For some time, my Long List of Unwritten Articles That I'll Get Around to One Day has included a piece on technical writing in Silicon Valley (along with articles on churches, schools, swim clubs, and informal social networks in the Valley; a piece on the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group; William H. Wesley's mid-1850s work as an illustrator to both Richard Owen and T. H. Huxley; and even more obscure topics).
Technical writing is one of those forms of invisible technical labor that we never pay any attention to, but which plays an important role in mediating between technologies and users, and structuring the way people think about products.
It's also a literary genre that has been transformed a couple times in the last twenty years, first by hypertext and CDs, next by the Web, and finally by discussion groups. Indeed, not including a user manual is increasingly popular, both as a way of saving money, and as a way to send the signal that "our product is so easy to user that it doesn't need a manual." (Of course, whether it is or not is another question; and usually the answer is, "of course not.")
Josh Greenberg is working a piece on "The Instruction Manual and the Wiki" that actually covers some of this territory:
I’ve been thinking a lot about instruction manuals as a metaphor for the ways that we use technology; if, following general STS theory, the actual meaning of a technology is structured by the frame of knowledge layered on top of it, then we can think of there being a sort of cultural “instruction manual” for every artifact.
A key property of an instruction manual is that it’s tangible, words on paper, a fixed codification of what one can do with a specific thing. When we buy a new camera or VCR or microwave oven, the manual that comes with it was produced by the corporation that made the artifact itself (though not necessarily by the actual designers and engineers who made the artifact; this is an important point, and one which cries out to be studied by some sort of ethnography of technical writing). We, as consumers/users, are expected to learn how to use this new thing we own by reading the manual.
One might raise the point that instruction manuals are almost universally reviled, and the goal of many designers is to create technologies that are, in a sense, prêt à employer – for many, the ideal design is one which requires no instruction manual, but which is so obvious on its face that any further discussion of how it is to be used is superfluous. The thing that gets left out of this argument is the fact that there is still an instruction manual of sorts, just one which hangs in the intangible threads of culture that inform our day-to-day lives. At one point, users needed an instruction manual to understand that a green button with a right-pointing triangle meant play and a red button with a square meant stop, but this knowledge became so ubiquitous as to become invisible, so commonplace as to be obvious.
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