” (p. 134-5). Johnson is intrigued by Suck’s links, and explores how such a decidedly nonlinear narrative would impact us. Because Suck’s web site is quite tedious, Johnson is not suggesting that it be used as a model for a new type of literacy but instead uses it to prompt us to think in new, creative ways.

A third strength of the Interface Culture is its style. Johnson is extremely engaging and provocative; he constructs his arguments with an effective blend of technical explanations, historical narratives, and cultural analogies. For example, he captivates us with the possibilities of the social agent, a feedback-driven intelligent agent that searches for patterns in the behaviors, tastes, etc. of the thousands of people who have run the agent. For instance, Firefly, a web site that recommends albums based on musical taste, has the user rank a certain number of albums, then compares that profile to thousands of others in its database. Firefly presents the user with a list of albums based on people who expressed similar tastes. Most importantly, though, users rank the albums recommended, “plugging information right back into the database, and allowing the agent to evaluate the success of its picks” (p. 197).

Johnson presents an exhilarating vision of how social agents could produce a democratic, chaotic revolution of music culture if they were allowed to direct radio and music television programming. Currently, corporations make the decisions as to who gets seen and heard; however, if social agents were employed, corporations would no longer decide who would get airplay as popularity would be determined by “a collective bottom-up process” (p. 199), with each individual listener deciding what s/he wanted to hear. The separation between mainstream and subculture would probably disappear, and our tastes would diversify. And, just maybe, talent and song quality — instead of physical attributes — would play a larger role in the success of a recording artist.

The weakness of Interface Culture is that some of the analogies and examples Johnson uses do not fully support his points. For example, Johnson draws an analogy between the Dickens’ novel and the hypertext links of the web. The Dickens novel is known for connecting the lives of his characters across social and economic barriers, making sense of the new unclear social roles wrought by the vast changes of the Industrial Revolution. “Where Dickens’ narrative links stitched together the torn fabric of industrial society, today’s hypertext links attempt the same with information. The imaginative crisis that faces us today is the crisis that comes from having too much information at our fingertips, the near-impossible task of contemplating a colossal web of interconnected computers” (p. 116). The purpose of an analogy is to clarify one thing by drawing out its similarities to another; however, this analogy creates confusion because it feels forced. The analogy to Dickens springs more from Johnson’s goal to equate the interface with high art rather than to illuminate the role of hypertext.

In addition, Interface Culture’s main audience is the educated computer user who is not necessarily an expert. Because his audience is so varied, Johnson’s frequent references to pop culture, art, and literature will probably be understood by each reader only in part. Nonetheless, whether the reader may miss the connection he is making, or Johnson may miss the mark, his analogies and examples are extremely thought provoking and fun to read. Furthermore, his central claims remain intact and he accomplishes his overall goal right from the outset, forcing us to think in new ways if we are to follow his journey.

Johnson’s words present an interesting fusion of ideas explored by literacy theorists Walter J. Ong, Eric Havelock, and David Olson. First, as Ong states, “print both reinforces and transforms of the effects of writing on thought and expression[1]”. Interface Culture particularly extends the idea transformation (not reinforcement) to the medium of the computer. At various points in his piece, Johnson connects interface design to changes in cognition, such as when he describes the effects of Engelbart’s spatial landscape and Kay’s desktop metaphor.  The connection to Ong is most explicitly made when Johnson posits that learning to compose on keyboard has affected the way we conceive our sentences:

The older procedure [writing with pen and paper] imposed a kind of upward ceiling on the sentence’s complexity: you had to be able to hold the entire sequence of words in your head, which meant that the mind naturally gravitated to simpler, more direct syntax… The word processor allowed me to zoom in on smaller clusters of words and build out from there… The computer had not only made it easier for me to write; it had also changed the very substance of what I was writing, and in that sense, I suspect, it had an enormous effect on my thinking as well (p. 143-145).

Furthermore, Johnson’s primary point is not how the computer has changed our cognition, but how the lens of the interface transforms the way we experience the information sphere, and subsequently the way we think and express ourselves.

Johnson also supports Havelock’s idea that “literacy when it came did not create a culture; it transmuted one which it inherited[2]”. This sentiment runs throughInterface Culture: Johnson is interested in the medium’s effects on our culture as they “trickle down into the broad cross section of everyday life, altering our storytelling appetites, our sense of physical space, our taste in music, the design of our cities” (p. 213). Furthermore, Johnson views the invention of the interface similarly to the way Havelock views the invention of the alphabet. Havelock recognizes the alphabet as a symbolic system that makes literacy accessible to a widespread demographic. Unlike logographs and syllabaries, Havelock contends that the alphabet has a small number of components (i.e., letters) that can be combined to represent sounds “with relative accuracy3”; therefore, the alphabetic system creates “the possibility of a popular literacy4” because it can be learned more easily by the majority. Likewise, Johnson asserts that the modern interface transformed the specialized C prompt into an accessible metaphor the majority finds comprehensible; the interface established the foundation for the computer literacy revolution we are currently experiencing.

Johnson postulates that the metaphoric illusions filtering our experience of information space not only imply a specific mindset, but help to create it. In other words, our value system as a people and the design of interface are interrelational, shaping one another as they evolve.  This argument strongly echoes Olson’s theory that writing systems “provide a model for language and thought5”. Olson believes the first people to use writing were not consciously trying to transcribe language and its structures (letters, words, phonemes, etc.); instead, the act of seeing the visual symbols provided an awareness of linguistic structure. Although interface designers are consciously trying to translate digital data, the possibilities are so vast that the interface is essentially providing us with a model for communication; its visual presence allows us to scrutinize it, uncover its components, change its syntax and grammar, and propel it in new directions. In addition, Johnson recognizes the interface as what Olson calls an “illusion of a full model6”; the interface creates blind spots to effectively translate the indecipherable world of raw digital data. However, the difference is that where Olson points this out as a drawback of the alphabet, Johnson sees the blind spots as a necessity for filtering the overload of available information.

Interface Culture, in Johnson’s own words, “is a preliminary survey of the field, a glimpse of the new medium in its formative years as it gropes uneasily for new ways to represent information” (p. 215). But more than this, Johnson’s book is a concentrated effort to raise our collective consciousness, to enlighten us to the enormity and pervasiveness of the impact that interface design decisions have on our culture. Certainly programmers and expert power users benefit from Johnson’s piece, but more importantly, the average, nonexpert user is empowered by Johnson’s grasp of interface design and his vision of its limitless possibilities. Whatever our background and level of computer expertise, Johnson engages our imagination and kindles our creativity. Interface Culture is a read that transforms us from passive users to active investigators, shifting our idle stares to inquisitive wonder.

Bibliography

1.      Ong, Walter J. Orality & Literacy. Routledge, 1982.

2.      Havelock, Eric. “The Coming of Literate Communication to Western Culture.” Perspectives on Literacy. Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, Mike Rose (Ed). Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 127-134.

3.      Olson, David. “What Writing Represents: A Revisionist History of Writing.” The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge University Press, 1994. 65-90.

Space by Matt Costello

A silence unhampered by wind.
Birds hovering at the feeder.
You do not move,
are afraid to move.
Everything has converged
to form a teetering balance.
If you move, or even breathe,
the birds fly away, the branches stir
as if shaken by a current of air.
So you don’t move.
The birds eat at will.
The chair strains not to squeak beneath you.
You think the birds look at you,
but they are only looking for movement,
which you’ve sworn to yourself
you would not provide.

And then (something)
slams into your life.
It doesn’t make the birds flinch,
but inside you something new
has come to live,
where before there was
a space no one imagines is there,
at least not as easily as

hard disk C: type: 47 dot com
main processor, floppy drive A:
browse without moving, serial ports
www dot 80 more megs:

enough to fit your life in,
and the lives of all your friends.
your belongings: a bed, a table,
a television, even the books
were stacked and set inside,
and it was like you had just
laid the first brick of a wall
that until then you did not know
you were going to have to build.

The birds are feasting
and constantly on watch.
Nothing will fool them,
but this new event
has branded in you an unknown place,
and becomes the first thing
you store away there.
It is your aunt, dying.
You didn’t know her that well.
This is the first thing.
There is a lot more space.
The birds will never end up there.
They are twitching ravenously.
They are risking their lives.
They have heads of statues.
They fly away in fear.
They have been through this before.

Cyberethics: Back to the Future by Dr. Jane Robinett, San Diego State University

Computers have reshaped our world and our lives in ways we have not anticipated. They have redefined not only the way in which work is done in offices, schools and manufacturing complexes, but also the nature of work itself. They have shown us that political boundaries are indefensible against invasions of ideas. The steady transborder flow of information and images that computer-based telecommunications networks provide, can threaten and alter even the most entrenched political structures. Computer-based medical technologies have redefined the boundaries of life and death. We have been forced to examine our facile assumptions about life as the ultimate good and death as the ultimate ill which can befall us. This has led to the creation of a new domain for ethicists: bioethics. Bioethics, for all its complexities, has a fundamentally familiar feel to it because it deals primarily with physical or instrumental reality. But computers have created another kind of reality one which Umberto Ecco (Travels in Hyperreality) and Jean Baudrillard, among others, have termed hyperreality. Ecco, who published Travels in Hyperreality in 1975, defines it as a reality that combines the real and the artificial. This combination results in more, a world, that is denser, more packed and vivid than reality itself. Chief among his examples is Disneyland, a world built around the latest technologies and using audioanamatronics, a combination of animation, audio, video, holographics, computers, robotics and lasers.

Baudrillard points to hyperreality as simulation which absorbs reality, a sel-referential object, a hyperreal object without a subject.(1) But for the purposes of our discussion, Albert Borgman’s definition of hyperreality are most helpful. Hyperreality is made possible by information processing “to the extent that it overcomes and displaces tangible reality.” (2) Borgman divides hyperreality into two categories: instrumental hyperreality, like the hyperreality of the financial world, an imaginary world constructed by telecommunications technology (phones, fax machines, modems and computers large and small), and final hyperreality, a not-yet fully realized hyperreal world which involves all our senses and creates a simulated world in which we can live. Although it is an artificial reality, hyperreality can and does replace physical reality because of three characteristics: it is “brilliant”, that is, it includes all physical senses and excludes unwanted information or noise (the sense of machinery operating somewhere in the background), it is rich (dense, allowing for all possibilities), and it is pliable, that is, it can be manipulated in any way we want. It is also attractive because it frees us from the unpredictability and intractability of physical reality and human beings. Hyperreality extends beyond novelty into a kind of parallel world made possible by computers, an electronic reality. It is this new kind of reality which behooves us to re-formulate both traditional ethical theory and traditional definitions of reality. We might call this re-formulation “cyberethics.”

The word “cyber” comes from the Greek [kybernetes] for helmsman, the person who controlled and directed the course of the ship. It was Norbert Wiener who first coined the word “cybernetics.” From this word comes “cyborg,” an acronym for “cybernetic organism,” those artificially created human-like beings which populate our science fiction and foreshadow other kinds of life. In 1985, the fiction of William Gibson first posited a new form of “cyber”: cyberspace, a form of electronic reality generated by the minds of those who use it in what he calls a “consensual hallucination.” Although Gibson’s cyberspace is, at this point, non-existent, instrumental forms of electronic or electro-mechanical hyperreality already exist, and forms of final hyperreality, including Virtual Reality, are now being pioneered by Jaron Lanier and others. What we need to navigate these uncharted waters of this new reality is a new understanding of ethics to steer by.

Ethics deals with the problem of determining what constitutes the correct behavior toward other human beings. It is based on values, some of which are fundamental to all cultures [the value of life and the acceptance of death, honest/truth-telling, fairness/rightness] and others which are culturally determined. Ethics is something which we all take part in. In dealing with people, we always have to choose between alternate courses of action. We base these choices, implicitly or explicitly, on values. In the light of such values, we develop more detailed concepts of what constitutes right and proper conduct toward others. Of course, this does not mean that we all have exactly the same ideas about what right and proper conduct is, nor does it mean that we work from the basis of a formal ethical system. But, in trying to live responsibly, we cannot escape attempting to articulate and apply our values — that is, we cannot escape being ethical.

Typically, in a traditionally-defined community, ethical principles underlie our public and private behavior toward each other, and in general, we act in accordance with these principles. We respect the lives of others, their privacy and property, and their right to self-determination. We observe rules of public order and courtesy based on these principles. We learn forms of ethical behavior from the time we are young. We are taught both overtly and by the constant examples we see around us, by what we read, hear and watch. This ethical behavior is reflected in the order of the communities we live in. Of course, there are always people who actively disregard ethical behavior. The results of this appear daily in the headlines, but it is news because it deviates so sharply from the norm. The surprising thing is not that people commit murder and mayhem, but that so many of us arrive home in the evening without having done grievous bodily harm to at least one of the people we have encountered during the course of the day.

Because we have so much practice, it is usually easy for us to determine what the correct action is when we are dealing with another person, even if we don’t do it. But it becomes increasingly difficult for us to behave ethically when the other person is not physically present, or when we have no sense of another physical person, when such a person is only present representationally in a data construct or a holographic representation. When we enter the hyperreal worlds which computers make possible, it becomes difficult to see that ethical behavior is even called since no physical or material forms of life are present.

By contrast to traditional notions of ethics, cyberethics should designate the correct form of behavior toward human beings, as the boundaries of their lives are redefined for us by information technology. Each of us, although we are rarely aware of it, exists not only as a physical person, but also as a collection of information located in various data bases. That informational representation of our selves does much to determine our lives. Because we now have this kind of dual existence, ethics must deal not only with actual physical people in a material reality, but also with their extended representations — that is, with the models or constructs of those lives which computers create and make widely available (the virtual person as opposed to the physical person). Cyberethics should also extend the boundaries of ethical behavior to encompass other kinds of lives and resources as they are included in an augmented understanding of what is essential to life, both human and non-human life.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of why and where cyberethics are needed, lies in computer networks. In order to begin, we need to understand how networks are constituted, not in terms of hardware and software, but in terms of the people who are linked together through them. A system built around networks and used to a greater or lesser degree by several thousand (or several hundred thousand) people is not at all unusual. The people who use any on-line system, regardless of its size, constitute a community, that is, they constitute a group of human beings who live or work in close hyperreal proximity to each other, and who share common resources of computing power, storage space, communication lines, programs, hardware, and processing time to achieve their various purposes. The people in this community take part in the same kinds of activities we find in any human community. They work at particular projects, trade information, gossip, argue, joke, play games, ask for (and get) help, strike up new friendships, get angry and shout (called flaming in English) and even commit acts of abuse and violence. In short, a network community, although its physical structure is entirely distinct from a traditional community, is identical in its fundamental aspects to any neighborhood.

But a network community is, to a large extent, invisible as such. It has no single physical location, no visible boundaries, no city limits. Unlike other human communities, it does not consist of the buildings, streets and parks of a physical town which tell us that we are in a place where other humans live, a place where ethical behavior is called for. It has no material existence, and hence, no material reality. It is a community of the mind. Its territory is all virtual territory, existing electronically within the system. It is not visible unless the user is logged on, and even then, the full scope of it is never visible to a single individual. Each user has only a single window from which to view this vast virtual country. But, no matter how large or complex, this community still consists of human beings, each of whom has an electronic home/office (an account) on the system. All of these users must share network resources to achieve their various purposes, and all of them are entitled to the same respect in terms of privacy, property, and self-determination, among other things, as they are in the physical communities of which they are a part.

Networks transcend our physical, social, cultural and national boundaries. When we use them, as we do more and more frequently, we are no longer citizens only of the physical place and time that we inhabit, but of a much larger human community whose territory is composed of virtual space, that is, not of physical expanses (towns, cities, farms, fields and mountains) but a hyperreality equivalent in important ways to physical/material space. Although it is not space in (physical) fact, it is very much space in effect. In this community, unlike other kinds of human communities which are constituted around the physical presence of their members, cannot teach or enforce a code of ethics by example. We have always depended heavily on the presence of others to remind us that we need to behave ethically. In a community of the mind where the nature of reality is significantly altered, it is difficult for people to understand that ethical behavior is required or to learn what constitutes ethical behavior because they feel themselves to be alone. But logging onto a multi-user system means walking into a community of other people. Learning what constitutes right and proper behavior in that hyperreal community is difficult unless these ideas are deliberately articulated, disseminated, and discussed. Many universities and research facilities that use networks have, in recent years, drawn up codes of ethics for members of this community, but many users never bother to read them.

Network communities are not the only example of the new kind of reality with which cyberethics must deal. Data models (information constructs) of the person also exist in this hyperreality. Those information constructs are routinely bought and sold in great volume. Many people regard these kinds of files as ethically inert. When the person is represented only by a few lines in a database or by a series of linked files, it might seem that there is no need to even consider ethical behavior. Should those files be erased, edited, altered, copied or damaged, there is no sense of causing harm, because there is no sense of damage to either physical persons or material property. The hyperreality in which those files exist appears to be clearly separate from physical reality. However, any alteration to that hyperreal model of the individual can have very damaging effects in the physical reality which the person inhabits, effects no less damaging and far more enduring, than a punch in the eye. Although computer files exist in hyper, not physical, reality, they affect and intrude on material reality.

The whole concept of virtual entities (virtual memory, virtual machines, virtual space, virtual communities, virtual persons, virtual reality) constitutes a good example of a new concept that computers have made possible for us. These forms of hyperreality are both real in effect and intangible in fact — virtual memory behaves like memory in your computer, but it is a space created or designated by the computer and not an physical array of memory chips. Among them is the most completely realized form of hyperreality that currently exists: virtual reality. Virtual reality is an entirely computer-generated physical environment which we enter via a virtual reality helmet and goggles and a set of gloves. Within this hyperreal world, we can move around, open doors, walk through rooms, poke around in cupboards, maneuver objects, play handball, perform surgery, or manipulate genes, just as if we were operating in a physical reality. It is an entirely new kind of reality, no less real than physical reality in effect but different in nature than physical reality. Just as it took entirely new tools to create, it will need entirely new definitions of reality before we can begin to think about how human beings should behave in such an environment.

The idea of a reality with no tangible physical existence is entirely new territory for us. Traditional theories of reality (ontologies), as Albert Borgman points out are “powerless to explicate the difference between the real and hyperreal….” (Crossing the Post Modern Divide, 95) In the same way, present perceptions of ethics do not encompass human behavior in this kind of reality. Traditional ethics defines our areas of ethical responsibility too narrowly to be helpful in dealing with the kind of reality which these systems present us with.

The hyperreality which virtual reality systems combined with holographics and audioanimtronics make possible, although it may appear identical to physical reality, is nevertheless disconnected from it. When we enter hyperreality we are cut off from physical contexts, even when the illusion of the physical is perfect. Hyperrealities are disposable; we can dispense with them when we wish, an impossibility with physical realities. When we leave, we find ourselves within the context of the physical world.

The job of cyberethics, then, is threefold: first, it must redefine the concept of reality to include the present and future hyperrealities which electronic, holographic and audioanimatronic systems create. Second, it must redefine ethics to include what lies beyond old bounds of the physical person and the physical community. We can no longer afford an concept of ethics which applies only to our behavior toward the physical person. The same respect and care accorded to the physical person of human beings must be extended to include the information constructs that, in one way or another, define and support their lives and well-being, information that exists in another kind of reality. Cyberethics must begin to map out guidelines for both the ethical uses of and ethical conduct in hyperrealities. It should help us consider not only our behavior to the members of the generations of which we are a part, but of those yet to come who will be faced with hyperrealities far more extensive and powerful than those we now have. Finally, it must, like the far older ethical understanding of societies we have been pleased to call primitive, look to correct and proper behavior toward other kinds of lives, large and small, human and non-human, physical and virtual, and toward the resources which support and sustain not only human lives, but the life of the planet.

In order to go forward into a future increasingly mediated by technology, particularly computer technology (a world of biochips, complex hyperspace realities, intelligent machines, and augmented humans), cyberethics must also look ahead to delineate the correct and proper behavior toward the machines and systems which will support and sustain both human and non-human lives, and may in turn, come to be a form of life themselves.

1. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, for a full discussion of his position.

2. Albert Borgman, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 82.
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