Jason Swarts. Wicked, Incomplete, and Uncertain: User Support in the Wild and the Role of Technical Communication. Utah State University Press (2018). 171 pp

摘要

The profession of technical communication emerged from the necessity to organize and coordinate relationships between technologies and their users. The call to create technical documentation-such as instructions, manuals, and procedures-that helped users to better understand their technologies became increasingly relevant with the rise of the household computer near the end of the 20th-century. That documentation was, admittedly, quite limited; a print manual could never describe every potential scenario a user might encounter. However, since the turn of the century, the ability to document these scenarios has increased drastically; this is not done by technical communicators, but rather by users on open-access software forums. Jason Swarts's Wicked, Incomplete, and Uncertain: User Support in the Wild and Role of Technical Communication responds to this shift in technologies and the relationships that users have with them to illustrate how new knowledge demands have emerged. Swarts describes the change in user relationships with technical communication, demonstrates how a discursive community emerges in forums that redistributes knowledge making power amongst users, and ultimately calls for a shift in the role of technical communicators. Swarts's argument, however, is not bleak: this is not the end of technical communication, rather it is an important call for technical communicators to embrace these shifts and recognize the ways in which their role has been expanded. Ultimately, Swarts argues that the new role of the technical communicator is to help shape user communities and empower users to take ownership of their relationship to technologies-a decades old call within the field reimagined for the 21st-century.