#6

Salvo, Michael. “Rhetoric as Productive Technology” from Critical Power Tools.

1.     Salvo mentions a few problems. First, he explains that students aren’t being effectively positioned produce an ethical change in the workplace. And, further than that, that students are not being engaged in classrooms about how to enact these changes in the workplace using technology. Additionally, he discusses a divide between cultural studies and rhetoricians. He also questions modern notions of experts and poses the question, “what is the technical communicator’s expertise?” (227).

2.     The solution that Salvo presents is a revision to James Berlin’s argument in Rhetorics, Poetics and cultures, which “names race, gender, and class as the three dominant matrixes that will shape cultural studies inquiry, particularly in the literary studies” (219). Salvo’s suggested revision states, “Learning to gain some control over communication forms and the technologies that enable them, students become active agents of social, political, and technical change, learning that social and technological worlds have been made and thus can be remade to serve the interests of democratic society” (220). 

Salvo documents the work already done in the field of cultural studies with an eye toward “highlight[ing] the active, cultural engagement they each foreground” (221) He “assert[s] that cultural studies does its most insightful work in the analytical phase by mapping discourses, institutions, and flows of power on a virtual map of culture. This productive analytic trust of cultural studies can effectively inform action through critically examining design, mapping the discourses that inform design, as well as revealing the complex networks of power and the interests that are served and subsumed in different designs” (221). In this way, Salvo suggests that technical communicators should bring the analytic and descriptive methodologies from cultural studies to “inform the active, engaged, and productive elements of technological invention and design… [which would offer them] an effective means for engaging political, social, and discursive implications of technoculture” (221). Salvo contends that this will advance technical communication research “to participate in cultural studies discourse and to move that discourse forward, to add technical communication’s engagement of workplace discourse and power dynamics to cultural studies while also enriching technical communication” (223). So, in essence, Salvo suggests that technical communicators should take some of the qualities of academics in cultural studies and apply them to issues they’re already interested in. He gets into what the field of cultural studies can learn from technical communicators later in his article, but, he basically argues that they can learn the art of knowing when to engage. He writes, “expertise ins not limited to critical analysis but also requires action, both critical status-raising rhetorical action and more mundane functional language work. Knowing when to engage in, or recognizing opportunities for strategic action is a rhetorical skill requiring action based on hard-won knowledge of the institution, the intensification and slacking of workflow, and the potential for language to enable change” (230).

             He also uses some nerdy jargon—technocultural agents? Really? Salvo then delves into the notion of expert and explains that before, experts served as people who used their knowledge to take over. However, there’s been a shift to thinking of the expert as a partner who comes into a community to help them do what they already do well in an even more effective way. He discusses expertise in terms of the technical communicator, effectively answering the question that he posed. Salvo argues that “being an expert in communication, in technical writing, in usability, does not exclude one from playing the role of expert in an accompanying technical endeavor… the expert’s role… becomes a self-conscious analysis and comparison of the local conditions with the previous experience and knowledge of the expert… technical and professional writers’ existing expertise in effective communication, coupled with the role of user advocate, informed by cultural studies analysis, can and should allow practioners and academics to contribute to the invention of new technologies” (226).

A few questions that I had:

1.     What is technoculture? He uses it over and over again, though I don’t think he really defines it. Is it just a culture of technology? A web based culture? What does Salvo have to gain by echoing the rhetorical moves of other authors (remember usability experts? Salvo uses technoculture agents)?

2.     Salvo makes moves to begin to discuss online culture, and, at the beginning of his article, I really thought he would discuss it more. How might these cues that he discusses, of knowing when to engage in specific rhetorical action, or even when there’s an opportunity for specific rhetorical action, change in an online space?

3.     I have to ask. Did anyone else think that he over-cited? I felt that his discussions of other people’s work, while very detailed, seemingly suffocated his overall argument. What was gained or lost by this rhetorical choice? (I ask this while thinking about document design. I'm not sure if this is a dumb question to ask, or to even think about, but I'm going to do it anyway--when we think about document design, is this a separate thing from thinking about the content of the document? How might this contribute to thinking about technical communicators as producers versus authors?)

Connections to other readings:

      He cited Robert R. Johnson’s notion of user centered technology and applied it to our perceptions about experts, which was really interesting. Also, he cites the article I presented on last week by Slack, Miller, and Doak, and discusses how “high-wage jobs are outsourced of “offshored” in the misinterpretation that professional writing is mere translation of information and delivery of facts from those who know to those who lack understanding,” bringing us back to the dichotomy of the technical writer as author versus the technical writer as producer (231). Also, I see links to Henry and Scott’s articles, which are focused pedagogies that would inspire students to make ethical changes in their future workplaces.