My Final Paper

For my paper, I explored how technical communicators have adapted and must continue to adapt their traditional practices and methods of writing in order to engage with their changing audience. My research questions included:

• Is the importance of writing clearly and concisely giving way to learning to write in a voice that is engages customers on a social level?
• Is writing decreasing in importance with the rise of video and other visuals?
• Are these changes really fundamental to the field of technical communication? Or are they just the newest incarnation of the technical communicator’s call to write to their audience?

My paper was focused on how the technical communicator’s devotion to the needs of their audience will necessitate the modification of their communication methods as they engage in social media marketing. I looked at the stylistic differences in writing for social media versus those of traditional technical communication. I found that though writing for social media required a strong voice and differences in style, the core of how we write remained constant. Even in writing for social media, the thing that was most stressed in my research was the need for clear and concise writing. I explored the idea that the rise of video could decrease the importance of writing and found that most of the research emphasized content over flashy visuals.

Thanks everyone for making this a great semester!

My Final Blog Post – What I learned

The topic I choose for my final paper related to Objectives 1, 2 and 5. In this paper I examined the aspects of selecting, creating, and maintaining a Knowledge Management System. This relates to the course objectives 1, 2 and 5 in the following ways:

Objective 1 relates to the way new digital technologies affect writing, specifically technical and professional communication. Most writing being completed in the Knowledge Management System will be technical writing. It will be related to how to perform certain tasks and how specific pieces of functionality work.

Objective 2 relates to the way digital technologies will change the technical writing workplace. With the implementation of a new Knowledge Management System, this changes the way we write based on the types of text the new system can handle.

Objective 5 relates to the consequences of these new technologies for writing, managing and distributing information/knowledge to online audiences.  My experience with Knowledge Managements systems is that each has a customer facing option. We create content on our side and then it is available for our customers to use when and where they have the time.

Knowledge Management Systems are an important piece of a software knowledge transfer. A knowledge management systems allows software development/support staff to create content for dissemination to the internal customers and/or customer base. This report provides an overview of things to consider when looking at selecting, creating and maintaining a knowledge management system. Also included is a compare/contrast of Sansio’s current Knowledge Management System to Parature, the lead in what is being selected to replace it.

As could be seen throughout my blog posting, I had a hard time with this class. It took a while for me to get the AHA Moment that really connected it all for me. I think part of my issue was I was looking at this as a Social Media class and the more I thought about it, the more I knew Social Media was not going to be used in my job. It took a while for me to break out of the Social Media and think about it as Digital Communication, which includes a lot of what I do in my job.

I ended up really enjoying this class and can’t wait to find a way to apply what I learned to my job.

Final Paper Reflection

My final paper topic is how technology has changed marketing in retail businesses.  My experience working at an order management software company that hosted websites gave me a lot of insight into this topic.  I also think my work experience at Verizon Wireless has influenced this paper as well, due to their initiatives to launch destination stores and enhance their website to create a better customer experience.  In the event that you haven’t heard of these initiatives, check them out!

http://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2013/11/verizon-destination-store-unveiling.html

http://www.verizonwireless.com/wcms/consumer/videogallery/accessory-videos/gadgets-and-gear.html

I have to say, there’s a lot of information on this topic and I spent A LOT of time sorting through it all to try to choose the “right” ones to include as sources.  I also have a lot of thoughts on the topic.   I have to say, I think this is the first paper that I ever struggled to stay within the page limit.  Normally I’m stressing to add content.

I haven’t submitted my paper just yet.  It is finished, but I want a to read it over a few more times before I hit submit.  I appreciate deadlines, because when it comes to writing things wouldn’t get submitted without one, but, these days always give me anxiety!

For those of you that are interested, below is my Abstract.  It has been a pleasure sharing this class with all of you and I wish you all the best of luck with your semester and happy holidays!

Abstract

Social media and technology have changed the way retail businesses operate.  In a few keystrokes on a keyboard or taps of a finger on a smartphone, customers can view online shopping sites and product reviews.  In addition, there are sites on the Internet to “comparison shop,” and these include prices from both local retailers and online stores.  In this competitive atmosphere and tough economy, retailers need to change the way they market their products and support their customers to keep them coming back.  Retailers also must pay attention to their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking and the online, as well as in-store, customer experience.  This paper will explore the power the customer has and how retail businesses are changing to support customer wants and needs in fast paced environments that rely heavily on technology.

Dos and Don’ts of Social Media in Healthcare Marketing

Three weeks ago, I was uncertain what I would write about for the final project. Fortuitously, my boss talked to me around the same time and asked me about taking on more responsibilities, including managing the company’s social media sites. Although we already have a Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn page set up, we post to them very rarely, and, until this semester, I would have had little clue as to what the best approach would be for capitalizing on social media. Well, I am happy to report that I have a much better idea now, especially after writing this final paper which I entitled “The Dos and Don’ts of Social Media in Healthcare Marketing.” I specifically looked at Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as they are very popular and are increasingly being used within the healthcare sector.

In addition to being helpful to my job, I felt like this topic was very appropriate because social media is a perfect example of the move from traditional means of communication to digital methods, a primary theme in the English 745 course. In this specific case, social media is replacing traditional means of word-of-mouth marketing (i.e. face-to-face conversations with friends and family). Now, people talk about their medical conditions and recommendations on Facebook, blogs, and discussion boards. People are looking for medical advice and health updates on YouTube. They are following health-related events and news on Twitter. Social media is pervasive in healthcare communications, and organizations would best figure out how to jump on the social media bandwagon.

Like with many things, though, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Social media will not achieve all marketing goals for the company. It has a specific use for specific audiences and should be used in conjunction with other marketing strategies.

Which Demographics Use Social Media?
Image source: http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/infographic-the-demographics-of-social-media-users-35432/

One of social media’s specific uses is to create greater awareness and increase conversation and participation, things that are not easily measured by normal ROI methods, but valuable nonetheless. The way I see it, social media can be a terrific means for getting your name out there to become established as the expert in your field. The company I work for used to be known for this and has taken a backseat lately. Perhaps being visible on social media will help bring our brand back behind the driver’s seat. Or, at the very least, allow us to be the “driving” force behind a social media strategy, rather than letting it sit, collecting dust.

Driving Social Media
Image source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/224898

 

In my research for this paper, I found an unbelievable amount of information so the most difficult part was narrowing down the resources. Fortunately, they all meshed well and I found many of the same themes, such as:

• Determine how social media fits into your overall marketing strategy.
• Decide which audience you are targeting and choose an appropriate social medium that this audience uses.
• Share helpful, engaging and valuable information. Photos, links and videos can help make this content more interesting.
• Regular, frequent posts are essential to stay relevant and keep your viewers coming back.
• Use Facebook apps to make your site more robust and useful.
• YouTube videos are more effective if they have an emotional element to them.
• Use two or fewer hashtags per Tweet.

These are just some of the things that I learned while working on this paper. I’d like to share more, so I am going to end with posting some links in case you are looking for some help with developing a social media strategy.

The Healthcare Communicator’s Social Media Toolkit

http://www.cdc.gov/healthcommunication/ToolsTemplates/SocialMediaToolkit_BM.pdf

31 Twitter tips

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2013/08/30/31-twitter-tips-how-to-use-twitter-tools-and-twitter-best-practices-for-business/

25 ways to get more social media followers

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/7512/25-ways-to-get-more-social-media-followers-aspx

Thanks for a great semester! Good luck to you all!

 

 

Farewell and enjoy your winter break!

Seasons greetings!

I have now completed my final paper.  The topic I chose for this lengthy process involves technology, digital literacy, and the degradation of quality and rigor in student learning.

The title of my paper is The Ugly Side of Technology: A Breakdown of What’s Happening to Education and Strategies to Maintain the Quality and Rigor of Student Learning.  Below, I have posted my abstract.  Enjoy!

Technology affords people innovative learning opportunities, such as using digital tools to shape understanding.  However, it produces many adverse effects that can overshadow the benefits, including the degradation in the quality and rigor of student learning.  Unless parents and teachers take action, student learning will continue to suffer.  In a detailed analysis, the author discusses the growth of technology by acknowledging the digitally literate generation and discussing the digital literacy narrative of a young woman.  Next, the author highlights the benefits of technology, but contrasts them with the many negative effects technology causes on student learning, including the breakdown of reading for comprehension and the increase of multitasking.  Finally, the author provides strategies for both parents and teachers to help maintain the appropriate and necessary use of technology.  Parents and teachers must provide students with strategies so they realize that technology does not replace traditional learning and that digital literacy requires the same, if not more, rigor as traditional reading and writing.

Therefore, I say farewell and enjoy your winter break! I am glad to have shared the experience of this course with all of you and I hope to collaborate again in another course.

Happy holidays!

Social Media has a Place in Higher Ed.

My final paper presented social media as a form of emerging media that allows higher education faculty to enhance instructional methods.  It presented background information on what it means to be a digital settler, immigrant, and native, and specifically addressed how to consider teaching our many natives that come into the classrooms today.

I think my future recommendations nicely sum up some of the most important thoughts for educators to take with them as they embark on their use of social media to improve student engagement and success, so I will include them here in this final blog posting, too.

As more and more students come to us having grown up in a digital era, it is only fitting that we utilize their propensity for technology and social media and use it to our advantage.

Emerging media forms and digital technologies have changed our classrooms and online learning environments and the students who fill them.  Faculty of higher education institutions will need to continue to change with them in order to best serve the students and prepare them for the continually advancing digital world.

Social media tools can improve student engagement when used properly with learners, and faculty members can utilize varying social media forms to benefit their instructional methods.  Resisting the use of technology and social media for educational purposes may leave those educators falling behind in a time that will continue to address the needs of our digital learners.

With extremely accessible, network-based tools, technologies are more than ever empowering students to create, customize, and share content with us and each other online.  This digital era and emerging forms of media open up to educators new opportunities for us to implement socially enriched pedagogies because it can allow for varied means to encourage student interaction and strong ways to manage a collective body of knowledge.

Faculty who decide to utilize social media can begin to design a socially empowered learning environment for their learners, and this can lead to greater student success and retention.  Given the growing role of social media in education, it is vital for educators to gain knowledge, insight, and training for how to effectively use social media for instructional purposes; furthermore, they must know how to solve problems and consider negative risks before its use.

http://vergepipemedia.com/blog/using-social-media-for-higher-education/

For faculty willing to recognize the powerof social media to transform learning,they are able to offer teaching and learning that allows learners to create, co-create, and share knowledge sometimes with a global audience beyond the classroom walls.

 

 

 

 

On a personal note:

Thank you to all for making this term such a valuable learning experience!  Take care!

Christin

How Social Media Is Changing The World

A cool infographic one of my Digital Humanities undergrads found that I felt was worth sharing as we close the semester!

Aaaa Haaa Moment

In many of our conversations this semester we have discussed the multitudes of social media options in this digital age.  While we have not exactly discussed trust or privacy as an individual topic before this week, there have been definite innuendos about the trust we each place in these sites; some of us have shown it by the desire (or lack thereof) to use a particular site, others have pointed out the flaws in some of our readings that can lead to a distrust of that author as well as the information in the article itself, and others just aren’t interested in sharing their personal lives.  Both of the chapters this week got me thinking about why there is such a variance, even in our small group of, assumingly (based solely on the fact that we are all interested in the same field), similar beliefs and personalities (ok, I am probably stretching it a little but just go with it!).  In particular when you take into consideration Facebook, there always seems to be a huge debate over what is posted and why people want to spill their life stories (and, at times, very personal information) out to all these supposed “friends”.  Even when we read articles about how Facebook is changing their privacy setting again and releasing more information (you need to see this visual – I can’t download the image), some of us are still frequent users, or know of people who are.  In Schofield and Joinson (2008), when I read the following quote, it all started to make some sense to me:

 “. . .we found evidence that trust and privacy interact to determine disclosure behavior, such that high privacy compensates for low trustworthiness, and high trustworthiness compensates for low privacy. Clearly, privacy and trust are closely related in predicting people’s willingness to disclose personal information, and the relationship may be more nuanced than simple mediation” (p. 25)

We may not trust Facebook, the company, but really, that is not who we are communicating with.  We are communicating with our FRIENDS whom we place a lot of trust in.  Therefore we continue to use the site even though we know our privacy is at risk.  In fact, when Facebook makes style changes, I have read comments that make it sound like “how dare you change MY site”.  The users seem to have almost hijacked the site in some ways – they seems to ignore the fact that there is an actual company associated with this site and they are in business to make money. They are quick to forget the most recent privacy concerns and continue to use the site and still revealing very personal information  – again because they are communicating with trustworthy friends, not the company itself.

The ethical principle in Katz and Rhodes (2010), the Being Frame, also plays heavily into the use of Facebook, on both sides of the screen.  Facebook, the company, Enframes its users:

“In the being frame, not only machines, but humans as well are Enframed, and considered a standing-reserve – not only for use by the organization [Facebook], but also by the machines to which we must adapt” (p. 237)

But the users themselves are becoming part of this “being frame” as well:

“The digital and the technical has become the personal (e.g. Blackberry devices, Facebook), and extend around the wired world.  We exist everywhere with technology as a technology; we stand with the resources as a reserve” (p. 238)

I believe it is because of this thought process (along with the trust aspect of their friends) that users are willing to look past well-known privacy issues and continue to spell out their entire lives for all to see.  Right or wrong, they are one with the machine.

Privacy and the internet

Privacy in healthcare is very important. This is something that I have some experience with. This kind of privacy is a bit different than the kind discussed in the reading this week. This Health Care Privacy is more about preventing access to data that exists. Not allowing people who don’t need to access a specific patient, access to that patient. This relates to the reading this week in that privacy is really about what you want to show the outside world. I liked the description of the 3 types of privacy; Expressive, Informational, and Accessibility.

• Expressive Privacy – The ability to choose what I say and do.

• Informational Privacy – The ability to choose what information I share with others.

• Accessibility Privacy – The ability to choose how (physically) close I get to others.

In addition to the three types of privacy described above there are also two forms of privacy; actual and perceived.

• Actual Privacy – When people are around, my actual privacy is limited.

• Perceived Privacy – When my family is around, my perceived privacy is high. I trust them to not divulge my personal information, to maintain my privacy.

There are a number of ways that people can protect their privacy online. Depending on the site you are using, for example eBay, you can turn yourself into a pseudonym. You can clear web history, deny cookies and other things. The image below is from a Pew Internet Privacy that was done that describes how much people understand about internet privacy.

http://researchaccess.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Pew-Internet-Privacy-Chart.png

Social Media sites also have specific settings in regards to privacy. According to Consumer Watchdog, Facebook and their ads track you even when you are not currently logged into Facebook.

http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/node/12480

After Privacy, comes trust. Once you look at the privacy settings of your web browser and or website you are looking at, you have to decide if you trust the web site you are visiting.

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S1807-17752007000300001&script=sci_arttext

This image visibly describes what goes into a decision by a consumer to purchase from a specific site.  “A consumer’s intention to purchase products from Internet shopping malls is contingent on a consumer’s trust. Consumers are less likely to patronize stores that fail to create a sense of trustworthiness and an easily usable context. In the meantime, trust would also be influenced by e-commerce knowledge, perceived reputation, perceived risk, and perceived ease of use, all of which are set as independent variables in the model. Hence trust serves as a mediating variable while purchasing intention is a dependent variable.” (JISTEM, 2007)

I know that I have done research on products and found website that were offering them for less than Amazon or some other known online retailer. I do research not only on the product they are offering, but also the website before I decide to trust the retailer and purchase from their website.

What do you know about protecting your privacy on the internet, specifically the use of websites privacy policies? Does anyone read these before signing up for a new website?

Privacy and illusions of anonymity

retrieved from http://xkcd.com/1269/

This week’s reading by Paine Schofield and Joinson about privacy gave me a lot of information to think over. Even though their writings occurred in the 1960’s and 70’s, their definitions are still very relent in today’s digital age. Westin defined privacy as “the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated to others”. Altman defined privacy as “the selective control of access to the self”. In most cases, unless someone is a celebrity or politician, they decide their own level of privacy or access to the self.

The Paine Schofield and Joinson reading also shared the ideas of Ingham, who stated that “man, we are repeatedly told is a social animal, and yet he constantly seeks to achieve a state of privacy”. I found this an interesting idea, but it does work with the ideas of Westin and Altman described above. Each person defines their own level of desired privacy. Some people choose to live very private lives. These people choose to share limited information online, and restrict it only to those they choose. These would also be the celebrities that we almost never hear about, that choose a life of discretion rather than embracing the spotlight that would normally follow them.

In a past reading, Qualman introduced the term “glass house generation”, which described how some people choose to live out their lives online. These people allow more access to themselves in the online world through social network sites, blogs, and also vlogs , and they share all sorts of personal information and opinions. Some feel that they can share a lot of information because they still maintain a level of anonymity, and some don’t seem to care. They feel they care share whatever they want and don’t consider the repercussions.

retrieved from http://ib2012-itgs.wikispaces.com/Privacy+and+anonymity

Ingham indicates that there may be costs for those who are unable to achieve their desired level of privacy, but I think it goes beyond that. Some individuals who choose to live at their desired level of online privacy may experience costs such as having that level of privacy breached. They may leave only a breadcrumb trail of information around on the internet, but there are individuals who are bloodhounds for that sort of information. With the proper motivation, they will scour the internet using various tools to seek out the information they desire, and the results can make people feel much more vulnerable than they expected. Anonymity online only works if you never disclose enough information to easily identify you, or if the information you do disclose doesn’t help to identify you.

I’ve been casually following the Kickstarter campaign for a board game called Shadows of Brimstone. I won’t go too deep into the short history of the game, but basically overall price, backer levels, and general issues with crowd-funding has caused this to become a controversial Kickstarter campaign. There are many strong opinions, and many have voiced their frustrations. I stumbled on this blog entry a few days ago and found it fitting with this week’s readings. I did not see the original post, but this amended post tells a great deal. The blog author shared an opinion someone didn’t agree with. That individual decided to track him down using bits of information, and then sent the author a creepy email directed at him and his fiancée. The author felt understandably vulnerable, because his illusion of anonymity and security had been shaken.

I find the above situation despicable, but it does serve as an example to the rest of us. Be careful what information you choose to share, because someday, someone may try to track you down. Personally, I would prefer it if they either came up empty, or ended up chasing their tail looking for a trail that has either long gone cold, or one that never existed in the first place.

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The Circle of Trust

This week’s readings deal with privacy, trust, and ethics in the digital world. The Schofield and Joinson piece, “Privacy, Trust, and Disclosure Online,” and the Katz and Rhodes piece in Rachel Spilka’s Digital Literacy for Technical Communication, “Beyond Ethical Frames of Technical Relations,” really approach the same question from different directions. What does it take to gain user trust and maintain integrity in an increasingly digital world?

Schofield and Joinson (2008) argue that privacy and trust “interact in determining online behavior” (p. 24). They discuss multiple dimensions of both privacy and trust, and they suggest that users often rely on some combination of these components of privacy and trust to guide their purchasing decisions and online behavior.

As digital communities grow, members look for ways to verify that other members are who they say they are. Schofield and Joinson (2008) point out that there are many ways to build trust online such as use of profiles, photographs, media switching, and linguistic cues (p. 21). Individuals use these tactics to build trust among other individuals, but how do companies gain the trust of their customers?   The below comic strip is a good example of how companies do not gain customer trust:

http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/102765.strip_.gif

http://www.register.com/imgs/productDetail/truste.png

Schofield and Joinson suggest that assuring customers that the information they disclose and the transactions they conduct will be dealt with appropriately and competently is an important building block for user trust. Also important is the company’s reputation; if people believe that they can trust a name, this belief can be more influential on purchasing behavior than trust building techniques such as privacy seals and statements.

While conducting business online might require disclosure of more personal information than it does in person, it also offers benefits such as “personalized service, convenience, improved efficiency” (p. 17). As online business continues to grow, this is evidently an acceptable tradeoff to many users. I know that when I am faced with the choice of going on a retail hunt for vacuum cleaner bags in the rain or giving Amazon my address and credit card number and having the vacuum cleaner bags delivered to my door, I almost always choose the latter.

Similarly, many users appreciate the personalized aspects and conveniences of online shopping, which are enabled by user tracking. Schofield and Joinson (2008) assert that users who maintain the same pseudonym in multiple online arenas can be tracked more effectively than users who switch pseudonyms from site to site (p. 26). As pseudonyms protect a person’s identity, I’m not sure why it’s beneficial for a person to have multiple pseudonyms. I tend to think consumers benefit more from enabling companies to track their usage in order to provide them with better products, recommendations, and customer service than from maintaining multiple pseudonyms in order to inhibit user tracking and preserve the notion of privacy.

Katz and Rhodes (2010) argue that “to stay competitive, as well as avoid potential crises, organizations and the professionals within them must both acknowledge and actively engage in multiple ethical frames of technical relations” (p. 230). Essentially, this is also an argument about establishing and maintaining trust and identity through a digital medium.

The 6 ethical frames Katz and Rhodes present explain how we use technical relations to achieve certain goals. Rhodes’ study, in which she examines Email as A Tool and an End, Email as Values and Thought, and Email as a Way of Being, demonstrates that depending on how we use it, email technology can be: both a means and an end, a value system, a method of rational calculation, and an extension of individual consciousness- or some combination of these. Even in the lowest common denominator of these ethical frames, where email is considered a tool, email is the mechanism that facilitates achieving a common goal through a digital medium, which requires at least some notion of trust and integrity.

http://www.sms.hest.ethz.ch/flow_man_machine?hires

Katz and Rhodes (2010) offer, “In delineating the ethical frames of technical relations that define human-machine interactions, we therefore recognize the socially dynamic and constructed nature of ethics; indeed because we do, we hold that technology both instantiates and helps construct social and moral values” (p. 231). This statement illustrates the bidirectional relationship between technology and social and moral values; ethics is a fluid concept that changes as social norms change. Social norms are changing as a result of technology, and thus the ethical frames of technical relations offer us a way to correlate the changing use of technology with corresponding ethical implications.

Coming to grips with the “Internet of Things”

So, I suppose this is tangential to this week’s readings (or maybe at the heart of them), but I kept going deeper and deeper into the Internet as I studied the issues of privacy, ethics,

http://vyanks.blogspot.com/2010/11/internet-addiction.html

and problematic internet use (PIU), straying far from my topic, getting lost in all sorts of sidetracks.  For example, I came across the word “paraphilia” in one article and didn’t stop to look it up, but then I came across it again. I was reading an article that mentioned the fact that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM5) (http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx) was updated in 2013 and would now include PIU, which I found interesting and relevant to this week’s readings.  So, I went to the DSM site and found, in fact, that “Internet and Gaming Disorders” is included in Section III, which is apparently a research section because it explains, “By listing Internet Gaming Disorder in DSM5’s Section II, APA hopes to encourage research to determine whether the condition should be added to the manual as a disorder.”

It was at this site that I saw “paraphilic” again, so I decided to do a search and spent over an hour just reading up on those.  I won’t offer you a link, but you can Wikipedia it and see at a glance why I got distracted. Or perhaps I’ve just been sheltered?

Anyway, I don’t think I would qualify as one of the addicted just yet, but this is the kind of thing I worry about — getting sucked in to the Internet “black hole.” I mean, I really had to force myself to stop going everywhere willy-nilly and exert some discipline — problematic internet use? Scott Caplan makes a distinction between impulsive (lack of impulse control) and excessive (a lot) and says that what might be seen as excessive might just be what is required for a student to complete an assignment (that’s probably me, so far), whereas compulsive use is more likely to result in negative outcomes (p. 724-725).

Speaking of negative outcomes, before I started this course, I thought about Internet privacy challenges mostly in terms of social media and the fact that some people seem to lack

Note that most of us still score a “C” for personal security measures.
http://blog.varonis.com/varonis-2013-privacy-and-trust-report/

boundaries with regard to self-disclosure.  Now, I have a much broader (and more disturbed) understanding of the privacy challenges we face, including the fact that it’s so easy to track our digital footprints. Still, like the people in this Varonis report, I do very little to protect my privacy.

Maybe there’s regulatory help on the way? According to this November 12 article from Politico (http://www.privacylives.com/politico-ftc-wading-into-internet-of-things/2013/11/14/), the Federal Trade Commission is going to start taking an interest in privacy issues because of so many everyday objects (“thermostats, toasters, and even sneakers”) that are getting connected to the Internet.  Some of the more interesting ideas: pill bottles that keep track of whether you took the pill, refrigerators that tell you when the milk will expire, and forks that track how fast you eat, all of which could embed sensitive information about individual consumers that could then be inappropriately shared.  This echoes Carina Paine and Adam Joinson’s concern that areas of our lives previously considered offline are now areas of privacy concern and being magnified online (p. 16).

Some trade groups are concerned that this new interest from the FTC might inhibit innovation, so it should be interesting to see if the FTC will be able to do much reigning in.  By the way, when I went to retrieve the Political URL, I saw an article about “hacktivist” Jeremy Hammond getting 10 years in prison, so of course, I had to stop writing and spend another 45 minutes learning what that was all about.  Oh well, I guess that’s the nature of the “Internet of Things” (that’s the name of the FTC workshop).

http://www.123rf.com/photo_20341387_love-concept-love-key-on-the-computer-keyboard.html

Finally, I found Steven Katz and Vicki Rhode’s piece, “Beyond Technical Frames of Human Relations,” a bit hard to absorb.  If I understand their argument, it’s time to move beyond previous ethical frames to “human-machine” sanctity, which “recognizes the new relationship between him and and machines as whole entities” (p. 250). Call me old-fashioned (for sure!), but I don’t want to have “reciprocity” with my machines (p. 251). The authors bemoan the fact that some mechanized procedures and processes, most notably content management systems, seem to operate according to the machine’s specifications and for its own purposes rather than for people or organizations (p.235), but their proposal that we humanize our machines so that they become “you”s rather than the objects that they actually are seems to be a prescription for making the situation worse.

Did I just not understand this? Do I just need to come to grip with digital “being” and the “Internet of Things”?

Functional Ethics and Privacy

Katz and Rhodes started out their foray into ethics and technology in Beyond Ethical Frames of Technical Relations by exploring briefly the potential hypocrisy in a nonprofit of using different terms to describe cognitively disabled people in internal communication versus external communication. This example certainly played into their arguments that communication can vary depending upon what ethical frame people are using at a given moment.

It reminded me of an article that I read which made the claim that profanity is shifting, making terms that derogate minority populations far more taboo than they ever were in the past. This lends greater weight to the idea that ethics may exist in various levels, because that company certainly had a standard that conformed to cultural norms of proper terminology, but within that framework, the standard was different when utility was more important than brand maintenance. Yet, I doubt that disrespect to that population was meant, and truly disparaging terms were not used at all, instead they used simply less accepted but simpler terms in order to get the job done.

The same thing could easily be seen in verbal communication. Most people will behave in a more formal manner with an external customer than they will with a coworker, because the expectations of behavior differ based on familiarity. For example, when I email my coworkers, even about work related things, I may include something funny or an emoticon, which would be inappropriate with a customer or even a supervisor. I really don’t think that having different frames for ethics is something that is exclusive to technology, but that we often adjust our ethical code to match our audience, at least to some extent. But it is just like in technical communication, we always have to adjust to the needs of the audience.

http://likeable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/4678884792_acfeba9fe5.jpg

Like ethics, privacy and trust are interesting topics to consider in relation to emerging media. While the Paine Schofield and Joinson article Privacy, Trust, and Disclosure Online delves primarily into how such concepts interact in an e-commerce situation, I always think of privacy as it functions within my job. I work at a hospital, so I sort of think of internet privacy like medical records. Because of HIPAA, medical records are privileged information and so most people would not think twice about them, people just assume that they are extremely private. However, they don’t know or consider the people who handle the information that goes into their medical record, the people who ensure that information is placed correctly and is complete. Many people see medical information before it is filed or committed to the electronic medical record. But, it is still considered private information because all those people who have seen the information are not allowed to talk about it.

I feel like internet privacy is very similar. Generally, if people don’t think too deeply about it, they will assume that they have complete privacy in their online interactions, when the reality is that they have less absolute anonymity than they believe. But, because of a reputation economy that regulates privacy to some extent, there is some level of privacy, even if it is not as absolute as we would like. There is also always the potential for a breach in privacy. I think that generally, it is far easier for us to assume a safety that doesn’t exist because doing otherwise would cripple our ability to function effectively within our increasingly technology saturated world.

Scams and Accountability

The reading brings up the idea of actual privacy and perceived privacy.  This is a very good point because someone may feel that their information is save when it isn’t.  A good example of this is using a credit card when online shopping.  Even though a company can have on their website that they’re a secure site, they might be using order files that contain credit card numbers.  When I worked at the software company that made and sold order management software, I’d see this all the time.  There are updated versions of the software that don’t allow for credit card numbers to be displayed, but if someone hadn’t updated their software they were carelessly storing customer data.  The customer felt safe because the site provided the appearance of being secure, but in reality credit card numbers are available to everyone that works for that company.  There were many times I even saw credit card data supporting customer support inquiries.

Another example of actual and perceived privacy is going out to eat at a restaurant and paying your bill with your credit card.  This is pretty standard, as it seems most people don’t carry cash.  Your waiter can be walking away with your credit card and scamming your information.  below is a link to an example story of waiters using skimming devices to copy credit card numbers so they could create counterfeit cards to use to purchase expensive items and sell them for cash.

http://money.msn.com/identity-theft/article.aspx?post=450f13b5-f7c3-422c-a953-7def3d7a80e0

Some of you might be wondering what credit card skimming is.  The image below shows some details about how credit card skimming can be done.  The link below the image takes you to an article (where you’ll also see this image) that provides some more information about credit card skimming.

http://www.businessinsider.com/hackers-tech-credit-card-skimming-2011-10

The reading makes a point that “we take it on faith people are who they say they are.”  This is so true in many aspects, such as online dating.  When you go on a site like match.com you’re just believing the person’s profile is an accurate representation of who they are.  This issue goes deeper than that though.   Celebrities get scammed this way by “catfishing”.  I saw on the news the other day that Brad Paisely and his wife got scammed by someone claiming their daughter was dying and she just wanted to speak to them.  The woman running the scam never asked for money, but when she said her daughter passed away she asked that Brad Paisely provide a song he had sung on the phone for the funeral service.

The link below (that also contains the image above) provides the story in text and video form.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/uncovering-dying-daughter-hoax-lured-celebrities/story?id=20793858

The video also mentioned this wasn’t the first celebrity that was scammed this way.  It’s very sad to think people would play on the emotions of another person in such a way.  This I guess opens the door to ethics, which was also part of the reading this week.  I know the reading focused more on workplace and email ethics, which I think is an important topic being email is replacing conversations.  I think that email is not only quick to fire off and get a response, but it also covers you from taking the blame for something.  For example, If I call someone at work and ask if something is ok and they say yes, I have no evidence that approval happened if something goes wrong.  If it was done via email, the accountability is on that person.

https://exploreb2b.com/articles/accountability-at-work-and-at-home

I think in the “cut-throat” world we live in makes the workplace tough because everyone is on the go and wants to look good.  Ethics sometimes take a backseat.

Frames and Ethical Implications in a Digital Being World

This week, I was really into reading about “The Digital Being” as discussed in regards to the Being Frame.

http://www.fao.org/docrep/007/j0902e/j0902e04.htm

I became engrossed in the idea of how ever-growing and expanding ranges of technologies “continue to sweep over culture and into our organizations” so much that as noted, practitioners and scholars must learn to understand and address the ethical implications (241).  One way, according to Digital Literacy this week, is to understand the ethical frames of technical relations.   And I could not help but think here about Mr. Clinton for some reason, denying any “relations” with that woman, Monica Lewinsky.   It is just where my mind unexpectedly wandered when I read the word relations.   I suppose in the context of living in a world where we now must consider our technical relations in addition to our personal relations, it does seem appropriate to connect to the idea of ethics and how this inevitably will always come back to any relationship we have.

http://www.audioville.co.uk/store/product/view.php?Id=68&ProductCategoryId=47

One of the most powerful ideas, for me, was this about our digital being from Katz and Rhodes: “Digital being has enabled us to forget that our values, our thinking, and our work are heavily defined by our technology, and that much of our life now exists outside our flesh, essentially in digital bodies” (239).   Suddenly, just after reading this, I had a vision of my family, friends, and colleagues as these digital beings, and then I thought, how much of their real selves do I really know?  What ethical implications does this have on my relationships and the way we might treat each other?  Do their digital beings treat others differently than their flesh selves?   I basically sat with lots of questions on my mind, and I saw the world almost in a very Matrix-like fashion where I am not sure who the real person is when I meet someone compared to the digital person.

http://imageevent.com/afap/wallpapers/thematrix;jsessionid=9uwbjkply4.eagle_s?p= 22&b=-1&m=-1&c=4&w=2&s=1&n=1&l=0&z=9

Another idea developed under this one is that the digital being has now taken over in a way that we are not as capable as people of the past, and our “digital machines have literally replaced our ‘mental storage’ of ‘information’…” (239), especially when it comes to the workplace and writing.  The specific example was how new employees struggle with writing and spelling because we are so programmed to use spell-check and grammar check systems that we no longer store the necessary information to become efficient writers.  I see this with students, also.  I also see it in math with the use of calculators.  I have a friend who teaches math prep courses, and she tells me often of students who do not know their multiplication tables without the use of a calculator (these are adult learners.)   And so now, I see that their digital being has learned these skills in a digital fashion, and when stripped of the technology tool, they are left lacking fundamental skills to survive in the work world and world in general.  Are we to expect that is okay because it is the way they have learned?   I find a little bit of an ethical struggle right here alone.  What is the responsibility of humans today in these contexts?

The other ethical frame I want to address briefly here is the Thought Frame and quickly tie it into the Digital Being.  The last questioning thoughts from the section on “Thought  Frame” really had me thinking about my organization: “Does your organization conceptualize or refer to communication as a transmission of information from sender to receiver? Does it regard emotional response in the workplace as noise in the system?” (237).    If we are very much defined by our digital beings in the workplace, and we communicate via email, videos,  webinars, podcasts, social media, and texting more than we do f2f, isn’t it much easier to become just a receiver in the system?   When our authentic selves present an emotional response to something, do we just become noise that interrupts the system?  When are we allowed to present our deep, meaningful self versus our digital being?  Is there a more appropriate time for one than the other?  I find that I am weighing heavily how technology has changed relations and ethics together on a very basic human level: how we see how our selves and how we then communicate with each other.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Self.jpg

Achieving digital utopia in the workplace

“Ideally, with improved staff spirits and strengthened commitment to the company, in the sanctity frame, employees who are treated as whole human beings will in turn consider the organization’s best interest along with their own, resulting in actions like taking better care of equipment, being frugal with company materials, and treating coworkers with respect” (Katz and Rhodes, 2010, p. 253).

What a utopic vision of the workplace! Truthfully, I think my company has nearly achieved this level of ethical standards with regards to digital technologies, but, for a long time, this was not the case. For several years, we employed outside sales reps who were from the age of old school sales where most client communications were done in-person and notes about the account were kept filed away somewhere in the rep’s home office filing cabinet. The problem with this is that the information is not easily accessible by other members of the sales staff who need it. To counteract this, my company integrated an online customer relationship management (CRM) software that could be accessed anywhere, as long as you had Internet access (and, more recently, available as a mobile phone app).  This CRM program is the one I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog – Salesforce.

Image source: http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Macvean

Like I was saying, these reps were old school and they fought using Salesforce tooth and nail. Information was rarely entered, phone calls were not logged and there was no accountability. Bringing this back into an ethical framework, was it unethical of these employees to not record their sales activities via the company’s required digital system, or was it unethical of the company to expect these employees, with fewer technological skills, to conform?

At one point in our reading, Katz and Rhodes (2010) said, almost in a disbelieving, joking way, “Imagine hiring an employee who did not know how—or refused—to use email as part of the job!” (p. 245). Yep, that was our company up until a few years ago. All of these old school sales reps are gone now.  The staff we have now is very adept with technology and uses the CRM fully. For a long time, our sales process was very painful, but now it feels like a well-oiled machine.

I think these former employees had a fear of technology. It was something they didn’t understand, and they definitely were not digital natives. Even less so than many of us in this class! Could part of their fear have anything to do with privacy and trust? With Salesforce, whatever information you enter is visible to everyone else who uses the program. With written notes and files, you can pick and choose what you share with the rest of the team (which they did during our weekly sales department calls).

Image source:
http://clairefaucett.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/fear-of-technology-the-double-edged-sword

The topic of privacy is an interesting one, not only with regards to something like a CRM program, but also with email and Internet use in the workplace. Most companies have IT departments that closely monitor the email and Internet usage of its employees, which I think is fair. They want to ensure that these tools are used

1) as means to help the company, whether it’s for increasing sales, improving workflows, communicating with vendors and clients, crunching numbers, etc., and

2) in a way that appropriately (ethically) represents the company and preserves its reputation.

So, how much control should a company have over its employees’ technology use? At our company, we have quite a bit of free rein. It makes sense, though, as the majority of our employees work in sales and marketing and we need access to the Internet (including social media sites) to research and learn about clients and competitors. We use email just as much as we use the phone for reaching out to clients and prospects. Our CRM program is online. For the most part, I think the trust that our company places in us makes us want to be more responsible and we rarely have any issues with people abusing this right. According to Schofield and Joinson (2008), this trust comes from the company’s belief in our abilities, integrity and benevolence (p. 19). The company believes that we not only know how to use technology, but that we know how to use it appropriately.

“With great power comes great responsibility.” 
-Uncle Ben, Spiderman

I am grateful for this freedom and trust, especially when I hear about other companies. A coworker of mine was just telling me yesterday that a friend of hers works for a cabinet-making company where there is absolutely no allowance for using email or cell phones for personal reasons at work. In fact, copies of employee email transactions are printed into hard copy each day for review. And, if anyone is caught using their cell phones, it can be grounds for immediate dismissal. Yikes! Is this within the rights of the employer to monitor technology usage in the workplace, or does it transcend those rights and become an invasion of privacy? If someone needs to make a personal call because of a sick child, does the company have any right to interfere? This brings up another interesting question – if the technological device being used belongs to the company vs. the individual, who decides how it can be used?

Image source:
http://movieswithdor.blogspot.com/2013/01/should-sundance-do-more-to-stop-cell.html

I don’t necessarily have all the answers to these questions, but I think there might be a final project idea in there somewhere, so ask me again in a few weeks and I might have a few answers! Overall, though, the discussion of ethics is interesting and a rather nice way to put a bow on everything we’ve learned this semester. Now that we have a better understanding of how digital technologies have come about and changed the field of technical communications, how do we use these technologies in a way that is right and good and furthers our field for the better?

With that, I wish everyone the best of luck in pursuing these ideals. It has been a real pleasure getting to know all of you this semester, and, hopefully, our paths will cross again soon!

What’s the limit? Limiting computer, internet, & email at work

Due to technical nature of technical communication (I know, big surprise!) we, as professionals, must address ethics and how they’re related to technology.  Clearly, ethical concerns arise in any field of work, but they relate to technical communication differently than other areas.

Source: http://www.connectworld.net/www1.html

 

 

I think many of us who currently work for any (type of) company that requires the use of computers, the internet, and/or email, have had to sign an “acceptable use,” “internet use,” or “email use” agreement.  (If not, stay tuned.  I’m sure one will be coming to you soon enough.)  Acceptable use policies are becoming more common, as employers are limiting what employees can and cannot access at work and protecting themselves in case of the possible reprimand of an employee.  The reason employers have to limit the use of the internet is that the internet is everywhere.  Compare surfing the internet to watching a TV show.  What do these activities have in common?  Both are entertaining activities that you can partake in at home.  What’s different?  You can surf the internet at work, but you cannot watch TV at work (unless it’s part of your job, obviously.  However, I don’t think most of use sit around with a TV readily available at work).  Engaging in internet use is something people can do anywhere and, as a result, companies have created policies so their employees know the expectations of acceptable use of computers and the internet.  Although Katz and Rhodes seem to abandon the idea of limiting employees’ use of the internet and email, I think this is a fair ethical standard as long as the policy is consistent, clearly stated, and frequently mentioned.  I work as a teacher for a large school district and the acceptable use policy in my school district is stricter than strict, but the Human Resources department does a good job of communicating expectations to employees.  My school has signs posted in every area used predominantly by teachers informing us that they are monitoring us via email, internet, and video surveillance.  Furthermore, the Director of Human Resources sends out periodic emails informing employees that they will subject to investigation for inappropriate email and internet use.  I know of teachers who would probably engage in inappropriate technology use if they weren’t so fearful of being investigated.  However, the Director has definitely scared most of us enough to leave our personal business at home.

Source: http://www.any-employee-monitor.com/internet-monitoring.html

Katz and Rhodes discuss the idea that many companies expect employees to use email for “neutral” purposes, or messages that do not contain any incriminating information.  Is it possible to separate an employee’s necessary work from the internet?  What if employers only allowed employees to communicate with coworkers in a “neutral” way when talking f2f, too?  I don’t think limiting the way employees interact with one another through email is a fair ethical standard in the workplace.  As a teacher, I am explicitly told not to communicate with the parents of students in any that they would consider questionable.  If I need to contact a parent about grades or behavior, the administrators at my school encourage teachers to contact the parent by telephone because, unless the parent records the conversation, it cannot be used against the teacher later.  Due to the number of schools and teachers getting sued, this is what email communication as a teacher has boiled down to.  I think society has taken a turn for the worst in this regard.  I don’t think teachers should be fearful of backlash based on their communication via the internet, especially when the communication is work-related (about their child).  Sadly, I have to edit myself when emailing parents and usually just step away from my computer and pick up the phone.  I don’t mind calling parents, but I think I should be able to email them if I want to.  In my opinion, I should not have to worry about the details of an email message when communicating with my students’ parents, but with lawsuits and teacher investigations, that is what teachers of today must consider.

In technical communication, and in every area of work that uses email, the internet, and computers, we must consider ethical issues.  In the future, I would like to see the standards change.  I think that some limitations on computer, internet, and email use is acceptable to some degree, but I think trust in a competent employee can be much more powerful than constantly monitoring every aspect of an employee’s work life.

Digital Literacy across cultures

I know that I’ve mentioned this example before in reference to global culture, but it directly relates to this week’s reading about digital literacy across cultures. I was fortunate to be part of a project that had stakeholders in the Midwest, Ireland, and India. The main purpose was to create a system and interface that would search and analyze… specific data. My role was to create a user-guide to help people utilize the system. There were several obstacles that needed to be resolved during my involvement in the project.

I worked closely with the primary tester, and she would use the system, try to stress it, and also validate the results of each test search. She logged all issues on the project SharePoint site. She recalled early in the project that the form originally classified the issues as defects, but that needed to be changed. The India team viewed the term defects as pointing blame. They would spend days researching whether the issue was in fact a defect, or if it was a design feature that was simply not working correctly. By reclassifying it as an issue, we eliminated the idea of blame. This allowed them to spend their time fixing the issue rather than researching who was at fault.

There were status calls twice a week, which allowed the project manager to collect status updates from each area, and also helped clarify what each person’s role was and the expectations for the week. I’m not sure if these calls were done for convenience, accountability, or because of deeper cultural reasons like Thatcher described in this week’s reading. I do know that it seemed to help people stay on task and understand their responsibilities.

Retrieved from http://www.humanfactors.com

We also encountered issues with the design and layout of the program. I found it difficult to use because most of the fields you entered data into or selected criteria from were not labeled. The lead tester had the same complaints, but was told that it was too late to make those kinds of changes. Part of the job of the user guide was to explain how to use the system, and part was to help American and European users overcome the awkward and confusing layout and interface. I wish I knew if it was a cultural difference, or if it was just a poorly designed interface.

I guess I’ve always taken general usability for granted, but this week’s readings by Thatcher and Blakeslee have made me realize that convenient usability is a factor of our cultural experiences, and that a different culture would have different experiences to draw from. What seems logical and convenient to me might seem confusing or awkward to someone from another culture. The areas of the internet that I frequent seem to be tailored to an American, or at least and English speaking user, but I would really be interested in seeing the potential layout and organizational difference of a website designed with a different culture in mind.

Ishii’s research about mobile phone usage was very interesting. It seemed like a well-done study, and it is one that I would appreciate seeing carried out again. He might be able to find stronger correlations today than he was able to when the study was originally carried out. I think he would find the mobile phone usage breakdown would still be similar between home, work, and away from work. Expected differences would be the level of usage for the average person, especially teenagers, and I would also predict a difference in the social skills among mobile phone users. It is easy for me to make predictions based on my own observations, but I really would like to see the research.

Retrieved from http://www.innovationsinnewspapers.com

Parlez-vous français?

. . . . I sure don’t but I had interesting experiment last semester communicating in a language I don’t know the first thing about! To clarify, I am talking about ENGL-712 Communicating in Multilingual Environments. As part of the final project for the class, we had to find a foreign language site and use Google Translate  to try and not just write a post or comment on the site, but get actual responses back from the other users.  I chose a French site thinking that since two kids are learning French, they might be able to help me out if I got in a bind. Wishful thinking that was, but it was still a fascinating experiment.  This was just a small part of a semester long class in understanding how a company that  has international clients that don’t speak English as their primary language, communicates with these clients.

I ended up enjoying this class so much that when I took ENGL-637 this summer, I focused on a small local company that had found themselves becoming an International company without really planning on it. They are a manufacturing company and they have quite a few instruction manuals that they are in the process of updating.  I went in intent on finding out how they handle (or take into consideration) their international clients as they are updating the manuals. Do they translate them? Do they do any adjusting for translation on the other end? What special things do they need to take into consideration as they write manuals with  non-native English speakers as their end users?  The answer I found out pretty quickly was – NOTHING.  They found translating to be cost prohibitive (which it is even for large companies) and since they are selling their machinery to a middle man – a distributor – they seem to be legally covered safety-wise without needing to translate the documents. I also found their attitude to be similar to Thatcher’s (2010) comment:

“Unfortunately, this kind of ethnocentrism—assuming that another culture will simply use digital media the same way as your own—is actually quite common in much U.S. research and theory, a point I discuss more thoroughly elsewhere (Thatcher, 2005).” (p. 170)

When I asked more questions about their lack of translation, the comment was, (I am paraphrasing here) “Oh we don’t need to worry about it,  Everyone we deal with speaks English really well”.  I was pretty shocked!  Interestingly enough, when I posed a similar question to my husband, whose company is also International, he said almost the exact same thing.  When  I asked my husband about translating legal documents, he said they have the plant in that location hire a translator to do that. Similarly, the company I worked with this summer relies on the end user to do all translating.  When I asked my husband how they know the document (in his case usually contracts) says what they want it to say, he kind of stared at me with a blank face.  When I pointed out to the summer company that their distributors may be able to speak English but (a) it is probably British English (and there is a difference) and (b) just because they can speak it doesn’t mean they can read it well enough to put machinery together,

they stared at me with blank faces (I love stumping people with an attitude!). In both cases, they just don’t know what they don’t know.  The company from ENGL-637 is just now venturing into putting all of their documents online in digital format with the intent of eventually having it be an interactive online-help system. If their digital literacy is anything like their  (albeit, currently being upgraded) manual-writing-system literacy where international clients are concerned, they will need more help than they realize.  Digital literacy is still a new and expanding field even in our own country, much less understanding how other countries will use this form of communication. Unfortunately, our embarrassing ethnocentric attitude may get in the way of ever being completely digitally literate where foreign clients are concerned.

Who is my audience?

Technical Writing is what I like to do. Many people do not understand what I do, but I found this really neat image describing it.

http://idratherbewriting.com/2012/03/02/technical-communication-metrics-what-should-you-track/

What does this image have to do with this weeks reading? Not much I just wanted to show this neat graphic.

This week the topic was audience. Who is our audience and how to we make sure that we are writing to this audience. I started my job at Sansio in 2002. In 2004 I started working in our Solution Center (Call Center), by 2005 I was working with the in house trainer and maintaining the training powerpoint. Throughout my use of the powerpoint and through my stint as Implementation Coordinator, this one powerpoint turned into 3 with an average of 300 slides a piece.In addition, the training manager had me create checklists to support the learning. The maintenance of these materials was very time consuming, but still was not the main portion of my job. When I was promoted to QA Specialist in 2007 training was changed to be online training and the Business Analysts who took over training no longer used the PowerPoint. At that time I no longer did technical writing. It wasn’t until I took my Technical Writing Practiuum in 2010 that I started writing. My supervisor found that I was good at it and I have been creating/updating User Guide Pages, creating Release Notes and updating other user materials.

AUDIENCE

Its always important to understand our audience. I have special knowledge of our audience because of my experience with our Solution Center and as Implementation Coordinator. I spent years talking to customers during and after their initial training of HomeSolutions. The image below gives a nice description of what I should be thinking about what I start my writing.

http://www.wikihow.com/Conduct-Audience-Analysis

Analysis – HomeSolutions Users

Understanding – When I write, I assume the person has a basic knowledge of HomeSolutions and the terms that we use.

Demographics – Most HomeSolutions users are women around 40 and most do not have a formal degree. There is the occasional user who is a nurse with an advanced degree.

Interest – They are reading the document because they want to know how to use a specific piece of the product.

Environment – The document will be viewed in the users office, most likely online within the application.

Needs – They need to know how to use a piece of the application

Customization – Needs may be to provide an overall description of the page/features that they will be accessing.

Expectations – The ability to use the piece/feature in the future without having to reference the educational resource again.

When it comes to the other product I write for, RevNet, I take a little different approach. The RevNet product is new to everyone. The product has only been around for a little over a year, so everyone who uses this product is brand new. I spend more time on this product line documenting definitions of words and places within the application.

I sometimes worry that I am not writing to the exact needs of the audience. We do not get a lot of feedback on our writing, even by internal customers, and I have not been able to find the time to make sure I get usability testing done to make sure. One thing that would probably help would be creating a persona. A Persona is a very detailed description, including name, age and picture, of a person who will be using the resource being created. In Spilka’s book, Chapter 8 Addressing Audiences in a Digital Age by Ann M Blakeslee they also describe using the persona with the development staff so that they have a better understanding of who they are developing for. One reason I may not do a persona is that I feel I have a very good understanding of our audience because of my experience with our customers in the Solution Center.

How important are personas to writing for an audience? Do I really need to do them, since I have first hand experience with them in the past?

Oh, how the audience has changed!

In our Digital Literacy reading this week, I found much interesting content, and I got stuck on the idea of audience in the digital age from Chapter 8.  Now with technology allowing writing in the digital age readily accessible to potentially all Internet users or to anyone who can access  an online document, this much broader sense of audience really does cause some serious consideration for technical communicators.  Who, exactly, are they trying to reach and why?  Are they friends, fans, or followers?  The idea of considering the target audience has taken on new meaning in our Internet, user-driven, and social media run online world these days.

http://www.scottkirsner.com/fff/preview.html

I found that the five case studies offered to us by Blakeslee were helpful in gaining an understanding when thinking about the much bigger “audience” a tech writer now must consider.  She notes, ” …we still need to approach audiences as contextual, unique, and particular, just as we have been doing all along” (202).    This finding made me think of the old adage, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”    I cannot help but think that audiences will  always be very specific, very particular, and  very clear in what they want.   I think this line sums it up nicely, “Such evidence also points to the need to tease out the unique and complex characteristics of modern digital audiences” (202).    It seems that digital communicators these days, much like in days past, should still seriously consider their audience and its needs to really reach the users.

http://www.7thingsmedia.com/blog/7thingsmedia-attend-integrated-marketing-week/

This idea of heuristics was brand new to me; “the digital environment gives writers various mechanisms, or heuristics, for this learning–in other words, it provides them with alternative methods for understanding user needs and a means to solicit user feedback during both early and later phases of learning and research; it also helps them respond to and interact with users” (204).  It is this new age of interaction that really has me intrigued with today’s digital communication age.  The entire concept of audience in the online arena has changed with the way we can and do interact with each other on the Internet.  Now, digital communicators work in a world where they know their audience might prefer interaction and the opportunity to offer feedback right away compared to earlier days where this was not necessarily possible.   The audience of today is a bit more demanding.

With the demands and desires of audiences today, digital communicators who realize that this process is much more user driven today will benefit and be able to target and retain their audiences. Those who ignore their audience needs or oversimplify their needs will not achieve success at reaching their audience.  It must be acknowledged that digital audiences are complex and will require a bit more than what we might have called an audience in former days.

I think the audience has more power today than ever before to affect how digital communicators must write.  Noted by Blakeslee are three very important ideas about how digital communicators must continue to gain a contextualized understanding of their audiences, and I think it is worth it here to point them out again:

• 1) need to know how readers will read and interact with their documents
• 2) need to know how and in what contexts readers with use their documents and
• 3) need to know what expectations readers will bring to their digital documents

I am not sure that in the past authors in the print or early digital realm really considered point three very much.  However, in this time of heavy user interaction, those who fail to realize and address the expectations brought by the reader will not reach them the same way others might.

http://monicatailor.com/page/2

Audience has really opened up quite a bit with the Internet and its power of interaction and immediate feedback.

Cultural Differences in Communication

This week’s readings provide some great insight into how technical communication (and communication in general) can have very different characteristics across cultures. Prior to reading Barry Thatcher’s chapter in Digital Literacy for Technical Communication, I hadn’t really thought about this as an issue; I had assumed that intuitive ways of providing instruction and organizing information didn’t vary among cultures. Thatcher’s example of his environmental project with the U.S. and Mexico border illustrates that this was not a valid assumption (although I don’t feel quite so bad because Thatcher admittedly made the same incorrect assumption while teaching technical communication at an Ecuadorian University).

Thatcher presents a framework upon which we can identify the areas of communication that are evident in all cultures: I/Other, Norms/Rules, and Public/Private. He summarizes how different cultures deal with these areas differently, and the implication is that different treatment of these areas requires the use of appropriate communication methods. To communicate effectively within a culture, we need to understand these three areas within the culture and adjust our communication methods accordingly. Even so, Thatcher believes that it is possible and desirable to adapt digital communications to be relevant cross-culturally.

Kenichi Ishii’s article, “Implications of Mobility: The Uses of Personal Communication Media in Everyday Life,” provides another perspective on cultural differences in communication. Ishii makes various points about mobile media in Japan that differ from my understanding of mobile media in the United States. I am wondering whether the differences are because things have changed since 2006 when the article was published, because of cultural differences in how people use mobile media in Japan versus the United States, or a mixture of both.

http://rosterplus.com.au/new-site/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/sms_v_email.jpg

Ishii (2006) uses the term “mobile mail” to describe both SMS and email messages “via mobile phones because in Japan, SMS and e-mail have almost converged into one service (mail) and users usually cannot clearly distinguish between these two services” (p. 346-347). In my experience, this is very different from in the U.S. Here, SMS messages (text messages) are primarily used as short form communication between two  or more well-acquainted mobile phone users, and they travel from one mobile phone number to another. Emails tend to be slightly more formal, email addresses are significantly less private than mobile phone numbers, email messages travel from one email address to another (even if the email is viewed on a mobile phone), and emails can be much longer than text messages.

References to the portable radio, Walkman, and pager also made me wonder whether Japan is at a different point in adoption of mobile technologies or whether the article is simply out of date. In the U.S., portable radios and the Walkman (a portable CD player) have largely been replaced by MP3 players (like the iPod) or by mobile phones that can play music. Pagers have also lost ground to mobile phones. In understanding an article about the implications of mobility on everyday life in Japan, it would be helpful to know whether the differences I noticed are a result of a 7 year old article or cultural differences between Japan and the United States.

http://blog.activ8me.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/mob-vs-landline.jpg

I found it very interesting that in Japan users make the most calls using their mobile phones from home, second most from work, and fewest when they are out and about. I wonder if this is true for the United States too. Despite the fact that I have landlines both at home and at work, this is probably true for me as well. I think this is mostly because my mobile phone also acts as a PDA, and I can access my entire phone book in one place and simply press a button to call rather than having to look up and dial a phone number on a landline phone.

Ishii (2006) posits that Japanese youth use text messages as a way to feel connected while avoiding conflict and demanding relationships (p. 349). This is definitely a parallel phenomenon to the U.S. trend Sherry Turkle references in Alone Together. While both Japanese and U.S. youth apparently replace face to face communication with mobile communication at least to some extent, Ishii does point out a study in which about 50% more U.S. adolescents than Japanese  adolescents felt that they could initiate a conversation with someone they don’t know. In any case, it seems that understanding cultural differences in communication will help technical communicators to communicate effectively both within different cultures and across cultures.

 

Location changes audience demands and the Internet can cure depression?

I’ve never traveled out of the country, so I find it interesting the reading this week stated different countries have websites that show information differently, for example they use less pictures.  This does make sense to me because I think about living in NJ and traveling to other places within the US.  It’s amazing how different things can be in different states.  I know NJ is very fast paced and when I travel sometimes it’s like being in a different country!  In some places people are much more relaxed and friendly.  I liked the example website provided in the reading, but would have enjoyed a deeper dive into examples of websites in different countries and why they are created the way they are.  I did some Googling and found a website in Spain and Ireland, and both have a combination pictures and words.  It looks like they’re laid out similar to websites that I’d expect to see in the US, so I’m not sure if I’m missing something, or not researching enough sites/locations.

Example sites:

http://www.enlavaguada.com/W/do/centre/inicio

http://www.thymerestaurant.ie/

Some of this is over my head information wise as I’ve never built a website, but there’s plenty of information on the web about how to build sites that will be used in different regions and how important it is to communicate with people in their own language.  The site below provides a lot of information on this topic.

http://searchengineland.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-multilingual-and-multiregional-seo-157838

I find it interesting the readings mentioned that studies haven’t really been done on how audiences are adapting to the digital age.  I found the case studies that were done though to be interesting.  The one mentioned how they use their support calls to help create content.  When I managed a knowledge base I used to do the same thing.  I’d go through the customer support ticket logs and listen in on phone calls to see what customers were asking and how they were asking it.  This helps get insight into what the customer needs to know and helps build the structure of the knowledge base so the customer could find it.  The reading also mentioned that the online environment is designed for quick feedback.  This is a very good point because in most knowledge bases users can leave comments or choose to give a thumbs up if the article was useful and a thumbs down if the article wasn’t helpful.

The reading did mention one of the issues with online content is that the information is available for everyone.  I don’t think this is true though, as some websites you have to log in to get access to content.  It is true that the content can be emailed to someone and be shared quickly and easily, but paper content can be photocopied and passed around too.

I also found The Implications of Mobility study entertaining.  I’d like to comment on three points I picked out:

• 58% of business users agreed with “mobile phones restrict my freedom”

I can really understand this comment.  I have a work cell phone and I agree it restricts my freedom.  For example, there are two big meetings this week on Tuesday and Wednesday I’m managing material for.  I’ve been receiving emails/texts and working over the weekend because I’m accessible via my work phone.  I feel the days of having a weekend to myself are gone!

http://joyreactor.com/post/470277

• Mobile phones blur the boundary between public and private space

I agree that it seems people have private conversations in public places.  Just waiting online at the grocery store you can hear more about a person than you need to.

• Internet could reduce depression by providing a means to obtain social support

I’ve never thought about the Internet being helpful to people in this way, but I guess it really could.  I think if someone is being bullied and they find a support group and bond with people, it really can turn their attitude around.  Even if they’re talking to someone across the globe, it’s someone that relates to them and understands them.

What does it take to be “digitally literate?”

Thus far in the course, we have read about individuals using the Web to find work, love, and entertainment.  Now, at last, we have read about the audience and the implications for a digital world.  I feel like what we learned in this week’s readings are somewhat no-brainers because we are becoming so incredibly familiar with technology and digital literacy, but nonetheless, the authors presented many excellent points.  However, when my eyes scanned the sentence that mentions, “audiences of digital documents may different from those of print documents,” I almost chuckled to myself (Blakeslee, 2010, p. 201).  Blakeslee also mentions that now, nearly all texts that technical communicators design is created for digital use, which means that even if a text is in print, likely, a digital version also exists.

When technical communicators create texts explicitly for use on the Web, they need to keep several factors in mind.  They need to know how readers will engage in the texts, the frequency readers will use the documents, the scenario in which readers will use the text, and the expectations readers have.  As a result, designing texts for the Web is a complicated process.  In digital texts, users have a greater opportunity to engage their readers.  For example, readers of an online text have the ability to leave comments on a text and provide a technical communicator with immediate feedback.

As a K-12 educator, I envision the increase for digital literacy within the next decade.  In the future, it will be nearly impossible to survive in the world without digital literacy skills.  The need to read and write digital texts will continue to grow as desktop computers, mobile phones, tablets, and laptops become obligatory in school and workplace settings.  So, what specific skills will readers need to be deemed “digitally literate?”

First, basic reading and writing skills are necessary to begin becoming digitally literate.  A reader must have the ability to read scholarly information of higher reading levels and to construct highly effective pieces of writing in a digital setting.  Next, familiarity with various technologies is also an important digital literacy skill.  A reader must be able to use the Web, word processors, and other programs to design and publish information.  Additionally, the ability to search and locate through various technological tools is vital to becoming digitally literate.  Readers need must be able to use computers, mobile phones, etc. to their advantage.  Readers must also be able to evaluate digital sources and determine their credibility.  As I mentioned last week, with so many “voices” on the Web, it is critical for a digitally literate reader to be able to decipher which texts he/she can trust.  Furthermore, digitally literate must be able to determine what not to read.  With information so readily available, readers usually do not have the time to read everything, so they must have the skill to determine relevance.

In my opinion, readers of digital texts need even more skills than do traditional readers.  For most of us now, the transition from traditional to digital is complicated.  However, since the children of today are born with a mobile phone in one hand and a laptop in the other, digital literacy skills will continue to develop and change, as new technologies develop in the future.

Beyond methodology: Looking at the cultural foundations of technology use

I have long known the great necessity for technical communicators to understand their audience. Blakeslee’s ideas that we need to focus in on a specific audience is hardly news. I even had an understanding that communication has to be adapted across cultural lines so that people from different cultures can easily understand. In order to communicate with a broader audience, you may have to adapt your methods. When I think of adapting communication for a cross-cultural audience, I think of IKEA assembly instructions. They are an excellent example, because they rely fully on pictures and remove the necessity for translation in order to be used in different countries. Apparently some people think that IKEA instructions are difficult to follow, but I think that those people would likely be even more confused by written instructions in Swedish.

http://notanotherhistoryteacher.edublogs.org/files/2012/01/
best-cell-phone-plans-2-11ep8kq.jpg

However, while I know that communications methods have to be adapted in order to communicate across cultural lines, I never really put any thought into the idea that the very way that technology is used can vary between cultures. I liked the way Baron explained the phenomena in Always On by comparing how we use technology to how people in China and India eat rice differently and how English and German people drive differently, not because of how the item is intrinsically different, but because the culture is different (pp.130-131).

It is the deeper issue, the foundation, that will matter. If we don’t understand how a culture uses a technology, any communication with members of that culture is going to fail to some degree if we don’t question the assumptions that are guiding our decisions. In Digital Literacy for Technical Communication, Thatcher gives the example of the differences in website construction between collective and individualistic cultures. While it makes sense that there would be differences in content, it is really interesting that the standards for an effective website are different to the point that the entire site may not be put together as a cohesive whole, but that different departments would be completely unique.

I do wonder though, how much variation there may be within a culture. For example, Thatcher showed examples of how the same information would be formatted differently for two different cultures. I actually thought that the American version of the letter was too abrupt, and preferred the version intended for the Mexican audience as it seemed more gracious.

Or even considering cell phone usage, I feel like everyone I know uses their phones differently. I know people whose whole lives are contained in their phone and they use it for everything. I know people who only have a landline, and people who are avid texters. I know people who are phone talkers and phone avoiders (that is me). And that is just among some of my closest friends. How do you define a culture’s use of technology when it can vary so severely from person to person? And how can you communicate effectively with a culture, if there is such variability in technology usage? Are basic cultural trends good enough to base a communication strategy off of?

Cross Cultural Communication Requires More Than Simple Translation

This week’s readings remind up that effective intercultural communication requires more than simple translation.
http://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/35857.html

Probably the most interesting reading for me this week was “Understanding Digital Literacy Across Cultures” by Barry Thatcher, though I found all of them pretty interesting. One of the reasons I found Thatcher’s piece so interesting is that at my school we’ve been trying to increase our international student enrollment, and I’ve always wondered (on the periphery of my brain) how our website must appear to people of other cultures and countries.  For example, we have a partner school in Wuhan China, the South Central University for Nationalities, where we recruit students to enroll in our Master of Science in Education with Emphasis in English.  I decided to go to their website to see if and how it might differ from ours―and so much of what Thatcher explained held true!

For example, there were no pictures of people on the SCUN site, and not nearly the sheer number of pictures that we have on our website so this is an example that in studies “more diffuse websites had relatively few pictures” and perhaps the concept that the public space of a website is “not the appropriate medium for something as private as a picture” (of a person) (p.187). Also, there are a few pictures of major icons, historical buildings, a panda, and a few nice views of the campus, so this is an example of research that on Chinese Web sites “drew complexly on icons of Chinese heritage to display the significance of the collective whole (p. 187). Also, take a look at the “Accommodations” page:

http://www.csc.edu.cn/laihua/universitydetailen.aspx?collegeId=263

It’s a clinical picture of the accommodations, with no indication of people.  Compare it to the main Residence Hall page of my school’s website, where all of the pictures focus on students:

http://www3.uwplatt.edu/residence-life

So, in thinking about our own website, we could not probably repurpose it for meeting the needs of our primary recruiting demographic (18.1 year olds who are largely from Wisconsin), but I wonder if we might create an alternative version for international students. In fact, SCUN has such a version.  Both of their websites are in English, but one is clearly meant for Western, native speaking English people and the other would be for a more localized audience. It seems the best way we might do this, according to Ann Blakesdale in “Addressing Audiences in A Digital Age,” is to get “a full, accurate―and contextualized―understanding of their audiences.  One way to acquire this, which was addressed by all writers from my cases, is to interact directly with members of our audiences” (220).  So, I think developing a site and asking our current international students to interact with it would be a great project for us to recruit more students and serve their needs more successfully.

This image comes from Rika’s Blog
http://rninomiya.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/japanese-cell-phone-keitai-culture/

Keitai Culture

Japanese cell phone culture came up in more than one reading this week: in “Going Mobile,” and “Always on,” by Naomi Baron (135, 233) and “Implications of Mobility,” by Kenichi Ishii ( p. 348).  Baron says that the government was pretty effective in “transforming outdoor use of keitai from talking to overwhelming texting instruments” (233), mostly because of collective governance .  This results from the need to negotiate appropriate activities in public space.

However, no culture mentioned this week has been terribly effective in separating the boundaries of home and the outside world (symbolized by the tradition of removing shoes before entering the house in Japan and India, Baron, p. 230) when it comes to mobile devices.

Land Lines?

There was a lot of data to absorb this week, and I’m afraid I got distracted on numerous occasions, stopping to look things up (I suppose this is a good thing!), but nothing disconcerted me so much as the statistic in “Always On” that 51% of American teenagers preferred land line phones.  That just astounded me because I work with so many young people every day, 99% of whom seem to have cell phones, and I hardly ever hear of anyone interacting on a land line.  I thought maybe it was a function of the fact that the article was published in 2008, so I did some research and found this PEW study from cnet. com (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57400439-93/teens-prefer-texting-over-phone-calls-e-mail/ ) that says that the number has indeed gone down.

This PEW study confirmed the trends we saw in this week’s reading.

In this study, the number has gone from 30% in 2009 to 14% in 2012, so that seems more in line with what my daily experience tells me.  Fourteen percent still seems high, but I am dealing with a pretty homogenous demographic, so my experience is most certainly skewed.

Examining Our Assumptions

The discussion of intercultural communication this week came shortly after I was in a workshop for intercultural communication in which we were asked to reflect on some of the assumptions we make in our communications with our international students, faculty, and staff on a whole host of issues. The presenters showed this video, which I had seen before, but I still got a good laugh and good reflection out of it, so I thought I’d share: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajq8eag4Mvc

It always comes back to your audience

For the most part, writing for a digital audience requires the same considerations as writing for traditional audiences. You must first look at the rhetorical situation. To do this, technical communicators must ask themselves a series of questions, including this question:

Who is the target of my message?

As you know, your audience can be broad and varied, or very specific. The problem with the digital world is that the audience tends to be the former, which can make it very challenging to decide how to create your message. How do you write a universal message for a non-universal group of people?

Well, I hate to say it, but you have to generalize the audience members. You can’t feasibly create a message that will work for each and every individual out there, so you just have to try to identify the most common features so you can address MOST of them.

How do you identify these common attributes? One of the best ways is learning directly from the user. Blakeslee (2010) talked about interacting with readers in this week’s readings – what you might call a “collaborative” audience or user-centered design. Of course, this hinges on having the audience provide feedback in order to help improve technical communications. However, like in the case study from TaxSoft, what if you don’t have direct contact with the customers? Or, in my own personal experience, what if it’s like pulling teeth to get user feedback?

Audience Challenge #1 – No Contact

Image source: http://loveanyway.theherosspouse.com/communication/no-contact_clearing-up-the-confusion

In the TaxSoft example, one of the employees interviewed said she had to get secondhand feedback from other departments or review call logs to see what customers were saying during conversations with their call center (p. 208). They did this because she (and her fellow technical writers) didn’t have a direct relationship with the customer. She commented that “writers are not subject-matter experts in our company, and, as such, it would not be appropriate to step into that relationship with our users” (Blakeslee, 2010, p. 209). I think this is very unfortunate. Perhaps this company needs their technical writers to start getting more involved with the customer?

The SecureNet case study, on the other hand, showcased employees who DID have relationships with their customers, going so far as to interview some of these audience members before starting a new project (p. 210).

Audience Challenge #2 – The Unengaged Audience

Image source: http://writtent.com/blog/5-social-media-content-mistakes-to-avoid

This is the audience that doesn’t provide feedback, or is very difficult to get feedback from. I have had this experience quite a bit in my place of work. A specific example is the online customer portal we launched earlier this year (that I’ve mentioned in previous blogs). We rolled it out in four groups. After each group was introduced to the site, I sought feedback from group members on the features of the site, if they were using it, what areas they liked best, etc. I probably sent out over 100 surveys and only had three or four returned to me. Those that were returned had little to no helpful feedback. What did I do wrong?

Well, it comes full circle because it has everything to do with the audience. My audience is not terribly tech savvy so many of them just weren’t using the site. Filling out a survey for a service they weren’t using didn’t make sense. For those that WERE using the site, they didn’t send us a survey back because they preferred to tell us in a more personal way. The most useful feedback we received was gathered during a phone conversation. Seems a bit old school, but, again, going back to the type of audience I have (not tech savvy), doing a telephone survey makes more sense.

Image source: http://morethanmarketing.net/category/measuring-social-media

Fortunately for me, my audience is typically quite specific. This can make it easier for us to create our message, although it’s not foolproof. But, this is actually one of the greatest things about digital technology! If we don’t get the message right the first time, we can change it anytime we want for little to no cost and for a modest amount of labor. With traditional communications (print), it can be time-consuming and costly to make changes. I just think about all those companies out there that still put together catalogs and how much time and resources that must cost them.

U-Line is a perfect example. They mail us a catalog once a month. Then, they send us a catalog with each order we place from them. Sometimes, we will get up to six or seven catalogs in a month! We think it’s a waste of paper and also prefer looking up products online anyway. Maybe this company needs to evaluate their audience a little better!

Image source: http://www.thriftyfun.com/tf/Organizing/Bills_and_Mail/Organizing-Catalogs.html

What is this “Second Life” thing?

This week both Qualman, in Socialnomics and Salvo and Rosinski, in Digital Literacy for Technical Communication, bring up the virtual world “Second Life“.  This is not the first time we have seen it referenced by Qualman but since it was also referenced by Longo, I felt it was time to take a hard look at this site.  They both seem to think we are all moving away from real life and going head first into these virtual worlds: “Those of us living in Western cultures based in technoscientific knowledge economies increasingly find ourselves thrust into virtual worlds where we inhabit avatars and interact with other simulated beings.” (Salvo & Rosinski, 2010, p. 155); “If you still don’t believe that some traditional interpersonal communication skills may be suffering, then maybe this example will make you a believer” (Qualman, 2009, p. 215).  I will say his (Qualman’s) commentary about the courtship and then marriage of Second Life players Amy and David was a little  . . . . creepy.  If that was a one time example of people moving from reality into the virtual world than I am not worried.  If, on the other hand, this is just one of many similar examples, then I can see where he is coming from.

The strange thing is, if this is such a popular game, one that is transforming the world around us, why haven’t I ever heard of it before?  I found a blog post that described the phenomena a little more in detail than the site itself does. According to The Verge’s Chris Stokel-Walker, this game was launched in 2006 with a ton of fanfare and media coverage (again, I did not have my head in the sand back in 2006 and I still don’t remember it!).  While the novelty wore off, in particular for the media and businesses using it to, of course, advertise, there is still a hard core group of around 1 million users. On any given day the popular Zynga game, Farmville 2 (also available through Facebook), can have as many as

8 million users and this game does not involve a parallel world where you can re-create yourself.  It is mostly just a silly game that other friends can help you play (in a limited, Facebook,  sort of way).  So is this idea that we are all going to become avatars a real threat or a hyped up one because both books were published within a couple years of the time this site first became popular (and I am sure their research and planning stages were even closer to the sites’ start date)? The best information I have is coming straight from the mouths of those most apt to play any sort of online games – teenagers.  After a very (very, very) informal survey of about 20 of my kids and their friends (all between the ages of 17-20 about 14 were boys and 6 were girls), none of them had heard of Second Life, the boys had all played other sorts of online games (such as Call of Duty, or World of Warcraft – both 3d virtual world style games but not as involved as Second Life), and the girls could care less about anything involving gaming. By no means is this scientific but it always gives me a little bit of the pulse of what is happening at least in our region, and a little peace of mind that I have one less thing to worry about!  I don’t think we are heading in the direction of a grand scale replacing real life with virtual worlds anytime soon but I guess it never hurts to be made aware of the future possibilities.

LinkedIn Culture and Community

Culture: “the ways in which people relate to each other within a particular social context – how their values, beliefs, assumptions, worldview, and so on are manifested through everyday actions and decisions.” Bernadette Longo – Where We Work (Spilka, 2010, pg 149)

Community: “a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals:”  Oxford Dictionary

There are a number of different Social Media Communities and the way that people act within those communities is the culture that they participate in. I have Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. The way I act within each of these communities is different. Facebook is more personal, I let people know about my feelings and what is going on with my family life. Twitter I am still figuring out, but use it more to find out what is happening in the world and with celebrities than with my family/friends/co-workers. LinkedIn is more professional. I connect with coworkers and other professional contacts there. The image below is a good description of where you would want to post specific items about your day depending on who you want to see and who you want to have to discuss this with.

http://imonlinkedinnowwhat.com/2011/11/09/social-posting-where-to-post-what-you-are-doing/

While this does not have a very complementary view of  LinkedIn (Is it boring? LinkedIn). It does show seem to show that what people share on LinkedIn tends to be more professional. You are managing your brand on LinkedIn, you want to make sure that what is seen there is professional, and not a description of your wild Las Vegas vacation.

My LinkedIn community is comprised of coworkers and other business contacts. I am connected with a few friends and family, but for the most part it is all my business contacts. The June 2010 STC had an article about “Using LinkedIn to Get Work” This article had a section on Researching Companies that Interest You. This was related to researching companies that you may want to work for, but it could also work from a business perspective. The company could research the employees of a company they are considering doing business with. I could see this being used in my company a lot. We often times market to larger home care and EMS agencies. The could use LinkedIn to check out the resumes of the people who do currently work for us and for those that no longer do. This can give them an idea about how stable our workforce is and if there is a lot of turnover. If there is high turnover, it could imply that we are not a good company to work for and they could reconsider signing our agreement. In addition, we could do the same about companies that we may want to partner with to make our product better.

The culture of LinkedIn is unique. You connect with people and they are considered your 1st level connections. In addition, the connections of your connections are 2nd level. There is even 3rd level connections which are connected to your 2nd level connections at their 1st level (and they are not connected to you).

http://seotopten.com/blog/2013/04/linkedin-joins-the-social-media-war-with-mentions/#.UncvCvlwqSp

The question is what to do with these connections. There are a number of things to do with these connections, including looking for a new job, promote yourself and research companies.

LinkedIn is a very powerful tool that I am still learning. I did some looking before I started writing this blog and found 40 new connections. I’m sure I’ll find more, but since I am not actively looking for a new job, I have yet to see all the possibilities of this site.

Why I should have updated my LinkedIn page before today.

I don’t work as a technical communicator. Because of my background, my wonderful supervisors will give me projects that they have no desire to do, but which are endlessly fascinating to me because they allow me to flex my writing muscles a bit. But, as a hobby, I also spend a great deal of time applying and interviewing for Technical Communication positions. You know, because it is fun.

I have had a LinkedIn account for a long time, but I never took the time to really figure out how the system worked or to actually make my profile helpful. I have to admit that before today, I hadn’t even updated it to include the MSTPC program. Marshall and Maggiani would be ashamed of me, as I have almost no contacts in LinkedIn. Moreover, I am probably not helping myself by not using LinkedIn as a resource.

It is interesting, however that Qualman and Marshall and Maggiani seem to expect that their readers are already well established in their fields. In Socialnomics, Qualman particularly aims his advice toward people with extensive lists of accomplishments. It makes me wonder how helpful LinkedIn is for entry level job seekers. Qualman’s only real advice to those without a list of articles mentioning them seems to be to make sure that there are no stains on your name by searching for yourself and making sure that there are not compromising material related to you.

http://www.resumetemplateguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Job-Search.jpg

In light of the idea of having a clean online image, it is interesting to think about these tools in the context of Longo’s discussion on culture in Digital Literacy for the Technical Communicator. She explores the idea of community as it relates to an electronic environment. One of her points is that there is no such thing as an all inclusive community with complete diversity of thought, because community is necessarily predicated upon the inclusion of certain type and the exclusion of those who fail to meet the criteria required for participation within the group. Ultimately, in order to have an overarching and universal understanding, a group must sacrifice individuality.

I wonder how much this impacts the job seeker. An online image must be pristine and conform to the expectations of the prospective employer. It is interesting because you are supposed to load your LinkedIn profile with things that make you stand out, but only in a certain way. I do wonder if all our social media will ultimately do us all a disservice by forcing us to conform to a standard that leaves no room for individuality or diversity, as a prospective employer may not see your online activity as beneficial to them, even if it is not actually wrong or even compromising.

However, no matter the effect it has on us culturally, there remains the reality that LinkedIn will likely continue to become increasingly important in the job market. And it is a resource that will be immensely useful if it is managed correctly.

So, I need to go and finish updating my LinkedIn profile now.

Culture and Community

 

Retrieved from http://www.stickworldcomics.com/comics/2009/10/culture-definition-2/

I was aware that culture had multiple definitions, but I guess I hadn’t considered how complex the sociological definition was as compared to the straightforward biological definition. Language and the meaning of words can change and evolve over time. This can lead to very abstract definitions that are very unhelpful. In the Spilka reading, Williams provided a great summary of the meaning of culture and how it changed over time:

‘It came to mean first, “a general state or habit of the mind” … Second, it came to mean “the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole.” Third, it came to mean “the general body of the arts.” Fourth,  … it came to mean “a whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual,”’

Culture can mean any and all of the above, which adds to the confusion. We use a word which can have several different meanings, and that meaning is dependent on the context. That creates an opportunity for a vast range or interpretations.

Community seemed more straightforward to me that it has been depicted in the reading. I can understand the desire to create a universal community that includes everyone, but that goal is not realistic. The Brufee communication model explored this option by creating a community with expectations and values that are known by all members.

The idea of insiders and outsiders of a community make sense, but it contradicts the goal of the universal community. As explained by Bernadette Longo, this would be a totality rather than a community. This is also an unlikely idea because individuals do have different values, ideals, and preferences. There are millions of people who use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites, but very few people use all of them. Even if those sites made controlled upgrades, there is no way that they could create an environment that would convince everyone to join and use the site.

I’ve witnessed Rheingold’s spirit of community on forums such as Boardgamegeek, 40K Forums, and Backpacker, but even those online communities are not without their problems. There are still active members who do not share in the value of community. Many put in extra effort to welcome new members and contribute to the knowledge and friendly spirit of the site, but there are others who wish to keep the exclusivity of the community, and drive away those that don’t seem to fit the feel that they have become accustomed to. My experience is that communities often begin to police themselves, both good and bad, to help control their membership. Sometimes it is driving out the disruptive forces through peer pressure, and sometimes it is driving away people that the policing force sees as annoying. Either way, few communities are truly welcoming to everyone.

Retrieved from http://xkcd.com/256/

With online communities, people have a choice about which communities they would like to be part of. They aren’t like geographic communities where you become part of one purely by proximity or location. Online communities bring people together because of similar interests or ideas. People stay a part of the community because of shared information, shared connections, or some other satisfaction gained from it. There are many reasons people stay with a forum or social media site, and each person defines and finds their own meaning.

In Spilka, Baudrillard’s characterization of postmodern as “the age of simulation… substituting signs of the real for the real itself” was a good summary of part two of the Turkel book. Postmodern has always been a term that I have struggled with. I’ve never been good with relative definitions, so saying that it follows modernism is really not helpful to me. I’ve also never been good with art and architecture descriptions. I appreciate the quote because it does describe a lot of the social interaction between individuals on social media sites. They substitute real interpersonal relationships for hollow online interactions. There can still be meaningful interactions using social media, but many are shallow and hollow shadows of the alternative.

(edit – I realised that the image I uploaded last night was not the correct one.)

Users Taking Over the World

As I was reviewing our course syllabus after completing this week’s readings, the title of Unit 3 struck me: “Work and Play in a User-Generated World.” I started thinking about what a user-generated world is and realized that it’s exactly what our readings have been describing. A user-centric sphere in which users demand good customer service, quick response time, new forums to communicate with each other, and improved and more efficient searching is, most definitely, a user-generated world.

While product research and development has always been motivated by the product’s users/audience to some extent, it is clear that consumers have been empowered and their opinions and voices amplified as a result of the rise of social media and digital technology in general. Ann M. Blakeslee’s chapter, “Addressing Audiences in a Digital Age” in Spilka’s Digital Literacy for Technical Communication, addresses how the concept of the audience has changed, especially for technical communicators, since the dawn of the digital age.

According to Blakeslee, while it was once reasonably safe to assume that a print user manual would have a fairly narrow, well

http://community.brownpapertickets.com/news/images/ES_ExpandAudience.png

defined audience limited to people who were likely familiar with industry jargon, such assumptions are no longer likely to be accurate. The internet has offered greatly increased accessibility to technical communication, and thus greatly expanded the potential audience for documentation. While Blakeslee acknowledges that it may be difficult for technical communicators to understand and define their now larger and more varied audiences for general documentation, she points out that it is easier to predict and understand the audience for particular types of documents such as instructional documents (2010, p. 201).

Just as digital technology has facilitated and expanded access to documentation, it is also (according to Qualman, Maggiani, and Marshall) revolutionizing the way we search for jobs. Social media allows for the rapid exchange of information- including information that helps both job seekers and recruiters. Qualman predicts that as with everything else on the web, middlemen will become less valuable and eventually be eliminated; job seekers will be matched with more appropriate jobs without the need for classified ads, job boards like Monster, or headhunters (2013, p. 178).

http://s0.hulkshare.com/song_images/original/0/a/d/0ad657ef69044b9e337ec24252b72d3c.jpg

Qualman anticipates that LinkedIn will be a major player during and following the elimination of the middleman from the recruiting and job seeking processes (2013, p. 178). Therefore, he can see job searching and hiring becoming even more referral based than they were previously.

The article “Using LinkedIn to Get Work” by Rich Maggiani and Ed Marshall also voiced the idea that LinkedIn will become increasingly more important in hiring and job seeking. In addition to advising job seekers, the article also advises the currently employed on how to maintain their profiles in order to stay up to date with their networks and potential future employers. This advice includes frequently posting status updates and listing events attended.

I had no idea how much LinkedIn offered in terms of job searching prior to reading this article. I did not know how LinkedIn job postings work or that there are job tabs within groups. I was not surprised to hear that LinkedIn is an increasingly important recruiting tool, though, as my company is currently using LinkedIn for recruiting.

I was intrigued by the idea of constantly updating the LinkedIn profile with status updates and the like, but also a bit wary. I’ve always had the impression that being very active on LinkedIn in the way the article recommends implies that a person is looking for work or projects or is advertising their own services. In the case of someone who is happily employed, I could see this being a red flag for their current employer and triggering questions about whether the employee is looking to leave. Maybe though, employers will understand the benefits to them of their employees expanding their social networks, and this will not actually be a problem.

Join ’em, have some pie, and release control…

Reading Qualman this week, I began to think about big businesses and how they stay big.  They adapt usually.   I had heard of Viacom previously, but this week’s reading allowed me to really understand why giants stay giants, such as Viacom.  Instead of fighting or resisting the changes social media brought to the world of business, Viacom chose to embrace it after realizing it was useless to attempt to beat social media and its power.  It just wasn’t going to happen.  I thought the shift from attempt to impose a “no” strategy to “let’s derive some benefit” really demonstrated a point:  resistance is futile.  Why waste time and money suing social media sites, such as YouTube and MySpace when one can turn around and devise a business plan to make some profit or gain some PR?    Therefore, that is why Viacom will continue to be a giant.

http://musically.com/2012/04/10/viacoms-youtube-lawsuit-back-on-after-summary-judgement-reversed/

http://theantisocialmedia.com/category/anti-social-media/page/9/

I thought it was interesting that some companies have entered into this “world of yes” in terms of social media and allowed everyone to “play” while others refused to release control of the “ball” as Qualman would call it.  Furthermore, I loved this line from Qualman, ” History repeats itself because no one listens the first time” (199).  What a great way to put it!    Then he provided the example of Associated Press, which took the resistant path as opposed to Viacom’s eventual path of least resistance.  Because AP went into panic mode, refused to let others “play with its toys,” and became fixated on the failure of others, it most definitely did not embrace social media and the idea of working together for profit.

I thought the comparison of these two companies was a great demonstration of this point made by Qualman:  “Companies that keep a level head will be fine and in some instances better off as their competition self-implodes” (201).   Those that do stay calm will enjoy a piece of the pie (even if it is smaller at times); it is better than no pie at all.

http://jobspapa.com/fortune-brands-inc-reports-second-quarter-results.html

Now, we see the majority of businesses embracing social media, or rather, using social media to propel business and involve the customer.  I can’t help but think about the examples Qualman provided to show that “this is all about becoming part of the content and enhancing the user experience rather than an interruption model” (204).    I thought the example of Green Mountain advertising that asked viewers to complete this line by texting their response and then waiting to see if theirs would appear as the line was ingenious as a business tactic.  This type of advertising has customer appeal and a real-time pull-in effect.    And the billboards by Mini-Cooper with the ability to read chips in

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/business/media/29cooper.html?_r=0

Mini-Coop cars and then welcome the driver by name to downtown Chicago–what a hoot!   Who wouldn’t get a kick out of that one?   These offer some powerful examples of embracing the changes technology and social media bring to the world of business and the way it can now offer an engaged experience.

Finally, I think Qualman was right here:  “Also, part of being successful in the socialnomic world, as we have discussed, is for companies to be more open and comfortable in letting go of the ownership and control of their brand.  It’s not going to be perfect every time, and the end user is smart–they understand that user generated content is beyond a brand’s control” (204).

Businesses and large companies that allow some of the control to be in the hands of its consumers and the use of social media are going to move forward.  Allowing the users to see what is good and what is bad gives them the respect they want as consumers.   The positive will outweigh the negative in the end, and if the businesses let the users alone to experience the ups and downs without trying to dictate their experience, then in the end, those users will stay with them.    Otherwise, what Qualman notes will take over for the business:  Fear of failure is crippling in the world of Socialnomics.  Those who let the fear control their choices will inevitably lose the consumers, the pie, and control.

http://www.mompreneurmogul.com/2012/03/no-fear-allowed-the-guru-blogger-mantra.html

Too Much Technology Creates Communication Problems

According to Bernadette Longo, everyone has a voice, but we do not hear some voices in the digital world.  So who determines which voices we hear?  I thought this was a great conversation starter.  I consider the World Wide Web a place where anyone can say anything, although we do not always hear the people with the best voices, but instead the people with the most popular voices.  In our culture, people expect to be able to say whatever they would like freely.  People promote the ideas they like the most, which is why we hear the most popular voices.  Thus far, I have used the term “voice” to represent a person’s digital thoughts, opinions, and ideas.   However, perhaps a little ironic, I think our ability to use our “voice” to communicate with another digital has led to the decline in our ability to communicate with each other in the physical world.  I believe that too much technology has created a community of people who feel comfortable enough to hide behind their computers and use their voices, but uncomfortable or intimidated in real communication settings.  Is technology creating social barriers or social connections?

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/12/living/lost-art-offline-dating/

Dating.  Over the past 10 years, the stigma of online dating has worn off as people are warming up to the concept.  But has starting an online dating profile affected our ability to communicate with one another?  Perhaps.  Online dating may hinder our ability to notice social cues and judge someone’s body language.  Quoted in a CNN article, Blake Eastman, a body language expert said, “People have an easier time picking out an emoticon to display the emotion they are feeling rather than actually showing it on their face” (Strickland, 2013).  Also quoted in the same article, dating coach Adam LaDolce says that people are fearful of rejection and, as a result, look to hide behind the computer screen instead of seeking organic relationships.  In my opinion, online dating can be useful for people who may having trouble meeting a mate in their daily life, but I am definitely a proponent for emerging from a hermit crab shell, venturing out in public, and striking up a conversation with a real person.  I think so much of communication, body language for instance, happens when we are with another person, and that aspect of communication is impossible to achieve through online dating.

Source: http://www.instantshift.com/2012/07/31/linkedin-social-networking-meets-baby-boomer-professionals/

Job Recruiting.  Qualman mentions the increase in online job recruiting.  Previously, employers paid big bucks to a “middleman,” such as a headhunter or agency, to seek out potential employees.  However, online job recruiting has eliminated the need to hire or pay for such services.  Now, websites such as a LinkedIn, enable employers and employees to directly contact one another.  Unlike Facebook or a similar social network, LinkedIn is strictly professional and allows users to post resume-like information on their profiles.  Users can also directly look at job postings and reach the hiring contact with the company.  LinkedIn can be a great tool for all parties.  However, does online job recruiting affect real life communication?  I think it can have an impact.  Before, professional social networking websites became popular, people contacted potential employers through written and verbal communication.  Today, people still do.  However, I think literacy skills as a whole are declining, and now the quality of the information people transmit to potential employers had decreased.  Especially if people are using sites like LinkedIn as their sole form of communication.  Furthermore, the quantity of information has decreased.  As mentioned in a previous week’s readings, people now seek speedy, truncated answers and do not spend time writing well-developed, quality responses.

Although I think human-machine relationships deteriorate human communication skills, I do not think they are entirely bad.  I believe that online communication can greatly affect our ability to communicate in person.  If we constantly meet people online, we will eventually lose our ability to interact in person and social skills will become nonexistent.  People need to use their “voices” to help, not hinder, their personal relationships with one another so that they do not ruin their real “voices.”

References

Strickland, A. (2013, Feb 12). The lost art of offline dating. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/12/living/lost-art-offline-dating/

Is Higher Ed “linked”?

From karmahire.com

I realized I’m going to have to undergo a shift in perspective regarding job seeking and recruiting after reading this week’s material. Having spent the last 10 years in just one institution of higher education, I’ve been used to a certain laborious way of doing things.  I’ve probably been on 15-20 search committees in the past 5 years, and, as far as I know, we haven’t used any social media such as Linked In or FB.  We recruit via our website and some online newspapers and job boards, then we get electronic resumes, then we consider them individually, then we meet as a committee, then we usually conduct phone interviews, then on-campus interviews, and hopefully make a hiring decision.  This process is not very nimble and usually takes 4-6 months.

Since I wasn’t sure if this is just specific to my university or to higher ed as a whole, I did some research and found that we’re probably a little late in adopting newer methods, but our field as a whole is still lagging.  In “Web 2.0 in Higher Education Recruitment,” Rob Friedman explains only about 20% of recruiters look to social networks for recruiting and most job seekers are still looking at online job boards. The study also noted that most professionals in higher education are using Linked In to do their networking and the article echoed the cautionary tone of Qualman and Maggiani and Marshall (“Using Linked In to Get Work”) saying, “The utilization of social networks makes it more important for job seekers and representatives of colleges and universities that what people see about them personally is consistent with the image they wish to publicize” (www.higheredjobs.com). Interestingly, the other social media sites professionals are using are Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, and Second Life.

How would professional networking work at Second Life?
http://www.gridworks.sl

Second Life?  How would that work since everyone is a “persona” and doesn’t really know who anyone else is or what they do? Seriously, if anyone knows the answer to this, I’d be interested since I couldn’t find much in my research. Also, if anyone else is working in higher ed, I’d be interested to hear if you’re using SM in recruiting.

It’s hard not to find Qualman engaging, but sometimes his claims seem so contradictory. For example, regarding recruitment through social media, he says “all of this newfound transparency from social business networks is a godsend for employers” (225). Yet, just a few pages later he warns people that “unflattering items should proactively be removed from the public eye” (229).  Of resumes, he says that recruiters used to have to “read between the lines” (225) to get a good sense of the candidate.  How is that any different than reading between the lines of a Linked In profile that has been wiped squeaky-clean?  I think SM is probably more efficient, more convenient, and quicker (which we in higher education could use), but I’m not sure I’m convinced that it’s any more transparent.

Speaking of transparency, I’d hate to be in the shoes of that University of Iowa grad student who accidentally emailed naked pictures of herself to her students. When you think of the potential multiplying effect of those emails getting forwarded, that’s probably not something she’s ever going to be able to “scrub” from her public record (See the story by Lisa Gutierrez at the Kansas City Star/Ihttp://www.kansascity.com/2013/10/24/4574427/iowa-teaching-assistant-accidentally.htmlowa).

The “Human+Machine Culture” by Bernadette Longo probably took me to mental places I really didn’t want to visit. In her discussion of culture and community, she writes “Human+machine culture represents both the hope of freedom from inhuman work and the fear that humans will not be able to control the machines they had made in their own image” (166). She says that technical communicators are in a position of “knowledge making authority” (166) and earlier refers to “the scientific knowledge system sustained through technical communication” (165).

When I read material like this, I worry that I am pursuing the wrong degree.  I sort of “glommed” on to the “P” in the MSTPC Program, thinking more of developing myself as a “professional” writer rather than as a technical writer, but most of what I read in my classes seems to focus on the “technical.” Is that because the means by which we communicate are “technological” or do most people envision themselves entering a “scientific knowledge system”? Am I thinking straight in aspiring to the P rather than the T?

I sometimes worry that the “T” is both literally and figuratively at the center of my degree

I guess I need to start thinking about these things if I’m going to get my Linked In profile updated and polished.  That reminds me of some other advice Qualman gives: “if job seekers share a common name with an individual that is less than scrupulous, then the job seeker needs to make certain the employer knows that the person is not them, but rather someone else with the same name” (229).

So, I guess I’m going to have to make a big note on my profile:

from vimeo.com

“Please don’t confuse me with Evelyn Martens, the serial killer.”

Is our digital culture a positive or a negative?

Our culture really has become a digital one.  Some of the reading this week reminded me of Turkle’s reading.  People do value human connections, but are electronics really satisfying that need?  It seems we feel valued when we’re a part of a community, but how is that really fulfilling our need to connect with each other?

http://blackcoffeetwosugars.blogspot.com/

I remember before this digital culture having to look in the newspaper to try to find a job to apply to instead of going on Monster.com or LinkedIn.  I do think that LinkedIn can be a great tool to find a job.  The recommendations on LinkedIn are very helpful to a potential employer.  You have to be careful what you post on LinkedIn, even if your profile is private you might be connected with your current boss.  It’s important to take advantage of the confidentiality tools LinkedIn offers, as well as be smart about what you post.

I agree with this article that states either you use LinkedIn right, meaning you have a full profile and are active in groups, or you don’t use it at all.  Just having a LinkedIn and not using it doesn’t help you.

http://jobsearch.about.com/b/2013/10/05/dont-waste-your-time-on-linkedin.htm

As part of the digital culture comes the Glass House generation.  I thought this name was interesting considering it’s very true.  It’s very easy to find information about people with online profiles.  A coworker of mine told me that the restriction for 13 – 17 year olds to keep their profile private has been lifted this week.  I can’t say that I agree with this.  I think if they can choose to post publicly that can open them up for danger of strangers knowing where they’re going.  But maybe it’s a good thing and can help cut down things like underage drinking because they’ll be more visibility to them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/facebook-teens-can-now-post-publicly-but-posts-are-friends-only-by-default/2013/10/16/57d5051c-3682-11e3-be86-6aeaa439845b_story.html

Apps like the Find My Friends app also provides more visibility into where people are.  Two friends of mine are engaged and they use this app to check up on where each other is.  I remember one day one of my friends told me she was at the doctor and her fiancé seemed to be gambling at a casino and went without telling her he was going.  It seems like these apps are set up for people with trust issues.  I remember growing up when my dad wasn’t home from work at the “normal time” we just looked out  the window and waited.  We couldn’t call his cell phone to ask where he was and when he’d be home.

https://itunes.apple.com/US/app/find-my-friends/id466122094?mt=8

I liked the part of the reading that covered the way search engines make money.  As I’ve said before, I worked for an order management software that hosted websites.  Clients asked us all the time about how to get their site higher in search engines and would pay us to do special work on their site to increase their rankings.  The software also allowed people to use what we called source codes.  This would allow a user to create different codes for the different places they advertise to see what the most productive ads are.  For example, if they have an ad on Google, they can enter the URL of the ad and assign a code to it.  Whenever a shopper would come to their site from that URL, that code would be placed on their profile.  Reports could be run to see how many of those clicks resulted in orders, and what the order size was.

The types of tracking and information we can uncover can have some positives, such as businesses knowing where to put more of their advertising dollars.  But we need to be aware of the negatives, like keeping children safe as well.  I guess we’ll see where some of these changes get us in the near future.

The genre of social media: Using LinkedIn as more than just an online resume

When you hear or read the word “genre,” you normally think of categories of literature or films – romance, science fiction, horror, drama, etc. Genre can be applied in a similar fashion to technical communications. In this setting, genre refers to a category of tools and resources used within the world of technical communications. For example, one genre might be paper-based communication tools such as letters, memos and reports. Another genre is digital-based tools such as emails, websites, and social media. We discussed in detail last week how information design and content management is changing from a paper genre to a digital genre.

This week, our readings put these changes into perspective when it comes to activity theory and human-computer interaction.  According to Longo (as originally stated by Kuutti), “Activity theory is a philosophical and cross-disciplinary framework for studying different forms of human practices as development processes, with both individual and social levels interlinked at the same time,” (p. 160). In this framework, “an activity contains a subject and object whose relationship is mediated by artifacts/tools to achieve an outcome” (p, 160). Refer to Figure 1 below which illustrates the basic structure of an activity.

Basic structure of an activity
Image source: Rott, L. (2013). Recreated from Kuutti, 1996.

To tie it all together, we looked at LinkedIn this week. LinkedIn is an example of a social media tool within the digital genre that shows us how the interaction between a person, materials and outcomes can occur through a computer-mediated interface.  In other words, LinkedIn is an online tool that is used to create a number of human interactions, using multiple tools, with various intended outcomes. These outcomes include:

1)      Staying connected to professional contacts

2)      Networking for future business opportunities

3)      Individual job searches

4)      Employer candidate searches

5)      Researching companies

Using the same chart as before, I filled in the specific areas (tool, subject, object, etc.) in reference specifically to LinkedIn and how interactions occur on this site. See Figure 2.

Basic structure of an activity – LinkedIn example
Image source: Rott, L. (2013). Adapted from Kuutti, 1996.

All of this makes me realize that the interactions and purpose behind social media is much more complex and intricate than I originally thought. When I first signed up for a LinkedIn account (it was just last year – yeah, I was a late adopter), I thought it would just be a nice way to reconnect with a number of past colleagues and perhaps connect with a few clients. And that it could act as an online resume. I really didn’t understand what all it had to offer until just recently. What happened recently? Well, first, I read the Maggiani and Marshall article a few weeks earlier than scheduled. Second, I received an email from LinkedIn (referenced in Figure 2 and embedded below) on ways to improve your profile.

 

Some of the things that I personally plan on incorporating into my profile are:

• Posting regular updates on the industry I work in and concepts I am learning about in graduate school
• Sharing information regarding events or conferences I attend, or even relevant books/research I’ve read or documentaries I’ve watched
• Adding a list of specific coursework I have taken – the name of a degree can be a bit ambiguous so why not spell it out for a prospective employer?
• Asking for references!

This last point is a heads up (warning?) to Professor Pignetti.  I may be asking you to write me a reference very soon for my LinkedIn page!

You don’t know what you don’t know . . .

How embarrassing.  I knew when I first started designing website that I really, no I mean really, did not know what I was doing but I thought my boss would teach me, which he did. Sort of. For the most part I taught myself. And then I am reading “Information Design From Authoring Text to Architecting Virtual Space” and realize just how much the two of us really had absolutely no clue how to do what we were doing, we just did it and customers seemed to be happy.  To be fair, my (old) boss started this business on his own five years before I came on with little to no training himself and was (and still is) doing quite well.  I think back on some of the sites I designed from scratch (none of which are still up and running due to businesses going out of business) and realize that there was always something missing.  I knew it back then but could not put my finger on it. I was not a graphic designer (nor would I ever be one) so I always blamed it on the images just not being quite right and therefore the effect of the site not being what I had hoped it would be.  I did at least always pride myself on my sites being easy to navigate with the appropriate information in the perfect locations. Now I realize that the reason the sites were not all they could be had so much more to do with the actual text and placement of information than I ever would have thought possible.

“Gurak and Warnick argue that to engage in digital literacy, one must have not only an ability to use new media technologies, but also a critical self-awareness that questions why and explores purposes digital communication technologies serve in culture.” (p. 103)

This quote would have never in a million years been something that I would have understood back then.  My job was more about getting our sites onto the first page of Google and manipulating text for that purpose based on the SEO standards of the time. We wanted the sites to be navigable and to have the information that was pertinent to the business (we would track page views through Google Analytics) but I am pretty sure we did not take into consideration the thought process of the users or how they were actually using the sites in the first place.  Again, kind of embarrassing to admit that those sites were public for a long time!  It does help to know that the early 2000’s were still a time of transitioning and exploring in the area of web design and its content.

The information in this chapter about “Technical Communicators’ Unique Contributions to Information Design in Industry”
(p. 106), is what can make the difference between a “professional” site and an amateurish one.  I think the fact that I was ignorant to design practices didn’t hurt me as much as it could have is because I have always been very visually aware of what looks right and what doesn’t.  We all have had plenty of experience browsing websites and you just know what looks right versus when something is just not settling about a site.  That being said, the fact that technical communicators are becoming more aware of the importance of the combination of visual design and content and the businesses they work for are taking it more seriously as well, is a great step forward in the field of web design: “Historicizing genre is significant, because it reminds writers that the ways in which emerging digital documents and virtual spaces are designed transmit values and reinforce or disrupt ways of working and communicating with one another.” (pg. 106-107).

This summer I worked on a small technical writing project for a company as part of ENGL-637. One of the first comments made by my connection at the company was how, at his previous place of employment, he was so tired of technical writers focusing more on design than content that he pretty much eliminated the department. I think this was very short-sighted of him but it also stresses the importance of technical communicators having balance between content and design and making it clear why the two are so heavily connected these days. “We are not merely writers any more. Now we are editors, information architects, usability analysts, interaction designers, project managers, client liaisons, and more.” (pg. 134)

I love that the world of technical communication is one of constant change – it is why I decided to take a second look at a career in this field (first look was

2o+ years ago), and started in this degree.  Little did I know just how important of a role technical communicators can play, especially during my naive years as a web designer. I can’t help but wonder, if I had known how all encompassing web design really was, if I ever would have stepped foot into the arena in the first place?  I would like to think I would have.  If not, I would have missed out on a great opportunity, no matter how high the learning curve was!

Technology or Bust?

The chapter “Information Design” in Digital Literacy for Technical Communication echoes a sentiment I’ve been having throughout this class. Salvo and Rosinski make the following point that especially resonates with me: “Use, familiarity, and comfort within these newer information spaces are therefore generational, and technical communicators must now consider how to bridge these generational boundaries that are likely to express themselves as technological preferences” (2010, p.105).

This bridge of generational boundaries is one that I don’t think has been adequately addressed in our readings until now. I think the tone of many of our previous readings has been that technical communicators must change they way they communicate or face the possibility of becoming irrelevant. I found in this frequently repeated theme an implied argument that technical communicators are resistant to new technologies, but their users are not; thus, technical communicators must adapt their communication methods to them to keep up to par with their users.

While I believe that this scenario is the case for some technical communicators, I have encountered the opposite problem in my current job. Savlo and Rosinski argue that technological preferences are generational. I see evidence of this daily; my users, consumers of the documentation I write, are more of my parents’ generation than mine and are more used to and accepting of print communication than digital. In fact, in some cases I have encountered resistance to digital communication, despite the fact that print communication is still equally as available and accessible.

http://www.asiafoodjournal.com/cmsimages/0903_AFJ_pg35_1.jpg

Don’t get me wrong- there are some users (mostly the ones closer to my generation) who do actually want to experience digital communication and even recognize its benefits. For example, my digital communication platform, Doc-to-Help, allows me to link words I’ve used to glossary terms, group key concepts together, offer direct links to related topics, and provide the user with the ability to search for a term or topic. If my users could get comfortable with this digital communication platform, I have no doubt that it would serve them better than a 50 page printed user manual.

In addition, as our product is a SaaS (software as a service) application which is accessed via a computer, an internet connection, and a browser, it should be safe to assume that our users, since they are able to access our applications, do not have the technological obstacles (lack of access to these tools) that Salvo and Rosinski point out could potentially inhibit their accessing online documentation.

Nevertheless, Salvo and Rosinski are right that we as technical communicators do need to do our best to bridge the generational gap and appeal to everyone. I am still trying to figure out the best way to continue making print documentation available for those who really need it but at the same time encouraging my user base to shift to the digital platform as it is faster, less resource intensive, and offers unique functionality.

The aiim white paper, “Systems of Engagement and the future of Enterprise IT,” brought up a very interesting point about how accessibility of technology has changed. Whereas traditionally new technology has been available first to businesses and larger institutions and then has trickled down to smaller organizations and eventually individuals, we are now seeing the opposite trend where technological trends seem to take hold at the individual level and grow until they reach larger organizations.

The aiim paper predicts, though, that businesses will have to speed up their responses to technological innovation and undergo a transformation which will further facilitate collaboration or risk becoming “roadkill” (p. 4). This new way of doing business is described as “Systems of Engagement” rather than its predecessor “Systems of Record” (p. 5).

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.nl/time-zone/usa/phone-area-codes/images/non-geographic-number.jpg

I can already see this transformation happening in my company. We are a small company, but one of my coworkers works across the country in a different time zone, some of our consultants work in a different time zone as well, and some of our customers are in still different time zones plus have different work hours than us. These growing communication constraints require that we find new and effective ways to engage with each other such as video conferencing and hopefully increasingly better mobile devices and cheaper and more accessible bandwidth as the paper predicts.

Sailing in the digital world

Savage’s analogy of metis and the deployment of digital tools really struck a chord with me. I look back to summer evenings spent sailing with my dad on Lake DuBay, and I understand the point he was trying to make. The goal of sailing and of deploying digital tools isn’t to master anything; that isn’t possible. It is to be responsive to several factors that can change quickly and sometimes all at the same time. My Dad’s C-scow was a fun boat to sail, but it was a highly temperamental boat to race.

Retrieved from: http://thepublicsquare.areavoices.com/the-motor-is-so-2011-why-you-should-try-sailing/

For those who may not know, scows are wide and flat bottomed sailboats. They are slow when sailed flat, but they become much faster when they are leaned up on edge. The waterline changes from wide and flat to very narrow and long, which drastically reduces the surface in contact with the water. When everything is going well, it is fast and exciting. Racing the boat is a matter of weighing risk and reacting quickly. You can always lean the boat less and sail it less aggressively, which will allow for more time to respond to changing conditions. Or, you can lean it far, sail very quickly, and sacrifice some of your time to react to changing conditions.

What does all of that have to do with deploying digital tools? Some of it is preparation, making sure you have done the testing needed to make sure everything works and understand how it works. Next, you need to have a team or crew that you can trust to handle their job if anything changes. The final portion is learning to pay attention to the signs in front of you. There are a lot of variables in both that can change, so paying close attention to everything around you is key to reacting to those changes. If you don’t notice a problem, it is unlikely that you will react soon enough or in the right way to be useful.

Each of us must exercise critical digital literacy to succeed in this ever changing digital world. We must understand more than just the context of our work. We must also have a strong grasp of the tools available to us and how best to use them. This was part of what prompted our switch over to HTML based documentation. The majority of employees work from home, so information needs to be accessible and able to be retrieved quickly. They also frequently have several programs open at once. HTML files are much smaller sized, and they open from a browser rather than Microsoft Word. This reduces the resources needed to open access and use the documentation.

The readings discussed single sourcing, which is another thing my team is working toward. We have established common wording guides to for frequently used portions of text or steps in processes that are program specific. This helps save time and drive consistency throughout our documentation, which can be difficult with eight different writers sharing the workload. We also have editors who help raise the quality of the documents and unify the voice.

Digital Footprints Leading to Necessary Information Governance (and more fiber in our diets)

http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2013/05/27/digital-age-information-overload/

This week’s readings contained much about information.  I actually started to feel a bit of information overload just thinking about how one would have to govern the amount of information now created living in this technological age.  The column chart on page nine under “Call of Action” from “Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT” really caused me to pause for several minutes as I thought about the years of change and how we have stored information.   The chart presented major changes from storage of information on microfilm to social content.  When I think about microfilm as the primary means of information storage some time ago and then compare that time to today and its use of social content as a way to store content and information, I imagine researchers pouring over microfilm in former days in comparison to future researchers years from now pouring over Facebook status updates, Tweets, and emails as a way of garnering information.  The amount of information digitally recorded these days is steadily growing.

http://www.incontextmag.com/article/Information-Governance-Who-is-watching-over-your-information

This brings me to information governance, which is something I really hadn’t given much thought to until our readings this week.  How do we govern information?  Who has to govern it?  When I think about businesses and their needs to maintain content and information in this digital age, I can’t help wonder how many job positions have been created these days purely to take on this type of job?   I especially thought about these questions when I read from “Systems of Engagement” this idea in relation to businesses, “Meanwhile, over on the business-to-business side, the attraction is more about cutting the time it takes to reach closure on any key issue, be that a product design change, a customer complaint, a late shipment, a pricing dispute, or the like. Here again, even though the communications are often in real time, they are leaving their trail of digital footprints — emails, for sure, but also Tweets, recorded web conferences and other types of tools (or other types of content). What is the right policy for storing or deleting such records? What preparations must one make for the inevitable e-discovery requests that our litigious society will surely generate?” (Moore, 2011).

I thought it interesting that businesses now need to consider that while they often have live conversations to resolve issues, indeed there is usually some trail in the digital world.  I found it even more interesting that the final thought here revolves around the idea that without proper preparations, businesses can open themselves up to legal action and loss of money.  This is a key reason why businesses will likely get serious about information governance as noted in “Eating More Fiber and Getting to the WHY? of Information Governance” (digitallandfill.org, Oct. 17, 2013).

Businesses will need to find a way to properly govern the amount of information now coming in via many sources, both hard copy and digital.  If businesses must worry about reducing risks and costs but must also reduce the amount of information being saved, I am not sure how they can avoid possible legal action without making sure they save everything.  And how would they save everything if the system to save information went automated in an effort to reduce costs as “Eating More Fiber” suggests?  Without capturing the digital footprints accurately, a piece of the trail may be missing that could prevent the businesses from losing time and money.

Maybe the inaction to really take information governance seriously comes more from people just not knowing how in the world to manage the incredible amount of information we have available to us these days.  As noted by the author of “Eating More Fiber”, “… but I feel the real reason for inaction is that the WHY? of information governance is not fully understood – at a gut level – by executives.”  The gut that may require more fiber is also the gut that may not fully understand the impact of not properly governing the information available in this age.

http://www.digitalfamilysummit.com/2012/safety-protecting-your-digital-footprint/

On a side note, from both readings, I also was led to AIMM and its upcoming conference; just the title alone sounds interesting: Information is the New World Currency.    Businesses and organizations can also learn about information governance by taking a course available through AIMM.

Content Management Systems, I use those!

I like the definition of Content Management that Spilka provides in Chapter 5. Content Management is a set of practices for the handling of information, including how it is created, stored, retrieved, formatted and styled for delivery. It usually has the following four goals: Distribute tasks and responsibilities among members, Author and store content that enable multiple-audience adaptation, Author and store content to permit multiple output and Author and store content that allow for reuse by multiple organizations. Spilka also recommends creating CM as a separate discipline and teach to other technical communicators (Spilka, 2010, pgs 130-131). This definition really is what I do on a daily basis in my current position of QA Specialist, who is also responsible for the majority of customer educational resources for our Home Care product line.

Where I work currently, we use a few different content management systems, most of which were created by in-house staff for our use. The one that looks the most like this definition is our SIETE product. This is the product that we use to track the tasks being completed by the developers, that guide our release notes and user guides, as well as our Knowledge Base which houses the release notes, user guides and other customer-facing educational resources. I was not included in any of the design aspects of this product, it does work nicely for our customers.

 

The image above is an example of our customer facing portion of SIETE. This is accessed through the application and the content visible on the right-hand side is content specific based on the page the accessed the Help from. In addition, there are additional materials that the user may find useful based on this page. It would include FAQs, User Guide Pages and Videos that were created. This can be updated by our staff immediately if issus or corrections need to be made. This page really encompasses goals 2, 3, and 4. It allows for multiple audience adaptation, permit multiple outputs (html, videos) and reuse within and across organizations.

According to Chapter 4, we, as technical communicators, organize the written communication for future use (Spilka, 2010, pg 123). This SIETE product does assist with this. The search feature within the Customer Facing Knowledge Base will search content and tags that are added to each item. At this time tags need to be manually managed on each task, but helps with searching when the customer may not know the correct term. We can add additional terms that customer might use, even if it does not match the terminology that we use.

The image above shows that Goal 1 can also be used in our SIETE Application. There is a module called Project that has Projects, Outlines and Tasks. Each task can be assigned to a specific person and it can detail what needs to be done, when it should be done and what other assets are needed to complete the task. Often times I will spend a day or two reviewing the User Guide for changes that need to be made. Simple changes will be made immediately, but longer changes will get a task. Once all tasks are assigned I, or my supervisor, can set due dates, priorities and estimate the time to complete. As time allows, these are updated and immediately available for our customers.

Policies and Content Management

After reading Geoffrey Moore’s Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT and William Hart-Davidson’s Content Management: Beyond Single-Sourcing, My only understanding of content management before now was with the idea of a content management system, as in a software program, and I had never really thought about it beyond that scope. It was interesting to read the perspective that the scope of content management is greater than I ever knew before. For example, I never really thought about the internet itself being content management, just because it is so chaotic and there is just so much there, without any real organization or obvious function for much of it.

I am currently working on a project to convert all of my department’s policies into a new format in preparation for relocating them to our organization’s new content management system for policies. This project is the only reason I really had any grasp on content management at all, and unfortunately, my grasp was very limited to what I needed to know in order to complete the project. However, as I look at the history of how our policies have evolved, just in the few years that I have worked in this organization, I can better understand the concepts of content management especially for technical communicators.

It is interesting to think of the changes in how we have managed our library of policies and procedures over the years. When I first started my job, our departmental policies and procedures were contained in a few giant three-ring binders. They were theoretically alphabetized, however there was no rhyme or reason for what word was chosen to represent the policy, so it could be extremely difficult to find the one policy that you needed. Furthermore, those binders only contained the policies for our workgroup, so if you needed to know about a policy for a different workgroup within the department, you would have to go to their work area and locate their binders to find the policy. It was a rather cumbersome process. Hart-Davidson referred to this type of information storage as a “content silo” (p.131) which is an extremely apt image. The content was just dumped in and even though people tried to make it accessible, it really was not.

http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Policy

Eventually, our policies were published electronically on our organization’s intranet site which helped a great deal, however there is only a very remedial search capability which more often than not is unable to locate the document that you need. Because of this, I am ecstatic to be moving policies into a content management system. It will allow all of the information to be in one place, to be searchable, to ensure that it is current. It makes my nerdy little policy-loving heart happy.

This just illustrates Hart-Davidson’s four goals of content management (p. 130). The movement from hard copy to a content management system allowed us to move from restricted access to more public access to the documents. It also subsequently allows people throughout the organization to adapt our policies for their own use. It is interesting, because most of the policies in our organization are written by whoever does the job and as Hart-Davidson pointed out, using a content management system isn’t going to improve the writing (p. 141), but it does at least allow access and for us, the process of reformatting all our policies requires us to look at them more critically than ever before.

Colleagues in different locations and how to get people to read the manual

I think that successful businesses with multiple locations have to follow the Systems of Engagement in B2B Enterprises defined in the “A Sea of Change in Enterprise IT” reading this week.  These five ways to make technology work internally and externally to be more productive really do make a difference.  These things won’t completely turn a business around, but they’re good things to do.  The first point of making meetings work better across time zones sounds like a no-brainer but it’s something people just don’t understand.  Verizon Wireless has many locations across the USA.  I’m in NJ and have to keep in mind there are times I’m working with someone located in CA.  I always look at the location of my colleague when scheduling a meeting to be polite to not schedule a meeting during a time that’s out of their office hours.  I even go as far to not schedule during their lunch hour!  And we use tools that allow for conference calls and screen sharing, even telepresence.  These technologies may be expensive to implement but make a big difference in how employees can work together and reduces employee travel.  I think addressing issues collaboratively and keeping collaborators connected really does help solve issues with real solutions quickly.  No one person will make a complete difference, but having a team that can easily communicate and come up with ideas will really make a difference.  I notice that sometimes my boss will get upset at my team for communicating.  I believe she thinks we’re talking about personal things, but we’re really collaborating and coming up with great ideas to help take our work to the next level.  I also agree that mining community content to extract insights and viewing collaboration and social systems in context will help with diving in and analyzing the community to result in better decisions for the future.  It’s also important that not everything has to be shared with social systems.  Having a social presence is important, but having the wrong social image can be just as harmful as not having a social presence at all.

Information design and architecture are huge responsibilities for technical writers.  Information design and architecture isn’t only for external use, internal staff can benefit as well.  Information needs to be easy to find and displayed in a well organized format for customers and internal staff to use it.  In the world we live in people are inpatient.  We want what we want when we want it.  If there is a barrier to getting what we want, we become frustrated.  When I worked as a technical writer and implemented a knowledge base, I came up with a draft layout of categories that information should be posted to.  I tried to put myself in the shoes of the customer and thought about where I’d look for this information.  There were many internal meetings to discuss this because we wanted customers and staff to see value in this knowledge base.  It had to be right the first time, as a customer, as well as internal staff, will base an opinion of it on their first use.  If they find what they’re looking for they’ll look at it again.  If a customer can’t figure out where information is, they’ll call customer support and already be frustrated that they had to pick up the phone, and not look at the knowledge base again.  I tried to do some searching to see how long a customer will spend finding information on a knowledge base before giving up and calling technical support, but I wasn’t able to find any details on this.  I think it’d be a good study to conduct.  However, there’s plenty of information, like this link below from Zen Desk, about how to develop knowledge base content.

https://support.zendesk.com/entries/26166856-Best-practices-Developing-content-for-your-knowledge-base

Technical writers are also content managers.  It’s part of the job of a technical writer to create and manage content.  This starts with defining the information to relay, the format/template that is used to relay it and making sure the content is up to date.  As a technical writer I’ve started many documents trying to figure out what the reader on the other side of the computer screen is looking for.  It’s difficult but I think the best we can do is relate to the person on the other end of the document.  Maybe customers will actually read the manual if they feel it’s put together well, and it’s easy to find and navigate.

http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/p/keep-calm-and-read-the-manual-1/

healthcare.gov: A “crash” course for this week’s readings

“The system is down at the moment,” from healthcare.gov. is not the sort of message digitallandfill is hoping to inspire in its “5 new rules of customer engagement” post.
Read the entire post at http://www.digitallandfill.org/2013/09/5-new-rules-of-customer-engagement-gd13.html

I would rather avoid a discussion of health care policy and politics, and I don’t plan to address those for the most part, but this week’s reading and the healthcare.gov. “hubbub” seem too convergent to ignore.Michael Salvo and Paula Rosinski remind us that “As soon as a design is out of the author’s hand and launched into the world, we see how effective that design can be in use … We make our information spaces, and then these spaces make us and impact our communication―always returning to the human genesis of the space, yet not always under the immediate control of the users (or designers) of that information space”  (In “Information Design”).

As Moore put it in “A Sea Change in Enterprise IT, “organizations are facing an avalanche of information” as they change from systems of record to systems of engagement and “Best practices in this new world are scarce.”

Well, they seem to be scarce this month for sure.

“We have a lot of visitors on this site right now.
Please stay on this page.”
From slate.com
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/problems_with_healthcare_gov_cronyism_bad_management_and_too_many_cooks.html

What went wrong with Healthcare.gov?

But, back in the spring and over the summer, experts involved in the development and elsewhere were talking about the potential of the Website in much the celebratory tone of Qualman in Socialnomics, without some of the cautionary tones of Moore’s white paper.  Both are very clear about the speed of change, but Moore’s quotes from a number of CIOs in 2011 (“We are grappling with this”; “Nobody has figured this out”; and “whether we want it or not, it is coming in”) suggests more trepidation and is somewhat predictive of healthcare.gov.

As I’ve confessed and lamented often, I’m not terribly tech savvy, but from what I can gather, there were some missteps in creating the “information architecture” that characterizes the site. What the developers and designers were celebrating back in the spring was that the site would have a content management system-free philosophy that would make for a “completely static website,” using Jekyll and Github, which was supposed to result in an “incredibly fast and reliable website,” according to an April 10 post at the HHS.gov blog site by David Cole, one of the designers from Development Seed, one of the websites designers.

According to Brian Sivik, Chief Technology Officer at HHS who was quoted in an article in The Atlantic Monthly, its use of social coding is built in a way that’s “open, transparent and enables updates. This is better than a big block of proprietary code locked up in a CMS [content management system].” I mean, the very title of the Atlantic Monthly article is celebrating democracy: “Healthcare.gov: Code Developed by the People and for the People, Released Back to the People.” (See the full article at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/healthcaregov-code-developed-by-the-people-and-for-the-people-released-back-to-the-people/277295/)

So, as I read through any number of articles trying to figure out “what went wrong?” I tried to keep my focus on the role of technical communicators, rather than policy makers, politicians, self-interested CEO’s and CIO’s, software developers, and code writers, but then I started thinking that my thinking is antithetical almost everything I’ve been reading in my classes for the MSTPC program: “We are not merely writers anymore.  Now we are editors, information architects, project managers, client liaisons, and more” (135) as Hart-Davidson reminds us this week in “Content Management.”  So, there are probably many technical communicators caught in this morass or, alternately, learning opportunity, depending how you view it the current problems at healthcare.gov.

John Pavley at the Huffington Post does see it as an opportunity for the “bi-directional” experience Moore, Qualman, and others have described. “If they want to live up to their initial promise and completely open-source the code on GitHub.com, I’d bet thousands of developers would volunteer to fix all of their bugs for them. That’s the power of open source and open government: Other people are invested in fixing your problems for you!” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-pavley/obamacare-website-problems_b_4057618.html)

Content Management Meet Up in Milwaukee

The Content Management System Meetup in Milwaukee began with
“Let’s get ready to rumble!”
Image from http://anything-digital.com/blog/events/what-cms-is-best-cms-showdown-results-after-milwaukee-meetup.html

So, all that reading about the CMS-free healthcare.gov experience got me curious about what are considered “good” content management systems, so I tried to root out some reliable information and came across this CMS “Showdown” in Milwaukee in May.  It’s not an “academic” source, but I found it enlightening in that it shows how such providers think it’s important to talk about CMS. The showdown was between 6 CMS providers: Sitecore, ModX, WordPress, Drupal, Concrete5, and Joomla.

The Fight Club meetup metaphor was funny but not really typical of the communication, according to the write up by Jessica Dunbar at anythingdigital.com (May 14).  It seemed to me to be pretty communal, in a sense, with quick pitches for each product (3-5 minutes), perhaps a little tag line or branding (ModX – “Creative freedom”; “We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time”; “Come for the software, stay for the community” [at Drupal]).

This was the only visual aid used at the CMS Milwaukee Meetup, which I found odd for a bunch of “information architects” who should be visual thinkers.
The article from allthingsdigital.com also includes a YouTube video for the Drupal Song. I’m thinking those guys might want to keep their day jobs.

A representative for Joomla declared, “Joomla! is a extremely customizable and adaptable for Enterprise, SMBs, NPOs and beyond.”  Joomla was the only representative to bring a comparison chart, so perhaps that’s why it won. At the same time the writer of the article declared himself the only judge, so maybe that’s why it won.

The good news for me?  I’m actually starting to understand what some of this means….

A Giant Digital Filing Cabinet

Information design and content management are two terms that I knew existed, but they never would have crossed my mind.  Technical communicators write and create their documents, but must also design the way they distribute information and manage what they write.  Most people only consider the writing part of a technical communicator’s job, but these are tasks in which technical communicators have always engaged.  Before the Web grew in popularity, technical communicators kept track and managed their writing in hard copy formats.  However, with the enormous increase of documents being created and distributed online, somebody must be responsible for maintaining it: “Search and retrievability – or findability – as well as navigability become increasingly important as the information age produces more documents than ever before” (Salvo & Rosinski, p. 103).  A document is useless if the user cannot navigate it or cannot properly access it.  I imagine a digital filing cabinet and a technical communicator working diligently to keep it organized.  I have created a visual to aid with my giant digital filing cabinet analogy.

I took a stab at defining the two terms:

• Information design – creating or establishing a text using a set of principles to improve the readability of a document

• Content management – maintaining the usability and searchability of a document so that it can be accessed by users

So, in terms of information design, technical communicators “[design] information in written documents so that those who put ideas to work can access content when needed” (Salvo & Rosinski, p. 105).  With the increase of electronic documents, it is important that technical communicators consider the format of their document.  If they want their users to be able to open up an electronic file and type their information directly into the file, they must design it in such a way.  Design in a key element in helping readers understand the document.  Also, technical communicators are “charged not merely with the activity of writing, but also with […] looking after the information assets of the organization” (p. 128).  Increasingly, technical communicators are responsible for keeping the information they write organized so users can locate it.  If a graphic designer creates a company logo, it will fall on the technical communicator to keep a digital copy of the company’s logo managed so that the marketing department, and any other departments, can locate it for their work.

Technical communicators use various systems for designing information and for maintaining documents.  InfoDesign is a blog that provides technical communicators with current information and communication strategies.  Technical communicators can use the tags to search for posts about a relevant topic.  Companies have many options in terms of managing their content.  CMS Matrix allows users to sort through a list of 1,200 content management systems and compare selected systems.  Top Ten Reviews contained numerical data comparing the most popular content management systems.

So does this giant digital filing cabinet create more work for a technical communicator?  I don’t think so, unless the technical communicator is not properly designing and managing his content.  I think properly designing information and managing it correctly can actually help a technical communicator be more productive in the long run.

Enterprise IT: From paper trail to online footprint

This week’s readings discussed at length content management and information design. With the rapid changes and growth in the use of digital technologies, both of these areas have changed drastically. These changes include:

• How we store information (paper vs electronic)
• How we design information (memo vs email vs social media messages)
• How we collect information ( paper surveys or comment cards vs tracking IP addresses)
• How we interact with users of the information (one-way transaction vs synchronous engagement)

Going back to my internship during college in the early 2000s, I realize now that I was involved with an early form of capturing data electronically. I worked for a global heater company that had endless numbers of user manuals for all its brands of heaters, even some they no longer made, but still serviced. One of my first projects as an intern was to scan the manuals into PDF form and save them to a folder on the shared server. It was tedious work, but, looking back, I can see how beneficial it was for them to have me do this. At the very least, they wouldn’t lose those user manuals if the building started on fire!

Today, I work for a company that operates a specialty retail pharmacy that is required to keep paper records for seven years. Despite the 10+ years that have gone by, it feels like a step backwards in the world of enterprise IT. However, with all the changes in healthcare (most notably EMR/EHR implementation at hospitals and clinics), I wonder how long it will be until other healthcare facilities (like a pharmacy or nursing home) will be required to go digital with their records as well.

It’s not just the pharmacy that can be dubbed a tree killer at our company. Our #1 marketing activity to bring in new business is direct mailings. Most recently was a postcard mailing to over 1000 allergists on the East Coast. The postcard was to advertise a webinar so the information delivery will be online and paperless, but any follow-ups to those that participate will very likely involve mailing paper documents, including a 100+ page manual that outlines the specific allergy modality that we promote. Is this a waste of paper? I think you have to weigh the pros and cons. This manual is not something that we mass distribute; it only gets sent to those truly interested in our services. If we were to allow access to it online, would we be able to prevent its dissemination to those we don’t want to have it, like competitors?

I am happy to report that our company has made at least a few efforts to reduce the amount of paper we use – the customer portal that I mentioned in last week’s post is one of them. One of our goals for implementing this website was to give clients access to a number of the patient education materials that we normally print and mail to them. We actually just had to review which ones we needed to reprint as our inventory was getting low on a number of them. We ended up deciding not to reprint a number of them. We want customers to get them online instead.

Customer portal
Rott, L. (2013). Snipped from portal website.

This online portal acts as more than just a way to reduce paper cost – it also acts as a type of content management system as it gives us a place to organize,  store and communally update a large amount of information for clients, but it also allows us to track usage and activities on the admin side, which I think this week’s readings showed us is just as important as the storage and organization of the content. From Moore (2011), one step he recommended for B2B enterprises (like the one I work for), is to “mine community content to extract insights to enhance the business” (p. 7). With our portal site, I can see when users log in and track what areas they are visiting most often. This can be helpful for updates to the site because we can see what people use and like. It’s not as sophisticated as how Google tracks our online footprint, but it works for us.

Speaking of content management, I also work with an online customer relationship management system called Salesforce CRM, which some of you may be familiar with. Salesforce is a fully customizable, on-demand program that I have been able to mold into what the company needs to track sales and customer growth. It truly embodies the definition of content management. It gives us a turnkey solution for “handling information, including how it is created, stored, retrieved, formatted, and styled for delivery” (Hart-Davidson, 2010, p. 130).

Salesforce CRM
Rott, L. (2012). Created with SnagIt.

From a generic framework, I added custom fields, inserted formulas and stages to predict closes on new sales, built new pages and sections, and created reports. We now use Salesforce to not only record all basic account information, but also as a reminder system to stay on top of daily, weekly and monthly activities. It also helps us monitor marketing campaigns and the progress of specific growth strategies. Additionally, it has document storage capabilities and allows us to build email and letter templates to create a uniform method of communication delivery. Finally, we have been able to build both basic and in-depth reports to help with sales analysis and communications. For example, we can run reports to see how many leads are in the sales pipeline, or create mailing lists to customers that have signed up to receive our quarterly e-newsletters.

Essentially, this program allows us to mine data on current and prospective customers, stay on top of our communications to these audiences, and plan future communications, whether it is a mailing, email blast or marketing push. It is the backbone of the account management, sales and marketing departments.

Like one of the CIOs said in the Moore (2011) article, “We are grappling with this” (p. 6). In some areas, my company has transitioned into the new era of enterprise IT quite well, but, in others, we are still figuring it out. I long for the company to be more technologically adept, but, in the grand scheme of things, I think we’ve made a lot of great strides, especially considering the small size of the corporation. It also made me feel better to read how many companies are struggling with this transition, so we are not alone. Overall, I think that as long as we keep trying to move in the right direction, we’ll be okay.

The Art of Rhetoric

There has been many a conversation throughout my time so far in the MSPTC program about Rhetoric and its purpose in today’s world of Professional and Technical Communications.  Some of my former classmates would like to see the topic, or at least some of the textbooks, tossed off the nearest cliff.  I cannot deny that I have had those feelings once or twice myself. In fact, I had to laugh in agreement at this definition of rhetorical analysis: “This category is, by necessity, only a loose grouping of related types of work that share a common goal: complicating common-sense understandings of technologies by analyzing them from a variety of rhetorical perspectives that demonstrate their immersion in social and rhetorical processes” (Spilka, 2010, pg. 92, emphasis added) Finally, the combination of our readings this week along with some more modern day examples shows me how rhetorical theory can add value to companies, especially through the use of social media.

In particular, the discussion of the music industry not understanding the value of social media and embracing it instead of fighting it, is really what made it all sink in: “Instead of actions that disenfranchised their customer base (some of the largest numbers of downloaders and sharers were made up of music fanatics), the music industry should have been rejoicing that their distribution, production, and packaging expenses became almost nonexistent!” (Qualman, 2011, pg. 153).  I remember vividly when this topic was a hot button (pre-iTunes).  I also remember being very willing to pay for songs but I was tired of buying whole albums when I only liked one or two songs, which was one of the major benefits I saw of downloading the songs (along with being able to add them to an MP3 player pre iPod).  Since iTunes has come along with the ability to pay per song, I will say my own personal music purchases have dramatically increased.  I continue to be so confused by some musicians still resisting this new modern format.  I am PAYING for songs and buying more than I ever had before.  If I am doing that, aren’t a lot of other people be doing the same thing? Aren’t musician’s songs only becoming more popular through this version of social media and therefore their revenues going up?  Seems logical to me but as Qualman points out “. . . the real reason they didn’t embrace the model is that they didn’t understand it” (pg. 153).

Hence the need for Rhetorical Analysis. If the rhetoric of technology were more prolific early on, and had been able to show through research and theory the value of this transformation in how we purchase music, the music industry may have started listening sooner.  Now, rhetorical theory for social media can be invaluable.  From understanding the why, when and how of social media usage, companies can maximize the effect of how they use it in their business models.  Social media is such a study of psychology and technology combined, the opportunities for rhetorical study of this booming technology are booming, adding value not only to the companies utilizing the theories but also to the profession of rhetoric for technology, in particular for “Technical communicators, who are by their nature intrigued by new rhetorical possibilities . . .” (Spilka, 2010, pg. 85).

Twitter and intrusive marketing

This week’s readings have reinforced that I am a late adopter. Both heavily discuss the benefits and uses of Twitter, a product that I am still leery of using. I don’t have any particular issue with Twitter; I just have no desire to use it. TV, especially reality TV has really embraced Twitter, and they definitely use it to collect user feedback. The immediate feedback is nice for companies, but I personally find it distracting.

retrieved from http://janrain.com/blog/4-emerging-social-commerce-tools-retailers/

In this week’s reading, Qualman introduced a term called “socialommerce”. Essentially, this is using collected information from social networks to provide a form of reviews or recommendations for products. The examples were interesting, but I feel like there are issues. I have a vast respect for reviewers, but not all people make good reviewers. Steve, in the examples, is choosing to trust the opinions of his friends to make pretty substantial decisions, rather than take some time to do additional research on the other options. Referrals are great, but they should accompany research rather than being blindly followed to save time.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but I appreciate my privacy when it comes to online usage. I like to provide reviews to some products, but I would rather put that review up on a related forum rather than connect it to my Facebook profile. I choose not to live my life online through my Facebook page, and I don’t want other people to know my buying history. It isn’t anyone else’s business how much camping equipment I buy each year, or what movies I have purchased. I’m already aware that web pages tailor their banner ads based on the cookies of recently visited sites, and that is intrusive enough to me. I certainly don’t want to share that information with everyone on my friends list. YMMV (your mileage may vary).

Qualman’s prediction of e-books reminds me of movies from the 80’s and 90’s so riddled with product placement that it was distracting. Nonintrusive product placement makes a scene seem more realistic, but some product placement appears too obvious and makes the movie look cheesy. If you have seen Back to the Future, the original Total Recall, or Wayne’s World, you probably know what I am talking about.

retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog+media/product-placement

It is one thing to have the main character drink from a soda can that is just barely identifiable as a Coke. It is entirely different if he places an order asking for a “crisp and delicious Coca Cola”. This is what Qualman predicts might happen to e-books. The text would feature links to products or services that the reader could click on to find out more. This already occurs in blog posts, and I hope that it doesn’t break into all digital reading. Many people use reading as a way to escape the bombardment of marketing, advertising, and social media, and it would be a shame to see that taken over as well.

Twitter: An Artifact in Activity Theory

http://rsharma17.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-do-artifacts-tell-us-about-lives.html

When I began Chapter 3 in Digital Literacy, I paused for a good minute on the title alone: Shaped and Shaping Tools.  My mind wandered back into a time when man used mostly his hands to shape things.  I got lost in thought down a path of tools and how we use them to shape so much; then I thought about Twitter and how it is shaping people, communication, and businesses.

http://www.workinghomeguide.com/16317/twitter-breeding-across-the-web-with-embeddable-timelines

Clark writes, “As I’m writing this in the spring of 2009, my current techno-rhetorical obsession is with Twitter, an increasingly ubiquitous ‘micro-blogging’ tool that is capturing the popular imagination” (85).  For some reason, Twitter has never been able to capture my imagination fully, and I continue to be resistant to the Tweet, and I don’t know why.   All around me people are Tweeting.   I fully understand its rhetorical implications, and I actually appreciate it as a tool that has massively changed social media and the way we communicate, yet I just won’t get on the Twitter ride even now when I know I should.

I found it interesting that Clark noted that Twitter was accused by some as “stupid, pointless, narcissistic, and over-hyped,” and “it therefore shows all the signs of a real cultural phenomenon” (85).   Why would something that possesses such negative traits become a phenomenon?  But indeed it has. Twitter has certainly taken the world by storm, and it has forever changed the way we can interact and communicate with each other.  I cannot help think how interesting it would be to capture our century in an archive of Tweets, but goodness, what a large archive it would be.

Twitter is a real cultural phenomenon, and I do not expect it to stop any time soon.  Our readings forced me to think about Twitter as a tool of rhetoric, and I began considering how this tool fits into activity theory.   When I consider an “activity system” with “ongoing, object-directed, historically conditioned, dialectically structured, tool-mediated human interaction,” Twitter fits right into this theory.  Clark cites examples of activity systems as “a family, a religious organization, an advocacy group, a political movement” (98).    Twitter has offered quite a new approach for any system to communicate with the world.  It’s really allowed us to “follow” anyone, anywhere, anytime.

The example given by Qualman of CNN Anchor Rick Sanchez illustrates the Twitter’s ability to “shape” human behavior.  His experimental use of Twitter was as Qualman noted “an overnight success.”  Sanchez was able to use the Twitter platform to capture his audience by asking them to help “produce” his show in some ways.  By asking thought-provoking questions and eventually getting his followers’ tweets scrolling on the byline, he effectively encouraged his 75,000 to watch just to see if their comment made the show.  Talk about a shaping tool!

http://twiangulate.com/search/

Now back to theory.  Activity theory calls for groups and individuals to be analyzed with a triangular approach that emphasizes multidirectional interconnections among subjects (the individual, dyad, or group), the meditational means or tools they use to take action (machines, writing, speaking, gesture), and the object or problem space on which the subject acts (98-99).  Twitter is a tool that utilizes a machine to work and allows for writing and promotes interconnectedness; people use Twitter to take action.   Then somehow I found my way to Triangulate, and I was further convinced that Twitter (because we have a method to charter its hidden networks) really is a cultural phenomenon that activity theorists can use for broad cultural understanding.

Clark writes, “Activity theory calls for active attention to analysis of artifacts, whether written genres or digital technologies” (99).  I find Twitter a fascinating example of an artifact from our time that is both a written genre and digital technology.  Twitter is capturing so much of our lives, history, movements, and human experiences.  It is most definitely “an analytical tool in the workplace studies in the rhetoric of technology” (99).

http://sirgy.com/how-did-early-man-cook-his-first-meat-and-made-his-own-tools/

http://babyonthefly.com/tag/iphone/

I cannot help wonder about those who will come years and years from now…will they sit around lit up screens and read about us in 140 character Tweets and fully understand our time?  I imagine a timeline in front of them.  A caveman and his hand or club will be present and so will a 21^st century man holding a mobile device.  The tools of man have changed!