The Rhetoric of Reach: Preparing Students for Technical Communication in the Age of Social Media

Abstract

The authors argue that technical communication instructors are in a particularly apt position to teach social media as key to students’ lives as technical communicators and future professionals. Drawing on the concepts of reach and crowd sourcing as heuristics to rearticulate dominant cultural narratives of social media as deleterious to students’ careers, the authors offer a case study of an introductory professional and technical communication pedagogy that helped to disrupt uncritical deployments of social media.

Keywords:

• crowd sourcing
• pedagogy
• reach
• social media

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors give many thanks to Dr. David J. Reamer and the students enrolled in his technical writing course at the University of Tampa for their feedback and comments on the student documentation published on Instructables. The authors also appreciate thoughtful and engaged reviewer comments that helped us to develop this article.

Notes

Students are not misguided in their concerns about social media use and its connection to employment, and perhaps even university admissions practices. As of May 13, 2013, the National Conferences of State Legislatures reports that social-media privacy protection laws are being introduced or are pending in 36 states. These states are seeking to stop the practice of employers and universities from requesting logins and passwords of employees or students to their social media sites. According to the conference, four states already have such protections, including Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah (para 1). These same laws are under debate as both industry and regulatory finances groups argue for the veracity of having access to social media outlets in order to monitor employee discussions of sensitive financial information (Eaglesham & Rothfeld, 2013, para 1).

In the particular semester discussed, students all used Instructables to ensure they were working with the same interface and design features and to allow for more robust user-testing.

We understand that some students in professional and technical writing courses might be eager to learn about and use social media for their professional development, but we see this position as equally capable of reinforcing the binary of good/bad that is worthy of complication. Neither position affords human agency because technology is the determinant factor in either a student's success or failure.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elise Verzosa Hurley

Elise Verzosa Hurley is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Her research interests include technical and professional communication pedagogy, visual rhetoric, and multimodal composition. Her work has appeared in Kairos.

Amy C. Kimme Hea

Amy C. Kimme Hea is Writing Program Director and Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona, and author of Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers.