Tactical Technical Communication

A decade ago, I was struck by the realization that almost all of the scholarship in our field focuses on the technical communication that happens within organizations, or that is produced by organizations to engage with their members, constituents, or customers (Kimball, 2006). In our scholarship, pedagogy, and practice, we regularly assume that the basic unit for consideration, the scope, is some sort of formal organization: a corporation, a government agency, or an institution.

This organizational assumption has come under increasing scrutiny by others, as well. For example, Clay Spinuzzi’s influential work has gradually expanded the frame beyond the organization to more flexible and temporary alliances. In Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design (Spinuzzi, 2003) and its more applied follow-on volume, Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations (Spinuzzi, 2013), Spinuzzi focused primarily on communication networks and conventions within organizations. But, more recently, in All Edge: Inside the New Workplace Networks (Spinuzzi, 2015), Spinuzzi broadens his focus beyond the organization, ironically by looking at something smaller: the project-based team. In other words, Spinuzzi’s work seems to have begun with assuming the organization as the proper unit of study but has shifted to consider more contingent and nimble arrangements that cross-organizational boundaries.

Of course, the organization is still an important unit of scope. Yet the organizational assumption obscures a larger view of the technical communication performed by millions of people each day on their own, working outside of, between, and even counter to organizations. This kind of technical communication existed long before the organizational assumption, but it has grown tremendously with the opportunities afforded by the Internet for people to share technical information for their own purposes, rather than on behalf of institutions. In effect, everyone who enjoys access to the Internet is now a potential technical communicator, sharing what they know about technology with the entire world. With services like YouTube, Instructables, and web forums, anyone with only a small investment in money or technology can share with users across the world the kind of information that has traditionally been the product of professional technical writers employed by corporations or government agencies. (For a more detailed discussion of this trend, please see Kimball, 2016.)

These new technical communicators find a ready audience in the many people interested in knowing “how to do” something, but not “how to become” something. Examples abound, but here’s a personal one. The bearings of our washing machine burned out. As it loudly tried to shake itself apart, my wife and I cast about for what to do. In previous decades, our options would have been slim. We could take the machine apart and try to diagnose and repair the problem ourselves. Naturally, our ignorance made us reluctant to take that route. We could hire a repairperson, but likely at great expense. We could simply buy a new washer, at even greater expense. Finally, we could seek formal training and become appliance repairpersons. However, such training is difficult to come by, even more costly, and slow. We would likely run out of clean clothes before we learned enough to fix the machine. And, ironically, we would likely have to learn a lot of information about fixing other kinds of machines, as well as the professional values and standards that would allow us to participate in the appliance repair profession and work for a company (or start our own). This formal option in previous centuries would have taken the form of an apprenticeship to a master, who would gradually have revealed to us the secrets of his trade, while we paid him to be his indentured servants for 10 or so years. Not exactly what we had in mind. Finally, we could buy a book written by a master craftsperson and use that as our guide—though books would likely be out of date or incomplete.

So, before we polished up our PhDs with a stint at a trade school, another option occurred to us: why not ask the wisdom of the Internet? Sure enough, a single search on YouTube turned up not just one tutorial on how to fix a washing machine but multiple video tutorials specifically on how to diagnose and repair our own make and model. These experts shared their know-how through sometimes-unpolished videos, with indifferent quality. However, the videos were nonetheless engaging, authentic, and accurate—in short, they were surprisingly successful pieces of technical communication. The videos also were also free—often provided out of pride of accomplishment and a willingness to share expertise and knowledge, or at most, a bit of Google ad revenue. Certainly, by following these instructions we were able to fix the machine ourselves for the cost of parts—about 1/20th the cost of the next available option. It took us more time than an expert would need, but we happily traded time for money.

We became temporary, limited-scope experts. Temporary, because we could forget what we learned immediately after the repair, and limited scope, because we learned only what was necessary to solve the immediate problem.

Like me, many users now turn to this kind of technical communication for guidance, often instead of official, institutional documentation. The common first step people now take when we encounter a technological problem is not to crack open the manual, search the help file, or even visit the company’s online help, but simply to type the problem into Google and see what pops up. Chances are, other people in the world have experienced the same problem and found a solution they are happy to share, usually for free. Manufacturers, recognizing the embedded expertise of their own user base, now commonly leverage or co-opt this expertise by creating open forums where users can share information with each other, rate the validity of the help they receive, and provide valuable metrics on the product and its use.

The genesis of this special issue

Ten years ago in the pages of this journal, I called for scholars to explore this much broader view of technical communication. A good number have answered my call. For example, Ding (2009) examined extrainstitutional rhetorics in alternative media surrounding the debate over the SARS virus. Mackiewicz (2010, 2011) analyzed the editorial practices of epinions users and the development of ethos in online reviews. Hallenbeck (2012) researched women’s technical writing about bicycling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the safety bicycle was a new and controversial technology that dramatically increased women’s independence and mobility. Van Ittersum (2014) analyzed the technical communication going on in do-it-yourself (DIY) and craft instructions. Rice (2009) theorized folksonomies of technical communication to argue that the “motorization of space” allows for flexible ways of defining mobile information and mobile work. Building on Moorhouse’s (1991) work on enthusiasm in the hot rod community, Fuller (2013) explored enthusiasm and its role in spreading “know-how.” Bellwoar (2012) researched how patients adapt, repurpose, and reproduce official health communication for their own purposes. Towner (2013) examined the public apologia of those found guilty in the Rwandan genocide through a framework of technical communication that builds up from individuals rather than down from official organizations. Seigel (2013) examined birth stories and pregnancy manuals as examples of tactical technical communication that explains “‘here is how I did it’ rather than ‘here is how it must be done’” (Kimball, 2006). And, before any of us, Durack (1997) argued that concepts such as technical communication, technology, work, and workplace have been framed in gendered terms, largely excluding the contributions of women from accounts of traditional technical and scientific communication and excluding the household as a site in which technical communication occurs.

As this work suggests, users of technology have truly become the “user-producers” that Johnson (1998) theorized—not only consuming strategic, institutional technical communication but also creating their own tactical technical communication. These user-producers recognize this shift from institutional to extrainstitutional settings, and they often trust and value the work of other amateur technical communicators over the work produced by a professional tech writer hired by a corporation. They are not, however, necessarily anti-institutional; they are willing to work within institutional strategies when it suits them, and to step outside those strategies when the occasion warrants. They might even be fans, such as the legions that line up outside of Apple stores to be the first to buy the newest iPhone. But a few of those fans are just as likely to turn around and take apart that phone the very same day, to create a video showing other fans “what’s inside the box.”

Tactics and strategies

Institutional technical communicators—communication professionals who work for corporations—become experts at representing how technology “should” work, from the corporation’s perspective. But a fellow user is freer to tell others how a product “does” work. Moreover, a fellow user has fewer impediments about breaking the black box of a product. Although a corporation typically resists modifications to its products (“Warning: disassembly of this unit may void your warranty”), a user-producer is free to tell the world how she disassembled, modded, combined, adapted, rearranged, and in essence re-made the product to her own ends. This individual action navigates the strictures of institutional power to find its own way. It is central to the culture of sharing technological know-how through tactical technical communication.

In using this term, I am extending Michel de Certeau’s (1984) distinction between strategies and tactics. According to de Certeau, strategies are the actions of institutions, whereas tactics are the operations of individuals. Strategies are best understood as attempts to control individual agency through systems of rules, conventions, and expectations. To use de Certeau’s own example, a common institutional strategy of cities is to set up a system of roads, municipally designed and controlled to manage individual travel through the city. Every time a city puts up a sign or paints lines on a road, it’s a good indication that they are engaging in institutional strategizing. Individuals, however, navigate the city more flexibly than its system of strategies suggest. Individuals engage in tactics that recognize institutional strategies and try to find ways to avoid or manipulate the strategies for personal ends. For example, I might decide that the no right turn on red sign the city has put up on my path to work is too inconvenient, so I determine to turn right a block earlier and avoid the intersection that might slow me down.

This is not to say that institutions or their rules are all bad, or that individuals and their shortcuts are all good. Institutional rules can be an expression of the entire community’s desire for regularity, civility, and safety. And though it might be legal, taking a shortcut is not always a socially responsible thing to do. Unlike Antonio Gramsci, de Certeau does not pit totalitarian hegemonies against heroic individuals. He recognizes institutions are made up of individuals, each with his or her own tactical response to institutional power. Neither is every individual heroic. But de Certeau does celebrate the subtle power and quiet tenacity of individuals as they make their way through institutional rules while trying to build their own lives and live them as they see fit.

Like Spinuzzi, de Certeau begins with the workplace but quickly moves beyond that boundary. He describes a technique the French call la perruque: borrowing tools or materials from the workplace to build something for personal use. For example, someone might use the office photocopier to make a copy of his tax return, or borrow a set of wrenches to fix the family car. In both cases, individuals cross institutional boundaries mixing home and workplace into a kind of a transgressive homework. De Certeau also describes a more powerful tactic, bricolage—the practice of putting things together that were not strategically intended to go together. In the article where I coined the phrase “tactical technical communication,” I chronicled how people used bricolage to build their own cars—not from scratch, per se, but from the combination of parts and subassemblies adopted from a variety of vehicles. In doing so, they had the opportunity to adapt institutional strategies to their individual tactical situation. For example, a tall driver could build a car with a frame that fit his own frame (Kimball, 2006).

But what I found more interesting than the physical modification of products and their adaptation to new uses was the discourse that built up around the practice of bricolage. Before the Internet, potential car builders (just like my wife and I with our washing machine) had limited options. They could forge their way through the project armed only with ignorance—but that would be reinventing the wheel in a very real sense. They could go to school to learn to become car designers or mechanics. Or they could be tutored, either by a master mechanic or by a book written by a master mechanic, in this case, “the book” by Champion (1996), the narrative guide that inspired this building trend. But even Champion was a rather fragmentary guide—more of a narrative of Champion’s own experience, and therefore limited in scope. The dynamic online community of builders that developed was something new. This community could help each other in real time, while creating a rich, multifaceted documentation of many individual practices.

Radical sharing

So to la perruque and bricolage, we can now add a third tactic that de Certeau in 1984 could not anticipate: radical sharing. By radical sharing, I mean our newfound individual capability of sharing our tactics with people the world over at great speed and with great effect. With a small investment in time and money, we can reach a multitude of people in situations similar to ours and share our own approaches and techniques for everyday living.

As de Certeau described it, individual actions can become institutional strategies by force of repetition. One person creates a shortcut; another follows in his footsteps; eventually others beat a path; and finally, the city gives in and paves a new sidewalk. But this is a rather lengthy process, now shortened by the affordances of the Internet. Perhaps the quintessential example is the YouTube video genre known as “life hacks.” In these videos, people share simple techniques for overcoming everyday problems. For example, YouTube’s Crazy Russian Hacker, Taras Kulakov, offers hacks such as how to open a can without a can opener (Kulakov, 2016; Willett, 2015). What turns this simple collection of tactics into a super power is the astounding reach of the Internet. Kulakov’s YouTube channel has 11.1 million subscribers; they and others have watched his 1,378 videos over 2 billion times (Kulakov, 2016). That’s some serious repetition.

I do not mean to sound like a polyanna, however, which is why I think adding “radical” to sharing is so important. As a tactic, radical sharing uses the Internet as a lever that can dramatically magnify the impact of an individual utterance. In de Certeau’s terms, rather than the relatively benign, low-impact activity of many feet gradually beating a path through a short cut, the Internet allows a single individual to cut a new path with a bulldozer.

The power behind this blade is not just the essential capabilities of the internet to share information, but the focus of radical sharing on how to do things. So I’m not referring to the citizen journalism that was so widely discussed during the Arab Spring and similar events that encouraged people to get out their cell phones and start recording video. Radical sharing is profoundly connected to technical communication. It’s not about what happened, but about making things happen. If anything, rather than citizen journalism, radical sharing is “citizen engineering.”

As such, radical sharing is not good or bad—just powerful. The practice of everyday life has become more complex as a result of radical sharing. Radical sharing can be as benign as helping people to avoid malaria (HealthPhone.org, 2013; Scientific Animations without Borders, 2012). Or it can be as malignant as helping people learn how to make and use weapons. It leaves the decision of whether to share destructive techniques not with the community, but with the individual—who might indeed be a “crazy Russian hacker” in a more destructive sense. De Certeau’s vision of everyday life invokes an interlocking network of individuals and institutions that provide a buffer to change. Institutions promote stasis and system not only to control individual actions, but also to limit misdeeds that might harm the polis. Competition between nimble individuals and slow-changing institutions provides a certain amount of balance. It gives individuals a chance to nudge institutional pathways toward human needs, while giving institutions the power to regulate changes that might not be good for everyone.

This power—really, this super-power—of radical sharing makes tactical technical communication something all technical communication scholars, practitioners, and students should know about. As I have argued elsewhere recently (Kimball, 2016), we are truly living in a Golden Age for technical communication—in the sense that more people than ever before are engaging in sharing know-how as part of their everyday lives. We need to understand this new mode of discourse. We also must teach our students how to navigate a new landscape with grace, so that where they put their feet creates a path that will benefit many and harm few.

This issue

I am delighted to find that my application of de Certeau to technical communication in our networked world has sparked ideas for other scholars. To those I mentioned above who have published articles or book chapters engaging with this idea of tactical technical communication, we can now add the five thoughtful and compelling articles in this special issue.

Two of the five articles use empirical methods to extend our understanding of tactical technical communication. One aspect previous studies of this subject lacked was real research on how people use technical communication to make their way through the variety of institutions that have an effect on their lives. De Certeau’s work and the work it has inspired might ring true, but we have scarcely begun the research necessary to say definitively whether people act tactically as de Certeau describes.

Drew Holladay’s empirical study begins to fill this gap, extending the critical and theoretical discussion surrounding tactical technical communication by listening to real people as they try to navigate the complex web of information surrounding disease and care. Holladay, in “Classified Conversations: Psychiatry and Tactical Technical Communication in Online Spaces,” uses a tactical framework to ask how patients with mental health issues interact with the documents mental health professionals use to treat the patients’ conditions. Holladay argues that patients use a variety of strategic information sources from multiple institutions to help understand their diagnosis and treatment. Holladay’s research explores and the various methods of making-do patients employ as they navigate the landscape of their condition.

Also using an empirical approach, Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, in “Reddit’s ‘Explain Like I’m Five’: Technical Descriptions in the Wild,” examines participation in a Reddit forum to see how tactical technical communication actually works outside of an institutional environment. At the ragged frontiers of the plain language movement, this Reddit forum attempts to link laypeople in the exchange of technical information on a variety of questions that are simply expressed, but perhaps not so simple to answer. The forum is an excellent opportunity to examine tactical technical communication as it happens between individuals—a case study for understanding extrainstitutional exchanges of technical information.

The three articles following Holladay and Pflugfelder look at some of the darker aspects of tactical technical communication. Daniel C. Reardon, David Wright, and Edward A. Malone’s, “Quest for the Happy Ending to Mass Effect 3: The Challenges of Cocreation with Consumers in a Post-Certeauian Age,” provides a case study of the difficulties institutions face when they attempt to include or co-opt user-generated content in their products and documentation. Johnson’s (1998) call to include users as equal participants was certainly inspiring, but it may have glossed over some of the complexities of negotiating that exchange. Reardon, Wright, and Malone chronicle a case in which users were distinctly unhappy about the product and even more unhappy about the way that their input was managed. The product itself became a contested space, as hackers and modders built alternative content to satisfy users directly, rather than through the strategic rulebook of the game’s creators. It’s a cautionary tale that should discourage corporations and other organizations from thinking that users can be easily tamed and put in the traces to support institutional goals.

Jared S. Colton, Steve Holmes, and Josephine Walwema, in their article “From NoobGuides to #OpKKK: Ethics of Anonymous’ Tactical Technical Communication,” explore the ethical gaps in de Certeau’s thinking. De Certeau’s expression of the tactical/strategic binary relies on an assumption that individuals who break a rule or take shortcuts here or there are at base good people trying to live their lives despite institutional strategies that try to constrain them. This assumption, which we might a few decades ago have simply called bourgeois, obscures the fact that de Certeau seems to be promoting cheating and other ethically questionable acts. What happens when individual tactics become institutionalized into strategies for controlling discourse and events? What happens when the hackers get organized, such as Anonymous did in the ethically muddy waters of the Ferguson protests? Our increasing familiarity with radical sharing as an option available to individuals suggests that we will need to share not only techniques and how-tos, but also ethical frameworks for governing individual action where institutional rules no longer seem to apply.

Sometimes the people engaged in radical sharing are actually radicals. Hilary A. Sarat-St. Peter, in her article “‘Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom’: Jihadist Tactical Technical Communication and the Everyday Practice of Cooking,” tackles perhaps the most extreme application of tactical technical communication. Jihadists worldwide use the same tactical approaches to sharing know-how that others use in protesting injustice or remaking a game. Over two decades ago, Katz (1992) shared his analysis of a memo written by a Nazi engineer recommending improvements to the efficiency of the transports that took Jews to the gas chambers. Katz’s argument was that one strategy of technical communication—expediency—divorced technical communication from its social context and ethical framework, leading to unspeakable tragedies. With a similarly brave stance, Sarat-St. Peter steps forward to look at improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and the people who teach prospective terrorists how to make them.

These are uncomfortable subjects. Despite many voices pointing out its complexity, in practical terms we still like to think of technical communication as something that makes lives better. Perhaps it’s time to grow beyond that feeling. Every chemist knows that her work can be used to cure or to kill. Every businessperson knows that there are ways to cheat the system or the customer. Every engineer knows her work could be used for a noble aim, or for aiming a gun. We seem to think that technical communicators are the filters that help individuals and institutions understand each other better. When the flow of information is only “as clear as mud,” we try to make it run a little clearer. But in so doing, we make a choice: maybe instead of filtering out the particles to make clear water, maybe we should be filtering out the water to make good soil. The same tactic/strategy applies to both goals. But, whatever our choice, it might mean floods for some, and famine for others.

One thing we should know: technical communication is a deeper river than most people think. We need to understand it from its surface to its depths.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miles A. Kimball

Miles A. Kimball is professor and department head in the Department of Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He has worked as a technical writer and knowledge management consultant in the defense and telecommunication industries. He has published broadly on e-portfolio pedagogy, information design, graphic design, digital humanities, and the history of data visualization.