Cezar M. Ornatowski & Linn K. Bekins, What's Civic About Technical Communication?

Cezar M. Ornatowski & Linn K. Bekins, What's Civic About Technical Communication?

In this dialectical synthesis paper (Gold), O & B respond to problems conceptualizing the concept of community in the study of technical communication--which, I might add, is not just a problem in that field. At the beginning of the article, they bring up the example of San Diego, talking about how there's not just one community--whatever that means--but many. Different communities with different values. The military community. The anti-growth people. The business people. Etc. This examples and examples like it pose a problem for conceptualizing community, esp when we think of community as a thing underpinned by consensus and shared values. They also give the example of work. When you're working at a firm these days, the firm will issue stock in place X, have an office in place Y, draw employees from place Z, and so on. They never ask, what underlies community?

Another problem they respond to is the service learning problem. If we send students out into the community, so to speak, they'll become better people. O & B criticize Huckins on this point. Faber gets criticized later. But O & B point out that even the Nazis had service learning projects. So then why send students out to do service learning? O & B don't argue against service learning per se, but they want it to be more infused with rhetoric? That's the best I can do on a quick read. Hauser also gets brought up. Students need to realize that they don't speak for communities but rather construct them, and probably have to construct multiple at different points in time. O & B never say as much, but I got the feeling like they wanted to teach students to be able to construct different communities at different points in time during the same project, while simultaneously being aware of doing so. 

But where do they get such a repertoire? How do they get so good? Or are they just supposed to be aware that community is complex and that they have to speak differently and vis-a-vis different value systems as they speak to different stakeholders? The word discourse gets brought up several times, and I think that's what they mean by that. But I'm not sure. 

Service learning is a point of contact. Service learning gets criticized via Huckin. 

They bring in concepts of community from sociology? but I don't know how sociology helps them. Does Hauser help them?

There are lots of examples in the middle-end. They go over what this would look like. 

Consider an example from a medical writer’s workplace: a document with which most of us are familiar, the package insert that comes with pharmaceutical products. Such inserts, usually small, densely printed and multiple folded sheets, provide information for both the prescriber and the patient for the safe and effective use of the drug, as well as a basis for the uses (and limitations) for a drug’s promotion to medical industry communities and the general public. This document addresses four distinct primary audiences: the physician, the phar- macist, the patient, and the regulatory agency. The insert is a summary expression of all the experimental data in the New Drug Application (NDA) collected up to the time of submission of the application to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

However, the construction of the insert and of the claims it makes about the drug often begins before any research has been performed—in fact, before the drug ac- tually exists. The initial claims may not in effect describe what the drug does or how it works; they are claims that the company would like to be able to make, and they in turn drive the research and development effort. The construction of the in- sert is shared among the marketing staff, who construct the claims in light of the projected interests and values of the drug’s (also projected) publics; the medical staff, who eventually supply the research that bears out the claims; and the regula- tory affairs and legal staff, who ensure that all government requirements are met. The pharmaceutical company’s medical writer who writes the insert and the volu- minous documents required by the process of FDA approval must meet the expec- tations and respond to the concerns of various “communities” she constructs through the claims she makes: the medical community represented by users, such as physicians and pharmacists; the potential patients; the insurers; as well as the “public” as represented by the FDA. Looking over her shoulder are the company’s shareholders and employees. The writer is, in fact, a member of at least two of these communities, in each of which she has a potentially vital stake, although she may contrive to manipulate the boundaries of these communities in ways that lessen or obscure her burden of choice. In summary, the package insert is initially constructed to discursively project the interests of imagined stakeholders; then it is revised continually as the research effort begins to direct which (if any) of the ini- tial projections can be developed or supported. The final draft of the insert attempts to mediate several “community” interests, which remain in continual tension.

The matter gets further complicated once the package insert receives FDA ap- proval and is listed on various drug directories used by insurers for coverage deci- sions. Consider a writer whose job it is to write guidelines for a primary audience of medical directors at an insurance company to assist them in their coverage deci- sions. The writer is asked to research, document, and sometimes even make insur- ance coverage recommendations about drug indications that have received FDA approval, as well as any off-label listings in the drug directories used for authoriz- ing coverage under Medicaid and other insurers. The guidelines include an over-

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view of the drug and its indications, a section with clinical study summaries to demonstrate efficacy and safety, and recommendations, including patient selection criteria. It is important to note that drug directories play a key role in supporting brand-name drug use by listing off-label uses as well as FDA-approved indications for insurance reimbursement, and that some directories include more off-label in- dications than others. Thus, besides the primary audience of a medical director, the writer must also consider a secondary audience of physicians and pharmacists, as well as the FDA, other insurers, various drug directories, and perhaps even the pharmaceutical company whose drug is being documented. According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal about drug directories (10/23/03), if a prescribed drug is listed in a drug directory used by an individual’s insurance, it is likely to be reimbursed, regardless of whether it is an off-label or an FDA-approved drug indi- cation. This simple fact gives rise to multiple considerations about what should be listed in the directories. On the one hand, the American Medical Association sup- ports insurance coverage for any prescription representing “safe and effective ther- apy,” as long as physicians pay attention to the scientific evidence and medical opinion. On the other hand, the rise in off-label prescriptions for uses not approved by the FDA raises insurers’ costs and potentially reaps significant financial benefit for the pharmaceutical industry. Such a scenario calls to question what should be included as scientific evidence and medical opinion for off-label indications and represents a potential Pandora’s box. What constitutes scientific evidence? Sin- gle-patient observations? Open or uncontrolled studies? How much of this infor- mation should make it into the drug directory? How, finally, does a writer mediate between the stakes of multiple communities to address the general public’s need for “safe and effective therapy”? The medical writer’s problem illustrates the plu- ralistic contexts in which the writer constructs communities (albeit dynamic and changing ones) as part of a documentation process. 

It just seems like something in the Susan Popham article. Communication is high stakes. When you communicate, you have to appease various audiences. You have to make it work for diverse stakeholders simultaneously, stakeholders who occupy different epistemological? worlds. 

How is what O & B are selling different from audience? What does the concept get us that audience doesn't? 

And at the end of the day, so what? are we just selling an awareness? 

our purpose in this article has been to argue that we abandon redemptive conceptualizations of community as a founda- tion for civic approaches to technical communication and envision alternatives that would account for the complexity, integration, interdependence, and technologi- zation of the world in which all of us, including technical communicators, actually live and work. 

So do we keep community at all?

To move on, we have argued for a symbolic/rhetorical view, which regards “community” as a discursive construction whose creation or invocation is always expedient in a rhetorical sense (the myth of disinterested “public” service notwith- standing). Philippe-Joseph Salazar has argued that “[e]xpediency is the heart of deliberative politics” as well as the heart of rhetoric (11). “To expedite,” he sug- gests, “is to act with a specific use in view. Rhetorical acts, because they engage values, activate deliberation and are conducive to action, must be carefully devised and conceived and delivered so that they reach...their maximum effect” (11). Ex- pediency here means that rhetorical acts are purposeful and calculated for practical effect.  

So we keep community. 

Re-listened to this.

All communities are constructed, in many cases in and through writing. It is not, then, necessary to leave one’s campus, company, or church to begin to learn to be a civically aware communicator. The (symbolic) boundary between communities, as well as between communities and something else—like the boundary between na- ture and culture—cuts in complex and not always apparent or predictable ways. For instance, one can see the interweaving of such boundaries (between public and private, work and nonwork, corporate and social, as well as between different types of relationships that mark these domains) in the following comment by a medical writer.

When I write [medical] disease backgrounders, I feel a little more like I’m doing something useful; the people who read my materials (sales people, clinical scien- tists) will understand the disease better, and their understanding will inform their discussion of it with customers (medical professionals), but also with family and friends who ask their opinions about health questions. I recently had an experience with my sister-in-law, who had lymphoma. I edited a disease backgrounder I had written to take out technical detail and sent it to her. Then, when she started treat- ment, I sent her a copy of the New England Journal of Medicine article about a new therapy (which she was receiving). I was able to show her, in the article, that the side effects she was having were common and did not predict a bad outcome. (I didn’t write the article, but I understood it as a result of my work.) That’s not general public discourse, but it’s “one person at a time” communication that I believe is amplified into a general public impression when it’s repeated. (Susan Hudson, e-mail to authors, 1 Sept. 03)

Such boundaries are further confused and complicated by electronic communi- cation technologies (Rheingold; Kolko; esp. Wise).  

Not quite getting it here. Are we talking about kairos? about how you need to be sensitive to what you send people and when? like, if you're going to send someone something technical, when you send it to them matters?

Also, when she says, "That’s not general public discourse" that makes it sound like that was in the email via a  question. 

Are we supposed to then stay small? to lower our expectations and only try to help individuals?

"Technical communication scholars need to research and the- orize the complex relationships between rhetorical actions performed by technical communicators in their various roles and the impacts that those roles may have on the various communities." OK, so boundary crossing. Situational communication? 

I just don't see how this is more than phronesis. Technical communicators should have phronesis. Ok, sure, who would argue against that???

Oh, and check out this guy Cohen. Look at how much proportion was allocated to this guy:

A “sym- bolic” view of community that seems most useful from a rhetorical standpoint has been proposed by Anthony Cohen.

In his analysis of the concept of community as one of the “key ideas” of the modern social sciences, Cohen seeks to capture the meaning of community, a la Wittgenstein, not by trying to describe what it inherently may be as an object, but rather by examining the way community functions as a concept both for those who live “inside” it as well as those who deploy it for a variety of purposes.

Cohen suggests that community is a relational concept based on a perceived rela- tion between putative members in contrast to nonmembers and/or other communi- ties. Thus, a defining characteristic of community is the boundary between inside and outside. To the extent that this boundary is typically not physical but perceived (by members and/or others), communities can be viewed as “symbolic.” Cohen sug- gests that the symbolic boundaries of community are largely constituted by peo- ple-in-interaction. He also suggests that the idea of community itself is largely sym- bolic, in the same sense in which all relational concepts are symbolic: they allow us to freely delimit areas of reality in relation to each other and to ascribe relative values to them (see also Bauman). In turn, these values underpin our attitudes and actions as long as the boundaries on which they depend maintain their salience in our con- sciousness, which largely means that they remain useful for some practical purpose. According to Cohen, the “quintessential referent of community is that its members make, or believe they make, a similar sense of things either generally or with respect

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to specific and significant interests, and, further, that they think that that sense may differ from one made elsewhere” (16). The “community itself and everything within it, conceptual as well as material,” Cohen argues, “has a symbolic dimension, and, further,...this dimension does not exist as some kind of consensus of sentiment. Rather, it exists as something for people to ‘think with’” (19). In addition, communi- ties imply not only meanings and interpretation, but also vocabularies: “People put down their social markers symbolically, using the symbolic vocabulary which they can most comfortably assimilate to themselves, and then contributing to it creatively. They thereby make community” (28, emphasis added).

To make matters more complex, Cohen points out that even sharing a vocabu- lary is no guarantee of actual unanimity of meaning or attitude; two Catholics pro- fessing “I believe in God” may have quite different things in mind. He notes that a “community can make virtually anything grist to the symbolic mill” of collective identity, “whether it be the effects upon it of some centrally formulated govern- ment policy, or a matter of dialect, dress, drinking, or dying” (117). From the sym- bolic perspective, it thus becomes difficult to impute “beliefs” and “values” to communities. Rather, community-formation and change appear to be a function of strategic symbolic (including discursive) action conditioned and constrained by multiple factors. As Cohen points out, “[W]hether or not people behave within the ‘community’ mode or in some more specialized and limited way is less a matter of structural determinism than of [symbolic] boundary management” (28). 

Seems just like attribution a la Miller--social action as attribution, a we-intention as an attribution to the other. I think then that symbolic just means attribution, imagined (Anderson), delayed. 

I wonder if that gets us to a rhizomatic image of thought. Kind of like the electrons on that show you were watching the other day, since in the rhizome too electrons orbit in one orbit then disappear and appear again in another orbit and are only able to switch orbits by an increase or energy. Community as ephemeral, but also delayed. A promise.