Is Casper Really a Friendly Ghost? (An Examination of "The Phantom Machine")

Reading "The Phantom Machine: The Invisible Ideology of Email (A Cultural Critique)" immediately reminded me of of Johnson's User-Centered Technology. The authors argue that as technology becomes naturalized (mundane), it becomes invisible and thus innocuous. However, instead of examining technology as a broad category, Moses and Katz focus specifically on email and the way it problematically conceals its ideology, which leads to life feeling a lot like a project.

"In a culture that has seen the work week increase and leisure decline, this paradox of electronic communication points to one of contemporary life's great ironies: Labor-saving devices make more work" (Lee 324 as cited in Moses and Katz 71).  

Katz and Moses are quick to point out that email is commonly viewed as very efficient and "freeing" in that it allows for quick communication without physical proximity and lacks many of the conventions that define a traditional business memo. Therefore, it is often seen as democratic, even considered a "social panacea" (72) by some, because it removes social inequalities, at least to a certain extent (standardized structure, informal). However, other critics suggest that the internet and email simply repackage traditional power structures or potentially create new ones. For example, they mention the U.S. dominance on the web, the reality of internet-poor places and peoples, and government intervention. Katz and Moses suggest that more work is needed to supplement the little research performed on email and ideology and indicate that their article is not meant to bash or praise email but "critique the hidden ideologies that underlie mail as a cultural practice" (74) using the theory of Habermas.

"Much like the Sprint cell phone commercials where problems in relationships are cured by the purchase of a cell phone, the general conception is that email facilitates and enhances personal communication and even personal relations" (75).

Habermas examines the relationship between work and communication and suggests that technology shifts the focus from a balance between work and interaction to work. He's also concerned with the disappearance of the distinction between work and leisure and the way technology makes itself normal and invisible, especially the relationship between technological ideology and the "capitalistic goals of production" (77), so that one appears to determine the other. Furthermore, the authors argue that, unlike other forms of technology, users cannot choose to use email to either maintain or cross the boundary between the workplace and "private life". Therefore, life is a project.

Habermas also outlines two possible relationships between work and communication.

1. Traditional Institutional Framework: interaction is controlled via social norms, common expectations, if rules are broken also enforced by punishments which are determined socially, "systems of ideals (myths, religion, laws) authorize political power" (79), focus on individual and domination-free communication, may have purposive-rational subsystems

2. Purposive-rational system: system controlled by technical rules, technology and science rule, actions motivated by desired outcomes, outcomes also determined by technology e.g. if the rules aren't followed, the task is not completed successfully

The article then jumps to talking about how email began: it was the result of the the United States Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Their aim was to have researchers share data to "speed up production" (81). In addition, when Ray Tomlinson invented "network mail" he communicated with another computer in the same room in order to see if the technical possibility was there. This focus on efficiency and productivity has continued to reign in email, as evidenced by the designs of Microsoft and IBM (see page 82 for examples).

"Improved general communication is really a spin-off" (83). 

Therefore, though providers like Hotmail cater to keeping in touch with family and friends, they are still focused on productivity and the intuitiveness of tasks.  In addition, the relationship between Microsoft and Hotmail allows leisure to interfere in the workplace. Though Microsoft and Hotmail offer some control to users in that they will change aspects of email in response to popular demands (making interface look like Outlook), the authors assert that it is only the illusion of control: "We do not own the company, we do not own the means of production, we do not have the power to make changes; we only have the power to imbibe expectations, and make suggestions based on them" (87). We do not realize that these are ideological products, and that we want what is already being "manufactured" by the purposive-rational system in applications (e.g. the calendar function in Hotmail). Blurring expectations means we want the same things we have at work in the home; a purposive-rational system conditions both the economic and emotional.

Because of this system, we now have new behavioral expectations:

1. When a person sends an email, he/she expects the recipient to receive it and be aware of the information instantaneously

2. Because email is quick, people expect that they will be able to respond faster

3. One should always be able to check his/her email: "emailoholism" and "communication enslavement" (90)

FYI when this article was published, 42% of Americans who used email checked in on vacation!

Also, though email doesn't have rigid rules, its standardization (the technology) determines its conventions (e.g. the header section). Not placing something in the subject line, for example, would not change the format and would also result in efficiency failure. Furthermore, it is the technology that determines what the email is going to look like in this purposive-rational way (and puts less emphasis on formatting due to software compatibility). There is no punishment determined by society if a non-optional rule is broken, but a reality that the email has not been sent and even breaking optional rules can result in misunderstandings or difficulties.   

The authors then talk about the shift to more informal language in email (e.g. salutations or lack thereof, writing more like speaking, less emphasis on grammar and spelling). They indicate that other scholars see this as a result of mixing the oral and literary modes and personal relations. However, they say that the informality "may be based on the values of efficiency and speed in communication...[a] move away from rules established within the traditional social institutional framework to those inscribed in the purposive-rational institutional framework" (96). Email and technology change the rhetorical situation and, therefore, relationships. This influences the way we teach (informal vs. formal language, away from rhetorical strategy and toward conciseness).    

I found the statistics and facts in the article's conclusion to be some of the most interesting information in the piece. For example, they mention that productivity is raised by $9,000 dollars per person due to email, but some companies are banning it due to a lack of essential face-to-face communication. They conclude that people are very dependent on email, with some even stating that it is their preferred mode of communication, but such technology can also lead to "communication overload" and stress. 

"Most people, if they think about the increase in work at all, probably see it as just an incidental effect of email use, and not part of the essential nature of email technology. However, this analysis reveals that increased productivity is not a coincidental extension of email technology, but the result of it" (99).

Questions:

1. Moses and Katz say, "What's at stake here is changing how people relate to each other" (85). How true do you think this is? Has email fundamentally changed the way you communicate? Is it different than a letter or phone call in means-to-an end communication?

2. Are these "computer violations" important simply because they make technology visible? Is this a good thing? How else might we make technology visible and will this make people think about it more?

3. Is the transition from traditional rules to the "freer" conventions of email always more freeing (e.g. I'm sometimes very nervous when I'm trying to formulate an email salutation)? Is this just the "transition period"? Are there still traditional roles in the closing information after one's name?

4. How is Skype influencing communication? For example, should we prepare our students for a Skype interview? A phone interview? How long would that take? Is it any different than a face-to-face interview?

5. My last article addressed teaching new and fading technologies; is the business letter a fading technology? Is formal/academic language a fading technology?

6. What do we most want personal email to do that professional email cannot? If productivity isn't the focus of such email, how do we make 'reaching out' the focus?

Connections:

Besides the aforementioned connection to Johnson's work, this article relates to Dilger's "Extreme Usability and Technical Communication" in that email could be considered a system that is plagued by extreme usability. For example, many of the product endorsements described by Moses and Katz stress ease of use (which also contributes to a transparency or invisibility in technology). In addition, both articles mention that the user has the illusion of the technology being user-centered. When he is discussing the fact that businesses attempt know what customers want before they do, Dilger says, "Obviously, in such a relationship, there is room for businesses to shape "needs" to be congruent with profitability, but little room for consideration of the user-centered" (55). A few sentences later he connects this to the ideology of consumer culture, the same production-driven ideology Moses and Katz attempt to get readers to acknowledge.

Interesting questions come to mind when one compares this article to "The Technical Communicator as Author". For instance, do emails have authors or are they like "private letters"? Can email ever be truly private? Does email help employees become the robots that the recruiter wants at the end of Slack et al.? Both articles deal with teaching implications as well (in rather large and perhaps intimidating ways). Is it the job of the technical communicator to ensure that the public understands that email is not value neutral or reveal information that organizations would prefer remain hidden?

Education and Electronic Literacy

The problem addressed by Selfe and Hawisher in their article "A Historical Look at Electronic Literacy: Implications for the Education of Technical Communicators" is that, though electronics are now ubiquitous in the workplace, "...the profession itself knows less than it might about the social, economic, political, and educational factors that affect the acquisition and practice of electronic literacy, in either preprofessional or professional environments, and the nature of the support systems that technical communicators need..." (505).  In order to help solve these issues, the authors examine how technical communicators have gained electronic literacy between 1978 and 2000. They focus on important factors influencing this acquisition and possible patterns that could inform more effective teaching.

Thus, the authors analyze the voluntary written responses from 55 members (interestingly, 46 females and 9 males) of a listserv dedicated to technical writing and conduct face-to-face interviews with 4 additional participants. They acknowledge the limitations of their sample (e.g. only one person of color, almost all currently consider themselves middle to upper-middle class, mean age 40), so they say that their article does not attempt to generalize results but rather provides a rich and personal history of electronic literacy acquisition (510).

Unsurprisingly, they find that autobiographical accounts of technological interaction are very different based on age, early exposure, and socioeconomic status. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, interactions with technology involved programming and the transition from horror stories and FORTRAN to a less hostile but still limited view of electronic literary (an introduction to computer literary). Though two of the participants they interview, Barbara Evans and Doug Williams, have very different backgrounds (the authors describe Barbara as exceptionally talented with writing and technology though her life was full of ups and downs, while Doug is a regular, successful, 'middle-of-the-road' man), they both learn electronic literary largely in a workplace environment.

Conversely, in the 1980s and 1990s, college-aged students started receiving informal training in electronic literacy because computers were now such a part of everyday life, and they often relied on friends, manuals, and younger siblings to teach them instead of parents or teachers. Again, though the two interviewees' (Pauline Patterson and Angela Ashton) stories are quite different (Pauline is African American and from a working class family, while Angela is white and from a middle-class background), they both achieve a sophistication with computers during their education that Barbara and Doug had to obtain through years of work. However, in these narratives, the authors also stress the difference in exposure to technology between students based on race and economic status.

These autobiographies, along with their own experiences, lead Selfe and Hawisher to make six observations:

#1 A technical communicator who is fully literate now must be able to "read, write, and navigate in technological contexts" (528).

#2 Literacies have life-spans influenced by cultural ecology and technical communicators need to be flexible in response

#3 Race and class (and possibly age and gender) all influence the acquisition of digital literacy, and educational and professional institutions should provide programming to help ameliorate these effects

#4 Teachers in technical communication "may need to be increasingly active in learning to value and teach both emerging and fading literacy practices" (532).

#5 Technical communicators must learn emerging literacies from active self-engagement and interactions with peers

#6 We need to see electronic literacy as part of a cultural ecology in order to address the digital divide

Questions:

1. How has being able to "read, write, and navigate in technological contexts" (528) changed since 2000? How do we figure out what we need to teach in electronic literacy and what students are already familiar with? Is computer literacy a given? Is it still okay to learn on the job or informally (and does that carry the same weight)?

2. How do we as teachers decide what fading literacies to value? (I'm thinking about the controversy over some schools no longer teaching cursive, for example.) Is it simply uselessly nostalgic to miss some of that know-how, like Johnson claims in User-centered Technology?

3. How do we get students to take charge of their own electronic literacy and learn from peers while still valuing their formal education? Is it simply about providing them with the opportunities to use technology?

Connections:

One of the aims of this article is to address electronic literacy in the larger context of cultural ecology and therefore confront issues related to age, gender, race, etc. As evidenced by the title, the first article in chapter 6, "Learning Intercultural Communication Competence," also stresses the importance of the cultural component of technical communication. Thus, both works want readers to acknowledge diversity, the first explicit step in Beamer's intercultural learning model. In the following article, Thrush further examines the importance of multicultural awareness for technical communicators. She says to avoid claims such as "people are really all alike underneath" (416), because it implies a sense of cultural imperialism. By using personal narratives, Selfe and Hawisher underline individual differences that are also dangerous to ignore, even if these stories have the same outcome overall. Lastly Thrush, Selfe, and Hawisher all say that workplace diversity and the effect of subcultures are not well studied even within the United States.

Reading Lay's article, "Feminist theory and the Redefinition of Technical Communication" made me see the ethnographers stand-point in my article. For example, "ethnography does not claim that anyone using the same methods would come to the same conclusions" (438), and Selfe and Hawisher are careful to claim that their results are not able to be generalized, that they are providing a "rich history" instead of the "similarities or universals" (Lay, 438) sought by traditional science. They also align with the next article in making gender visible and echo some early feminist critics that women need "equal access...to education, credentials, and job opportunities" (Gurak and Bayer, 453). Though Selfe and Hawisher do not often engage specifically with gender in this essay (other than to say that it may determine whether or not an individual becomes electronically literate) they do provide the specific example of single-parent homes having less internet access, especially homes where the single parent is the mother.

Looking at definitions of important terms is useful for drawing connections in chapter 7. First and foremost, Self and Hawisher define electronic literacy as being able to communicate online. They state, "we mean the practices involved in reading, writing, and exchanging information in online environments as well as the values associated with such practices-social, cultural, political, educational" (506), and claim that their definition of electronic literacy is synonymous to digital or technological literary. What they want to avoid is talking about is simply computer literacy, which is the skill set required to operate a computer. Conversely, when Breuch defines technological literacy she encompasses both electronic and computer literacy; however, she reveals the dangers of taking a tool-based approach to technology and, even citing Selfe, acknowledges the importance of context, the social, political, and cultural factors that are linked to technology. Furthermore, though they do not specifically mention electronic literacy, Selber, Johnson-Eilola, and Selfe also indicate the importance of the social environment and cultural context. In looking toward the future of technical communication in the final chapter, Ornatowski also brings in society, this time to emphasize the importance of the technical communicator's role. "...in a society increasingly driven by technology, the technical communicator is becoming an important voice in determining how the issues involving technology...are framed and approached...Controversies over technologies often also reflect other issues and broader tensions in society" (597).

Negotiating Cross-Boundary Communication

In her article "Communicating Across Organizational Boundaries: A Challenge for Workplace Professionals", Rachel Spilka asserts that communicating outside of one's own organizational unit can be difficult and confusing. The act remains problematic because "little is known about how to interact and negotiate across organizational boundaries" (372). Spilka proposes to solve the problem by discussing the results of a longitudinal qualitative research project, including an overview of the research that has been done, the costs and benefits of cross-boundary communication in two case studies, the most effective strategies, and the study's implications.

Case #1

A small division of the state government, the Soil and Water Division (SWD), wants to create a memorandum with other agencies to define duties of different levels of government on a urban conversation program. Difficulties they encountered included an unwillingness of other organizations to (a) collaborate in the first place and (b) trust them during the collaboration.

Case #2

The upper-level management of the SWD of the state government is forming their plans for the next five years and asks for input from lower-level workers. However, they only listen to lower-level workers during early meetings, and very few of their suggestions are incorporated into the final plan, breeding resentment.

Bottom Line:

The inability to effectively communicate across boundaries is bad.

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Thus, it is surprising that little research has been done in the past 15 years, especially by scholars in rhetoric and communication. The article suggests that it is perhaps because qualitative studies within organizations are still relatively recent.

Spilka's observations from these two cases suggest groups should share a common goal or attribute in order to be successful, but also have dissimilarities to ensure that the groups need one another. The SWD benefited from relationships with other organizations through access to their resources and an association that helped increase their status, but had problems balancing internal and external goals and values, which caused tension. The SWD also had to deal with incompatible internal goals (empowering others vs. becoming indispensable to districts) and a rapid turnover of personnel.

Strategies Employed:

Social

1.  Consider goals and needs of other organizations involved
2. Try to fulfill all goals, but acknowledge that external ones may need to come first
3. Accept that some internal goals may not be productive
4. Always display public loyalty to other organizations
5. Learn as much as possible about other organizations and context
6. Don't act on a problem until you know all the information
7. Always work to maintain power of individual organizations working together
8. Be proactive
9. Volunteer for leadership roles and be involved
10. Determine which organization has ultimate authority
11. Educate others about their social roles
12. Display solidarity in some circumstances

Rhetorical

1. Make sure documents are clear, accurate, and detailed
2. Ensure that organizations in partnership are visible and acknowledged
3. Use reports and evaluation checklists to justify work and accomplishments
4. Repeatedly explain the organization's responsibilities
5. Use visual mapping
6. Change wording in later documents (negative outcome)
7. Watch timing of information and what facts to present
8. Express gratitude, but make your organization very visible
9. Cite information from other organizations to increase own authority

Spilka concludes with implications for other organizations that are thinking about cross-boundary communications; her suggestions include trying some of the above strategies, analyzing the goals and communication tactics of the partnership organization early on, and considering ethics and complications.

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"Educators could make a stronger effort to diversify and expand the types of rhetorical situations their students encounter in courses, particularly in terms of providing them with the experience of communicating with varied, complex internal and external audience with different, possibly conflicting, goals" (389).

Questions

1. When readers are first introduced to the case studies, a lot of the costs are emphasized (tensions, mistrust, etc.). However, Spilka later lists a plethora of effective strategies they employed. How effective were these relationships in reality? How do the other organizations feel about the collaboration? What was the result of the divide between lower-level and upper-level management? Should you ask other organizations or organizational units to be part of the process in the first place, if you know you are not going to value their input?

2. Should newly formed organizations use cross-organizational collaboration in the same way as older or more powerful organizations? Similarly, how does size influence this dynamic? 

3.  How do we decide what represents an "organizational unit"? (Spilka talks about the importance of related questions on 389.)

4. Do workers have more practice with cross-boundary communication than we might think? For example, is collaborating on a paper a cross-organizational activity (e.g. order of author's names, acknowledgements, etc.)

5. Are some of these strategies common sense and, if they are, do we really need to study them?

6. Is communicating only within the department or even a departmental unit the exception instead of the norm (quote on 373) now?

Connections

It is fairly easy to connect this article with others, because it covers a great deal of social and rhetorical strategies for communication that may also apply to users and members within  an organization. In addition, many of these articles bring up cross-boundary communication. For example, "What is Information Design?" by Janice C. Redish suggests that it is important to consider goals for the product early in the process, and Spilka expands on that idea to consider the goals of all the organizations involved. Furthermore, Redish states: "We may specialize or call on colleagues who specialize in helping us with aspects of the process, such as user and task analysis, usability evaluations, copyediting, and proofreading" (215). This is likely to involve collaboration between organizations or organizational units to produce a technical document and may require consideration of who has authority etc.

The next article by Mirel, "Following User-Centered Design Practices", states that any project that considers usability has a variety of objectives, such as enjoyment and ease of learning, and that development teams "choose to build for some dimensions while neglecting others based on project deadlines, resources, and other constraints" (221). Though Spilka asserts that that an organization should to attempt to fulfill all goals, she also admits that external goals may have to be given priority, given the constraint of conflict. Overall, it is a lot about prioritizing. The following article by Kramer and Bernhardt emphasizes general rules about style, and I feel like Spilka attempts to do the same for cross-boundary communication, though both admit that the 'rules' can be expanded and refined.

"The Rhetoric of Design: Implications for Corporate Intranets" also indicates that goals should be conceptualized and considered early, connecting it to Redish and Spilka, and stresses the importance of simplicity and clarity (274). This directly aligns with Spilka's first rhetorical strategy. I find it interesting that Spilka does not directly mention the need for consistency within communications with the same other organization(s) or even in cross-boundary communication in general, and I wonder what she would have to say about that. Foreshadowing the next section, should there be a genre for cross-boundary communication, for example?

As aforementioned, the next article by Berkenkotter and Huckin discusses the sociocognitive view of genres. They state that genres are not just static but flexible and changing. "Genre knowledge embraces both form and content, including a sense of what content is appropriate to a particular purpose in a particular situation at a particular point in time" (294). This relates to Spilka's realization that organizations need to be careful of what information to present and when (rhetorical strategy #7) and also that they need to consider content (e.g. rhetorical strategies #1, #4 and #9) as well as form (e.g. rhetorical strategies #2 and #5).

The next article by Freedman and Adam discusses the differences between participation in the classroom and participation in the workplace. They talk about issues of authority (interns not taking the advice of newcomers, for example, or simply referring to it as her or his opinion), and authority is also something that needs to be dealt with in cross-boundary communication. By taking away the teacher-student evaluation framework, issues of collaboration and who plays what role are bound to occur. The dismissive interns remind me of the upper-level management who removed the comments of the lower-level workers, though the situation is, to an extent, reversed.

To generalize, the last two articles before Spilka also address how the classroom and the workplace should interact. Spinuzzi suggests considering the integration of activity networks into classroom practices, and Blakeslee talks about classroom-workplace collaborations, their issues, and their value. Audience also comes up in Spilka's article when she says, "Students might encounter his type of complex audience in internships [Spinuzzi], but they could also encounter it in courses requiring them to produce documentation for actual clients, reviewers, and multiple audience segments [Blakeslee]..." (389). It is interesting to note that she mentions that adapting to varies genres and activity networks have been well studied, though their methods seem to be what she suggests for the classroom (see above quote).

"Human language (including writing) can be understood only from the perspective of a society rather than a single individual" (110)

In the article "The Social Perspective and Pedagogy in Technical Communication", Thralls and Blyler suggest that social pedagogy is often problematically considered a uniform concept. Thus, they intend to describe the four distinct categories of social pedagogy, including their disparate ideologies, aims, and classroom practices.

1. The Social Constructionist Pedagogy

Communities shape and determine discourse via "communal norms" (111) 

Aim: Acculturation, participation in community discourse, collaboration

Classroom Practices: case studies (both researching and creating), write in situation (internships), peer review, group writing, computer-supported collaboration

2. The Ideologic Pedagogy

Community norms should be resisted, because they ignore hierarchies/power structures and leave language unquestioned

Aim: emancipation, controlling community norms instead of being controlled

Classroom Practices: Analyzing conventions, problematizing discourse, experimentation with alternative discourse, focus on larger good, teleconferencing, computer lab for breaking traditional relations

3. Social Cognitive Pedagogy

Community norms internalized by individual to determine how they view writing tasks, "doubly social" (118)

Aim: Focus on acculturation to situation, metacognitive awareness

Classroom Practices: reflect on writing through self-study, use experts as models, research large social topics, heuristics, role-play

"...constructionist, ideologic, and social cognitivist pedagogies all embrace the idea that a system of norms enables communication within communities and thus links writers, writing, and culture...paralogic hermeneutic pedagogy thus poses a radical departure from other socially based pedagogies" (119).

4.  Paralogic Hermenuetic Pedagogy

Communication cannot be codified or taught because it is not systematic, occurs instead at the moment conversation takes place as codes are interpreted; external view

Aim: "passing theory"-reach understanding through guesses and assumptions of words' meanings, writing open-ended

Classroom Practices: dialogic discourse, one-on-one student and teacher interaction, no case studies

Implications

Authors suggest that melding these viewpoints is impossible, giving examples. Furthermore, they suggest that the paralogic hermenuetic pedagogy would have drastic institutional implications, including the breakdown of the traditional classroom and a reduction in student-to-teacher ratios.      

Questions

1. Why do the authors leave out the institutional implications for the other three stances? Because they all allow for a technical writing classroom? 

2. Why do social constructionists oppose cognitive principles? Do they disregard social concerns? (124)

3. Are the programs that are mentioned as useful for collaboration in the social constructionist pedagogy (e.g. "word processing, computer conferencing, electronic mail..." (113)) really specific to a certain pedagogy? Can computers aid us no matter what our aim is?

4. What pedagogy do you identify with (or do your objectives identify with)? Were you aware of that when you wrote them?

5. Should students have a say in classroom pedagogy, or should they at least be aware of what the pedagogies are? What would happen if we had a mix of classroom strategies?

Connections

1. The first article by Miller shows how a positivist approach has been replaced (or should be replaced) by a communalist one; this article goes on to describe the differences between these communal approaches.

2. Johnson stresses the importance of comprehension, the differences between historians, sociologists, and philologists, including the 'internalist' and 'externalist' views of historians; the same terminology is used here.

3. Durack discusses how women have been historically underrepresented as technical writers as well as inventors etc. and might agree with the ideologic pedagogy, which resists norms (and dominant way of knowing) and thus offers more power to women.