Seven Red

I had a conversation with a colleague about my Three Dogmas of User-Centeredness post, for which I had planned a follow-up, but the conversation convinced me that I needed a bit of a clarification before I get to that. Since that post is also apparently linked on some Indiana discussion forum to which I have no access, I guess this will have to serve as a pseudo-response as well.

The problem for my colleague, as I take it, is that I spent so much time in critique that it was not quite clear what I liked. So, my colleague first brought up a situation in which Adobe users both identified a bug or vulnerability and developed a patch for it. So, you like that sort of thing, right? Well, sure, but that’s the kind of relationship that I’m interrogating in that post. Oh. Alright, how about crowdsourcing? Isn’t that more democratic? Well, maybe, I guess, but that’s the kind of relationship that I’m interrogating in that post. (And truly, I identified Lessig and similar writers as “ideologists of free culture,” but they are almost a breath of fresh air next to Tapscott, Howe, and Company, though the latter writers tell us everything we need to know about the former). The frustration is at this point clear. Well, what’s the alternative? I’ll defer that question for later, but I’d first like to offer what might serve as a clarification, and I’ll proceed by analogy here, sort of, by referring to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. I say sort of, because it’s not merely an analogy, since the system and method of Foucault’s work really drives the analysis in the first place, but it is an analogy in the sense that I’m trying to clarify my position by demonstrating a similar shift. On to it.

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I guess I’ve been motivated to say all this for a while, but the real spur was an article I read the other day that tries to navigate a course for the future of usability studies, “User-Centered Technology in Participatory Culture: Two Decades ‘Beyond a Narrow Conception of Usability Studies,’” by Robert R. Johnson, Michael Salvo, and Meredith Zoetewey. The real exigence for the article seems to be the sort of thing that almost always gets ink these days: positioning professional technical communicators as a necessary part of technology design processes. This is an old story by now. You can’t read the technical writing literature for a day without coming across the deep anxiety about the the effects of disintermediation on the technical communicator role. Because this role has been so classically tied to a position of intermediary (between scientific experts and a lay public), its collapse in post-Fordist economies has sent everybody even faintly associated with the discipline into frantic redefinition mode. The problem, to state it quickly, is that in disciplinary societies (that is, Fordist-Taylorist economies) that maintained strict differentiation of functions (which is to say, a division of and within manual and mental labor, combined with a division of production and consumption), the technical communicator actually played a significant role, because the functional divisions produced distinctions in knowledge and capacities, and thus required the labor of an intermediary. As the partitions and divisions of the old disciplinary apparatuses start to fall apart, along with the temporal rhythms of the production process, these distinctions no longer hold. Not only is technical knowledge dispersed over a wide swath of the lay public (as every meth lab in Montana will readily attest to), but the experts and laypeople are often better at writing for and interacting with each other than the supposed intermediaries.

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