Rhetorical Memory

A Study of Technical Communication and Information Management

Stewart Whittemore

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226263410
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Institutions have regimes—policies that typically come from the top down and are meant to align the efforts of workers with the goals and mission of an institution. Institutions also have practices—day-to-day behaviors performed by individual workers attempting to interpret the institution's missives. Taken as a whole, these form a company's memory regime, and they have a significant effect on how employees analyze, mix, translate, sort, filter, and repurpose everyday information in order to meet the demands of their jobs, their customers, their colleagues, and themselves.In Rhetorical Memory, Stewart Whittemore demonstrates that strategies we use to manage information—techniques often acquired through trial and error, rarely studied, and generally invisible to us—are as important to our success as the end products of our work. First, he situates information management within the larger field of rhetoric, showing that both are tied to purpose, audience, and situation. He then dives into an engaging and tightly focused workplace study, presenting three cases from a team of technical communicators making use of organizational memory during their everyday work. By examining which techniques succeed and which fail, Whittemore illuminates the challenges faced by technical communicators. He concludes with a number of practical strategies to better organize information, that will help employees, managers, and anyone else suffering from information overload.

CHAPTER ONE

Managing Information in Organizations: An Overview of Ideas about Memory and Memory Work

Memory work is also process, like a journey; it must therefore have a starting-point.

—Mary Carruthers, 1998, p. 23

In the book In the Key of Genius: The Extraordinary Life of Derek Paravicini, professor of music Adam Ockelford tells the inspiring story of a blind and severely autistic young man who, despite seemingly impossible odds, has become a famous virtuoso pianist. Rather than proving to be a handicap, Derek’s Paravicini’s condition enables him to do something amazing. Only a short time after he listens to a piece of music—any piece of music, no matter how complex—he is able to replay it perfectly from memory, like a human Dictaphone. But Derek is more than a mere recorder. He is also able to improvise, to riff, and to embellish the music, making him a virtuoso at his art rather than some sort of “human iPod,” able only to imitate, not to innovate or to improve upon the original composition (Ockelford, 2007, p. 45). Derek is able to do this in part, Ockelford explains, because his perfect embodied knowledge of his workspace—his piano keyboard—unites with his innate perfect pitch and aural memory to create a single psychosomatic (mind-body) memory. So firm is this embodied memory that recall is automatic and virtually effortless, which leaves Derek’s mind free to weave amazing improvisations around the original material. Consequently, Derek’s memory ensures that, despite what might at first seem to be a disability, he has achieved a successful and fulfilling career.

In our own careers, most of us are not, of course, able to perform our jobs with as much facility as Derek. Our brains are not wired to give us Derek’s intense focus or perfect memory for detail. Similarly, our workplaces do not, by and large, mesh as seamlessly with our work activities as Derek’s piano does with his. Consequently we lose things. We forget key pieces of information. We become distracted easily. Our in-boxes accumulate mail, our cell phones ring, our instant messaging icons flash, our list of to-dos grows longer, and the piles of paper on our desks grow taller. Together these distractions can cause information overload, the condition popularized by the futurist Alvin Toffler in the 1970s, in which completing even simple tasks seems to require a wearying amount of sifting and searching for relevant data. Our working lives thus become a delicate balancing act of trying to stay on top of the information that comes in as a routine part of our jobs while also exercising some creativity, of putting our own touch on this information in order to create value for ourselves and our employers. And, despite the explosion of revolutionary new technological prostheses that are supposed to make managing information in our lives and work easier, we rarely encounter anyone who feels firmly in control of his or her information workspace. Simply consider the variety of devices with which it is now possible to derive information: personal computers, televisions, personal data assistants (PDAs), iPods, tablets, smartphones, e-book readers, and even network-enabled smart wristwatches. And these are just some of the hardware platforms; it would be impracticable to list the multitude of software and network technologies that run on each device or the multiple human stakeholders who must be consulted in virtually any business process in a networked global economy. With all due respect and admiration for the exquisite talents of Derek Paravicini, the average office worker is bombarded with far more cognitive, sensory, and physical information inputs than Derek must deal with. And the result is that, with such a profusion of inputs from this wide array of sources, it can become difficult if not impossible to turn our attention to pure innovation as Derek does. Yet we know that such innovation and creativity are often essential to solving complex problems or finding new and better approaches to addressing issues.

Those of us who earn our living as writers in organizations, whether in industry or the academy, understand all too well the impediment to creativity and original, inventive thinking posed by the need to stay on top of incoming information—impediments that, ironically, appear greater the more information technology the employer utilizes for our supposed benefit, so that technical communicators in high-technology firms face perhaps the greatest risk of being overwhelmed by information of any of us. For example, in the research study I will be discussing throughout this book, which studied a team of technical communicators at the software firm Software Unlimited,1 when asked to describe the principal difficulties entailed in managing projects, each of the three principal research participants, whose stories ground the case studies in chapters 4–6, focused on separate but related challenges of managing, storing, and using incoming information. Three telling quotations from these discussions offer a preview of the problems that will be discussed in succeeding chapters.

Consider first the trifecta of difficulties that Robert, the newest technical communicator at Software Unlimited, whose brief tenure with the firm will be considered in detail in chapter 4 in order to raise issues of information and memory affecting newcomers to a firm, identified when asked about the work he had been doing on his first project with the firm:

We had these three barriers that made it hard. Number 1, the software to create the help was only on Windows and therefore I had to get files from here, so that’s one area that’s annoying. Number 2, all the changing screenshots. So basically, you are replacing a screenshot or maybe adding a new one with a file that’s here, and so you better make sure that the old one’s gone. I try really hard to save it as the same name and just overwrite it. And the third thing is you have the whole Windows/Mac thing. So, trying to take a document that’s 90 percent the same for each situation but you might have to go through and change the task bars in all the doc. So you had two near-identical versions and then bad things can happen.

Second, Lucy, whose recent return to full-time work after family leave will give us an opportunity to consider issues of memory and information facing working parents in chapter 5, characterizes the principal difficulties of managing projects in terms of scheduling and team dependences:

With our group, our projects—our tasks—don’t relate. . . . It’s not always easy to see what they relate to because we [i.e., the technical writers] might have something like “create PowerPoint” just to give an example, but below that heading are three tasks for three [software developers] to do. . . . So, I’ll have the PowerPoint documentation but I need all those other things done before I can do anything with it. . . . I’m having [impediments] because things aren’t getting done. Because I don’t know when things should be done, you know, so what I’m trying to do is track when the things should be done. Sometimes something is supposed to be done and no one has even mentioned that they’ve worked on it or are going to work on it or anything because we are missing something with this tracking.

And third, when asked to describe the methods and tools that Software Unlimited provides to help her track her project deliverables—finalized written products like user manuals or online help files—Angela, the most senior technical communicator, understandably chooses to discuss the issue in terms of growing and changing organizational dynamics:

This [i.e., tracking project deliverables] has always been a challenge. Now that we have six people on the documentation team—before it was just me; now there are six. We need standards. We need to be sure everybody is aware of the style guide and the things that we come up with. . . . We also have a training department that we interface with. So now we have all of their information and our combined information that we have to keep track of. And now we’ve got processes that are going into position for posting information on the Web. . . . There are a lot of meetings. We have a lot of projects and projects within projects. A release isn’t just [the online help and regular documentation] anymore. There’s the localization part. There’s the web documentation part. There’s the web marketing part. There’s the training part. So we have lots of projects within major release projects. There’s not a great way of keeping track of all that information at a glance, so you really rely on remembering a lot.

The difficulty of juggling multiple and overlapping versions of deliverables, the risk of miscommunicating critical information among teams with varying skillsets and work goals, and the sheer proliferation of interested parties involved in most design efforts—Angela and her colleagues’ descriptions of conditions at her workplace probably sound all too familiar. The growing complexity of organizations, work teams, business processes, and technologies places more and more demand on our limited ability to pay attention, to remember, and to think. Like Angela and her fellow employees, we must rely upon our own limited resources of time, attention, and memory just to stay on top of this glut of information.

Software Unlimited is, in other words, typical of the workplaces in which many professional and technical communicators find themselves, and the issues Angela raises of managing information with only our own fallible human memories to guide us are ones that many of us can recognize and relate to. Fortunately for us and for Angela and her colleagues, most of our jobs do not require a perfect memory. What our jobs do require, however, is that we be able to locate the information we need when we need it and that we then analyze, mix, translate, sort, filter, and repurpose this information in order to meet the demands of the marketplace, to meet user needs, to satisfy customers, to feed upstream business processes, or to help ourselves and our colleagues make decisions. In addition—and this is a critical point—like Angela, our jobs require that we do this demanding work within specific physical, technological, and social spaces, which present us with unique sets of affordances (i.e., the perceivable properties of an object that indicate its possible uses) and constraints for managing information.

In short, technical communicators’ relationship to information in their workplaces is rarely straightforward, and, in the absence of a perfect memory, mastering information requires a strategy. In this book, I use an examination of a particular case to help us better understand the issues confronting us in order to develop strategies for mastering information in our workplaces. To do so, I explore the experiences of Angela and her colleagues at Software Unlimited as they attempt both to stay on top of new, incoming, and shifting internal information for themselves and their teammates and to exercise creativity and add value to the organization’s product offerings.

My intention is not to suggest that the strategies employed by the documentation team at Software Unlimited are necessarily the best ones, nor do I mean to imply that they have universal applicability to other workplaces. However, the information culture at Software Unlimited presents a rich environment for examining the challenges faced by technical communicators today. Specifically, like most software companies, Software Unlimited operates in a realm in which new information, usually in the form of technological advancement and innovation, is rapidly and constantly being created, both within and outside the company. It is critical for the company, and in particular its technical information managers, to be able to assimilate and manage new information, and especially to communicate and translate that information into the technical knowledge systems of its employees as well as the company as a whole, for the benefit of its customers.

At the same time and as a direct result of this influx of new and ever-changing information, older technical information rapidly becomes outdated, obsolete, and superseded, requiring, in effect, that outmoded components of the technical knowledge existing within the company’s information systems be purged to accord with such things as software updates and other improvements to the company’s products. In other words, it is often just as important that old information be removed and discarded from the company’s knowledge systems as it is that new information be assimilated into them.

Examining the work processes of the technical communicators at Software Unlimited, therefore, offers fertile ground for gaining a broad and insightful perspective on the problems faced by technical communicators and more importantly for discovering and evaluating the solution strategies that are developed by these communicators in the course of their daily operations. To gain such a perspective, we must first perform research. This book is about achieving a strategic perspective through such research.

SOME CAUSES OF INFORMATION OVERLOAD

A first step in addressing a problem is to define it by establishing a language for talking about it. So, before beginning a detailed examination of the experiences of the technical communicators at Software Unlimited, it is useful to consider why information is becoming such a burden in our workplaces. The ever-expanding number of information and communication technologies available to us is a good starting point for finding a common language. What is it about these technologies—many of which offer elegant user interfaces and useful tools for acquiring, sorting, displaying, and storing data—that paradoxically makes staying on top of information seem more, not less, difficult? To begin answering this question, we must first take a step back from the technologies themselves in order to better understand issues of information storage and use at a conceptual level.

One way of conceptualizing information inputs in our workplaces is to consider them in terms of pushed and pulled information (Kirsh, 2000). According to Kirsh, pushed information is data that arrive in our workspace (real or virtual) unasked for. It is sent to us without any prior request for it, as when a colleague forwards an email without first asking if we’d like to receive it. As recently as twenty years ago, this push-based information flow, though substantial, came in a rather limited range of media: paper memos and (physical) mail, newspapers, telephone calls, and so on. The range of tasks required to handle and manage this stream of data was similarly limited, as research has pointed out. For example, you could transcribe a spoken message (e.g., Anderson, 2004), enter an event in your calendar (e.g., Geisler, 2001), file a document in a filing cabinet (e.g., Yates, 1989), add a document to the pile on your desk (e.g., Malone, 1983), or, beginning in the early 1980s, stick a reminder to some surface with a sticky note (e.g., Spinuzzi, 2003b).

Now, of course, even though the stream of information arriving via paper documents has abated little despite the supposed dawn of the paperless office (e.g., Sellen & Harper, 2002), we must also figure out how to manage a never-ceasing, twenty-four-hour-a-day influx of instant messages, cell phone text messages, wiki updates, blog posts, tweets, Facebook updates, RSS feeds, and email on multiple mail accounts. Email alone is capable of geometrically expanding the amount of pushed information through the ability to add attachments of large (and multiple) documents and databases. (If we want to take this even further, attached documents or published articles can include links to other pertinent documents and articles—and so on—making the pool of available information appear infinite!) Pushed information, not surprisingly, has become a major source of stress among office workers (Edmunds & Morris, 2000). Wurman (2001) aptly labels this stress “information anxiety,” because the burden of managing work information now spills over into our private lives, and all times of the day and night. Whereas, previously, pushed information arrived largely with the morning mail or through telephone contact during more or less specific “business hours,” thanks to modern electronic communications (and in part to the burgeoning global economy), it is now capable of arriving 24/7, 365 days a year. As a result of our technologies, we now worry about what information-related deluge from work will take place while we are “off the clock.” For example, will our in-boxes overflow if we are out sick? How will we ever find time to wade through our messages when we return from vacation? And, most pressingly, how do we do anything new when we spend all our time just trying to stay on top of our current information?

By contrast, pulled information is what we accumulate when we go looking for specific data, ideas, or opinions. It is what results when we purposefully search for answers to a specific question or browse about a general topic. It is data that do not come to us except by our own invitation. Until access to wide-area network technology and the World Wide Web began to become common in workplaces in the 1990s, our options for accumulating this pull-based information were also rather limited. We could, for example, try to recollect a piece of information from our own organic memory, consult our desktop dictionary, read the internal documentation, ask a coworker, interview a subject matter expert, search the files on our desktop computer, or look in our own or our organization’s file cabinets. If we didn’t have any luck with these options, some workplaces supplied encyclopedias or in-house libraries composed of sources related to our organization’s core business. In a few cases, employees might have needed to go outside the organization to conduct research in public or university libraries and archives that held specific kinds of reference works. By and large, though, it was not too difficult to determine at what point we had done enough research (i.e., pull-based information gathering) to satisfy our employer or industry’s need for sufficient due diligence.

While there are probably few technical communicators who would trade the affordances for research offered by the Internet with the far more limited ones available to us earlier, Internet technology nevertheless makes vastly more information accessible to discover, wade through, digest, and use. In so doing, the Internet broadened the base of our information-related job responsibilities. Kirsh (2000, p. 24) notes the irony of a situation in which “our life ought to get easier” and yet “no matter what we have found so far, most people harbor a lingering belief that even more relevant information lies outside, somewhere, and if found will save having to duplicate effort.” Out of this information-rich context, new central questions emerged. How do we sort through it all? How do we know when we have consulted all the right sources? When have we pulled all the relevant information? When have we searched all the right databases? Indeed, all of these fears would seem to be well founded: The website MajesticSEO’s Fresh Index claims that there are at least 200 billion web pages on the World Wide Web (which its search robots have actually visited) and estimates that there may be as many as 600 billion pages in total, although fewer than one-quarter of them are covered by search engines. It would seem that it is virtually impossible to “know” with anything close to absolute certainty that one has found the most precise and definitive information about anything. When do we cease looking, if only for the moment? And then of course, the question becomes, what do we do with the information once we have found it? How do we use it? How do we make it refindable? How do we communicate it to others? How do we convert raw information into usable knowledge and then make it accessible to coworkers or team members as well as to customers using the company’s products? Finally, it is important to keep in mind that much of this information, both pushed and pulled, is editable; whereas the largely paper-based information of the past was static and unchangeable in its form, electronic documents very often are alterable by their users. In this way, the sheer volume of available information, coupled with both our increased access to it and our ability to manipulate that information, has led to significantly increased stresses related to managing it.

To further complicate matters, information obtained through the Internet can be repetitive or duplicated to varying degrees, and its reliability can be suspect. On the one hand, companies competing within specific industries are apt to “spin” either generic or technical information through online publications, blogs, or promotio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Managing Information in Organizations: An Overview of Ideas about Memory and Memory Work
• 2. Memory Work as Embodied Rhetorical Practice
• 3. Studying Rhetorical Memory Practices in Context
• 4. Learning Memory
• 5. Embodying Memory
• 6. Mastering Memory
• 7. The “New” Art of Memory
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• References
• Index