Stories and Maps: Postmodernism and Professional Communication

Traditionally, professional and technical communicators portrayed their work as the transmission or translation of the work of "experts" (Slack, Miller, & Doak, 1992). In this model, the most valuable contributions come from those who design the technologies or manage departments—the content-area experts—rather than from the business or technical communicators (Doheny-Farina, 1992; Johnson-Eilola, 1993; Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 1996). This marginalization becomes especially dangerous in this era of downsizing and contract work. As long as the primary value is located in the production of an individual, concrete technology, technical and business communicators will be seen as outsiders.

For we do not produce technologies, but teach people how to use them. We are, in this articulation, either in-person or routine production service workers.

In order to articulate our role as symbolic-analytic workers, we need to make people focus on texts as technologies, as technologies that act by connecting up other technologies, other contexts, other users and makers. This view, in turn, helps blur the binary division between mechanical and organic. We can no longer go back to a pre-technological life, so we must work to understand technology as one aspect of our livings.

Although in some ways this blurring might seem to abandon nature, if we work this very carefully, we can instead contextualize our technologies in ways that make us look more carefully at how we make and use them.