Now to the more formal stuff. George Pullman and Baotong Gu contextualize the scholarship by claiming that content management (CM) is gaining both visibility and implementation and its impact on technical communicators makes it a concern for practitioners and scholars alike. They argue that tech comm should be consulted on the implications of CM for three main reasons:
- it revolutionizes how we view tech comm
- there is a glaring lack of involvement on behalf of tech comm practitioners, researchers and teachers
- research in this area, albeit under a different nomenclature, is already being done as well as being implemented by tech comm designers in specific environments. Seems pretty reasonable that folks would be slightly pissed if stuff they were researching, designing and using was being implemented in other arenas without consultation and reflection. And at stake in CM debate is the separation of content from presentation, which Clark traces as far back as Aristotle specifically and Hart-Davidson evokes in the rhetorical tradition of techne.
What is at stake in the separation of content and presentation is various things:
- Pullman and Gu focus on how this impacts the tech communicator, who is in relation to CM in a range of ways: shut out laborer, silenced creator, training of both scholar and student, as well as rhetorical/critical prophesiers
- Hart-Davidson explores the implications it has "as a means to guide decisions making about the creation on knowledge" (10), which arguably has some far-reaching and powerful implications
- Anderson sees it as a point of possibility in which the tech communicator can insert themselves into and shape the ECM discourse; it is also a point to reflect critically about what ECM can really deliver both business and consumer in the way it divides, packages, distributes, appropriates or reifies the way in which work is done
- Whittemore takes a more labor based approach in examining how tech communicators are placed in relation to content, hoping to avoid a future of contingent labor and instead favor a future of reflective and critical investment on behalf of tech communicators in designing future CMSs
I see quite a few parallels that put this concern into focus for me. For instance, Clark evokes Kinross as arguing that no presentation can be free of rhetoric, but that doesn't mean that a separation of concerns isn't a part of the technologies that we use. That separation in the case of HTML, as Clark shows, is a textual separation of visual style from content application. The risk we run, Clark argues is that genre will be viewed more statically, reinforced and then automated in a cut-and-paste kind of approach:
As a result, after implementing this type of separation, a significant part of the writing process becomes the negotiation of content across genres rather than simply within them, and writing is structured by the design and use of information models, rule sets, style sheets, and the technical infrastructure that maintains and enforces those models and rules and presents content whenever it is requested. (50)I agree with Clark that a discussion of the implications of separating content from presentation seems in order. Indeed, what might this mean about our own teaching of genres (analysis, argument) and how does our pedagogy overlap concerns about CM?
Further, I'm struck by Andersen's discussion of the streamlining of information, which is actually a complex process of consolidating different departments, processes, content, authors into sets or series of applications that can be deployed across an organization. There is an analogue here between ECM and textbook publishing, all of which is concerned with a wide reach of information for a subset of a market, which hopes then to create an even larger, ubiquitous market of "process pedagogues" en mass. Is this the work of flattening we saw in last weeks discussion? In addition, Andersen's discussion of the sector of influence being embodied most in online magazines overlaps with both our discussion of textbooks in Steve's course, but also the circulation or publicity of a public opinion, with the eventual offshoot of a discipline of criticism that morphed into English studies as we discussed in Lois' course. Finally, the quality debate that Andersen explores is easily transferable to our own field in terms of a continued need to explore the implications of what we mean when we talk about a quality of writing.
That leads me to some crucial questions I had about this batch of readings:
- How do the questions, terms of debate and implications change if tech comm shifts its signifier from writing to composing?
- How are the quick changes in technology (as indicated in Andersen's discussion of her article revisions attending to new updates to CM and ECM) part of issue of reflective or critical engagement with the rhetorical implications of CM? If we cannot slow down the speed of technology, how do we keep our scholarship from always being merely a call for us to slow down and analyze what's going on, which is in inherent contradiction or reaction to the speech of the subject we study?
- What are connections and manifestations of these concerns (content and presentation separation, genre, authorship, the role of scholars and practitioners, writing or composing as rhetorical process) in our own field? What could we gain by exploring the connections?
2 comments:
I was so glad to see your connection of Andersen’s rhetorical critique of enterprise content management (ECM) with Tony Scott’s meta-disciplinary critique of writing manuals/textbooks utilized by writing instructors. For those of you not in Steve’s class, here’s a quick synopsis of Scott’s analysis: Though his book, Dangerous Writing, does a number of things, the issue Amber and I find a connection with Andersen’s analysis is based on one of Scott’s chapters where he conducts interviews with writing faculty to investigate motivations and uses of published textbooks on writing within the composition classroom. His most surprising findings were that most times instructors chose textbooks based on their cost and the credibility they provided for instructors and that never did an interviewee cite comp/rhet research as a reason for choosing a text. He points, therefore, to a paradox in how research and teaching gets done in our field: scholars who do research on FYC generally don’t teach it, while those who are teachers of FYC comp don’t consult the published research on the topic.
I wasn’t expecting to be as intrigued with Andersen’s focus on enterprise, but I was pleasantly surprised by her rhetorical approach to evaluating enterprise, especially in the ways her analysis acted as a meta-critique of enterprise that TCers, researchers interested in TC and CM, CM engineers, and CM marketers alike should find important and useful. According to Andersen (and similar to Scott’s argument that writing instructors fail to consult the research in comp), it seems that when it comes to CM enterprise, there is a failure to consult the research in technical communication (or even technical communicators who will be primary users of this information!) If this is the work of flattening, as Amber questions, not only do we have information gathering and flattening (in both comp textbooks and CM enterprise) but we have the flattening of complex forms of genre-structured content that will be mined, consulted, and adapted by masses, all WITHOUT consideration to current research on what important consideration need attention and what best practices exist both in the classroom and in the work TCers perform. In Steve’s class we were left somberly and without any good solutions for action to be taken for remedying such a problem. I wonder, then, besides calling for CM enterprisers to be more conscious of the research TCers produce, how might TC researchers and practitioners become more involved in addressing and improving this dilemma?
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using Wordpress to revise the small business info, want to update their own content--don't want to learn CSS or learn the ins and outs of programming
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