9: With Digital Technology Comes Great(er) Responsibility

Something that seems to be coming up again and again in our readings is that technical communicators are “not just” anything. They are not just the transmitters of information. They are articulators. They are not just users of technology. They are digital literates who “apply…the thoughtful deployment of technologies” (Salvo & Rosinski, 2010, p. 123). Technical communicators are becoming—or perhaps, have always been—complex people. Their jobs in the multitude of industries and positions in which they find themselves have demanded complex intelligence and thoughtfulness. If nothing else, this is the one thing I will walk away with at the end of this semester—I’m convinced—technical communicators are “not just” boring, formula-following writers who don’t do anything but regurgitate information. They are a key element to the development, production, and transmission of information. As Salvo and Rosinski (2010) describe through Churchill’s words—”We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us”—technical communicators have to be able to determine how their documents and productions, digital or otherwise, will be used, how users will interact with the text or software (p. 124). It’s not important, necessarily, that technical communicators are trained in every design technique, for example, but it is important that technical communicators have, at the very least, an understanding of “the language and concerns of information designers” (Salvo & Rosinski, 2010, p. 125).

As we continue our consideration of visual elements, design, and influence, I realize how little I’ve either A) paid attention to such discussions in past undergraduate and grad-level courses, or B) how little exposure I’ve actually had to such discussions. To constantly keep in mind the effectiveness of visual elements in the development of a text or document is something that seems obviously necessary, and yet, is something I, personally, fail to consider as frequently or thoroughly as I should. What scholars like Kumpf (2000) are doing is exactly what needs to be done: bringing to lightall of the elements any writer or developer of a text should have in their back pocket, from writing skills to knowing how to effectively use the plethora of computer software features now available (p. 402). Kumpf actually provides, at one point, a very simple explanation I’m not sure I had arrived at myself about why there seems to be such a sudden surge of support for visual communication, as we saw in last week’s readings. He (2000) says: “Twenty years ago, most technical writing classes acknowledged visuals, but those visuals were secondary to text. Moreover, most students then could not import visuals into the text, but rather saved them in an appendix” (p. 403). I guess this seems obvious now, but of course visuals would apparently be seen as thrust upon a pedestal—our channels and mediums for communication have gone visual in this digital era. So written communication is not lesser in any way, visuals are just becoming supplementary in their importance in digital and other documents and texts.

I thought in Barton and Barton’s (1993) discussion of the map as visual representation and the rules of inclusion and exclusion was an incredibly important perspective to consider. As we continue to move headlong into an increasingly visual era, I think, as with maps, viewers and users of digital technologies and texts have to be fully aware of what the visual elements are meant to be representing, what the visual elements appear to be representing, and what the visual elements are not (or are not able to) representing (p. 238–39). It is, thus, equally as important for technical communicators and information designers to always be conscious of their choices—making informed choices and being careful of what visuals they choose, or don’t choose, to represent the information they are transferring. Finally, in Barton and Barton’s (1993) closing thoughts, they say “the governing aesthetic of the visual as collage-palimpsest is not the modernist ‘less is more’ but rather the postmodernist ‘less is a bore’—an aesthetic that privileges complexity over simplicity and eclecticism over homogeneity…” (p. 248). In juxtaposition to last week’s readings, particularly Lauer and Sanchez’s discussion of visuospatial thinking, Barton and Barton’s description of the modernist “less is a bore” aesthetic is surprising. Maybe in 1993 this would have still been the preferred aesthetic, the complex over the simple, the eclectic over homogeneous, but it seems we’ve moved into more a “less is more” aesthetic where visual designs that are simpler are arguably clearer, more effective, and more visually appealing—and this could arguably be a result of our society’s need for expediency, anymore, which is a direct result of digital technology. As we are able to find information more quickly, we need the visuals around us to “speak to us” quickly, and visuals that are not complex and eclectic, butare simple and homogeneous, tend to grab our attention and keep it for the necessary seconds it takes for us to internalize the information. Of course, simple and homogeneous does not mean not aesthetically pleasing. With the surge in visual thinking, we need information quickly but it still has to look good enough to interest us.

Barton, B. F., & Barton, M. S. (1993). Ideology and the map: Toward a postmodern visual design practice. In J. Johnson-Eilola & S. A. Selber (Eds.), Central Works in Technical Communication, (pp. 232–252). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Kumpf, E. P. (2000). “Visual metadiscourse: Designing the considerate text.” Technical Communication Quarterly, 9(4), pp. 401–424.

Salvo, M. J., & Rosinski, P. (2010). Information design: From authoring text to architecting virtual space. In R. Spilka (Ed.), Digital Literacy for Technical Communication: 21st Century Theory and Practice, (pp. 103–127). New York, NY: Routledge.