Stories and Maps: Postmodernism and Professional Communication

From a postmodernist perspective, we might instead begin to value the idea that technical communicators' talents lie not in their skills at taking (and simplifying) dictation but in constructing novel and useful (if contingent) structures in fields of information. In other words, business and technical communicators do not write documentation or author reports, but make maps. What better job than mapmaker in an era when information is portrayed to users as a confusing, jumbled tsunami of data? If this new epistemology were being put forward only by professional communicators, it could easily be dismissed as egocentric, careerist maneuvering. But the general postmodernist model has already gained influence in a wide range of disciplines, a situation that professional communicators must quickly act on in order to assume new responsibilities and positions of influence.