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Recycling or trash? It's a question you may have asked yourself when faced with a gross can, a heavily-stickered art project, or some weird plastic thing. Benton hijacks the podcast to teach Abi the behind-the-scenes of the recycling process: How it works, how effective it is, the consequences of "wish-cycling," and why plastic sucks so much. He addresses what steps you can take to make recycling work better, besides just putting things in the right bin.

Sources and further reading

TC Talk episodes mentioned:

• “Cult rhetoric.” https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/techcommtalk/episodes/Cult-rhetoric-e1b1gpi/a-a70h9n0
• “Tech comm from outer space: More lessons from alien movies.” https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/techcommtalk/episodes/Tech-comm-from-outer-space-More-lessons-from-alien-movies-e1md55n/a-a8cdbc1

Wikipedia articles mentioned:

• “Recycling” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling
• “Sustainability” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability
• “Microplastics” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics
• “Greenwashing.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing
• “Wishcycling.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishcycling

Music credits:

• Opening theme: S: Disco Funk Loop by SergeQuadrado | License: Attribution NonCommercial 3.0
• Ensemble. (2008). “So they say” [Song]. On Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog Soundtrack [Album]. Mutant Enemy.
• Wheatus. (2000). “Teenage dirtbag” [Song]. On Wheatus [Album]. Columbia.

Image credit:

• Siera Wild, “Recycling sign green.png.” CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Transcript at https://faculty.mnsu.edu/tctalk/podcast/recycling-you-still-dont-get-it/

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Benton and Abi feel bad about climate change. As they should. They talk about how to channel negative emotions into productive action, as recommended in the book Facing the Climate Emergency by Margaret Klein Salamon.

Transcript and sources can be found at http://faculty.mnsu.edu/tctalk/

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Benton and Abi feel bad about climate change. As they should. They talk about how to channel negative emotions into productive action, as recommended in the book ⁠Facing the Climate Emergency⁠ by Margaret Klein Salamon.

Sources and further reading Salamon, Margaret Klein (2023). Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth. New Society Publishers. * Bakke, A. & B. Bakke (Hosts). "Disaster Comm, Part 1: Disaster is the New Normal." (24 Nov. 2022). [Podcast Episode]. In TC Talk. https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/techcommtalk/episodes/Disaster-comm--Part-1-Disaster-is-the-new-normal-e1r7var/a-a8u21lb * Bakke, A. & B. Bakke (Hosts). "A Tech Comm Prof and a Space Enthusiast React to Don't Look Up" (6 Jan. 2022). [Podcast Episode]. In TC Talk. https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/techcommtalk/episodes/A-tech-comm-prof-and-a-space-enthusiast-react-to-Dont-Look-Up-e1cffr5/a-a76c9bs * Resilience. (2023, November 15). Crazy Town Bonus Riff: Bundyville and Stories that Need to Be Told with Leah Sottile. Resilience. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-11-15/crazy-town-bonus-leah-sottile/ * Westervelt, Amy. (Host). (2016-present). Drilled* [Podcast]. Drilled Media. https://drilled.media

TranscriptBIt's depressing. It's enraging. It's frustrating. It makes me want to change everything I do. It makes me feel like it won't make a difference if I do. It makes me want to run for office to fix something. I get all the feels about it.AHi My name is Abi. I'm a professor of technical Communication.BOh, now me?AMm hmm. BAnd I'm Benton. I am not a professor of technical communication.AAnd this is TC talk. That's tech talk. So we talk about Tech comm whether or not we are professors of it, BRight. I guess that you could consider me a bit of a subject matter expert on this. Expert ay be a little overreach butARight we're talking climate today.BWe're talking climate.AThis is going to be a hard episode.BYeah, AI've been putting it off because we're going to talk about BThe climate emergency Aand specifically our psychological states around it, our emotions around it.BMm hmm.AClimate anxiety. Climate doom BYes.AIt's a real thing. It's safe to say we both have experienced it.BYes. Would you like me to mansplain it to the audience?ABen splain.BBen splain. Okay. That sounds a lot less negative.AAre you going to Ben splain the climate emergency or climate anxiety?BClimate Doom.A Oh, okay.BSo climate doom, which can lead to climate Doomerism, is a response to information about the climate emergency that is basically, well, we're all fucked and there's nothing we can do about it.ARight. Climate doom is perhaps an unproductive manifestation of climate anxiety.BPerhaps?AOkay, okay.BIt's explicitly an unproductive response.AOkay. So Listeners may recall several months ago we did a series on crisis communication.BYes.AAnd in the course of that, in part one I believe we talked about how I tend to, well, initially I said I tend to bury my head in the sand in response to bad news. And then I revised it to no, I run around like a chicken with its head cut off. Because as much as I wish I could bury the feelings, I can't. They're always there and I find them paralyzing at times.BIt drives you to avoid engaging with the data, with the reality.A And you are, you're kind of like, let me work this into every casual conversation.BYeah.AWhich makes you a lovely dinner party companion. BHow many dinner parties have we been to?ASee, that's why!BI doubt it.AWe'd be invited to more if people weren't always like we can't invite Benton, he's gonna be holding us all accountable. No, but you're right and you have very kindly and gently brought my attention to this tendency of mine and we have a thing. Who's that?BThat's Fern.ALet her in. This is our first time recording with two cats. BYeah.AAnd Fig has never been in the blanket for it, so it's a new experience for him. where was I? So you very gently brought this to my attention by recommending that I read this book. And the book wasBFacing the climate emergency.AHow to transform yourself with climate Truth, by Margaret Salomon Klein. I did not like what this book had to say. It called me out. I needed to hear it. I hated the experience of reading it. But I'm on board. So this author, she is a psychologist and a climate activist. She founded the Climate Emergency Fund. And I feel like psychological perspectives have kind of been missing from the conversation about climate communication. Well, I shouldn't say that. I hadn't been paying attention to the fact that there is work being done around psychological responses to climate change and how that affects people's behavior. This topic is relevant to TC talk listeners in a couple of ways. Obviously, technical communicators are tasked with conveying complex technical and scientific information to a range of audiences. Climate change is scientific and technical, but it's also affecting everyone by now, BYes.ASo it should not be the scientific and technical topic that remains, this is knowledge that should not be hoarded or kept amongst experts. It needs to be shared widely. And that's not to say people haven't tried. I think for a long time there's been that, that classic science communication misconception that if only people knew, if only people had the information, they had the facts, then they would do the right thing. Then they would understand.BMmm hmm.AThen they would believeBthe Education Panacea fallacy. I just made that up.AYeah. There is an actual name for that. But I can't think of what it is at the moment. So I think part of the solution could be understanding how people are approaching it cognitively. One thing I always encourage my students to do is consider the emotional states of their audiences. There's never going to be a reader, or an audience, or a user who is in a 100% ideal frame of mind when they encounter your communication.BTrue.A People will have different beliefs and feelings and obstacles that affect how they respond to the information. So on the one hand, I hope that by discussing this, people who teach and do tech comm can, we'll give you something more to consider in terms of crafting communication for your audiences, but more relevant to our focus today. We each also individually have to deal with our shit.BYes.AI just I have feelings about this stuff. I’m going to vomit them upon you.BWhere they come from is a question that is real.ASo my dad is a songwriter. One of his first songs he ever wrote in college, that was a lyric. We'll never let him live it down. Um, feelings, I have feelings.BBy us talking about it and our feelings I think that, I hope that we can help guide others to begin this process on their own.AYeah. Which is something that she says in the book that we need to do is we need to talk about it. Do you remember when we went to the DFL picnic and I was talking with our Minnesota State representative. And I was like, so, give listeners a brief rundown of how awesome the Minnesota Legislature has done.BYes. So, national news has picked up a lot of the accomplishments of the DFL, which is the Minnesota variety of Democrat, ADemocratic Farmer Laborer.BYep. Anyway, their accomplishments at the state level, having control of the State House,AThey have a razor thin majority,BBut having that thin majority still accomplishing major things.Alegalized marijuana,BPaid sick leave.AEnvironment stuff, BYes, environment stuff.AThe point is Minnesota has been called the anti -Florida and I think it should be a model to other states of what to do when you actually get power.BMm-Hm.AIs like make stuff happen. Anyway. So I was talking to him about this and I was like, what do we do about climate change? Omg. And he said, have conversations about it. And initially I was like, what is that going to do? We need to act. And as will become clear as we proceed through this discussion, you got to get other people on board. Everyone's kind of already thinking about it, and probably ignoring it.BMm hm.ASo we got to make people uncomfortable.BYeah.AShe shares a 2021 study that showed that 56% of young people believe that humanity is doomed. 46% say that climate anxiety affects them every day. So I'm not just making it up. People are thinking about it, people are worried about it. The book is pretty easy read. Well, I shouldn't say easy, it's a decently quick read. She has the chapters broken down into steps for dealing with your climate anxiety. The first step being face the truth. Second, welcome the painful feelings. Three, re-imagine your life story. Four, enter emergency mode. Five, join the movement and disrupt normalcy. First, a little background. She says, and I quote, “we are in pain because our world is dying and through our passivity, we are responsible for killing it.”BSo that's why it's important to talk about it. Anything but passivity.AYeah. That sucks to hear but this passivity is all around us. It's like, I don't know, the millennial cynicism. It's probably not limited to one generation. But when we see that attitude, it seems like, meow, like the end of earth is inevitable. Like the end of humanity as we know it is inevitable, we've resigned ourselves to it. She says “How can we otherwise make sense of the fact that more people aren't rioting in the streets at the imminent destruction of their lives, their children's lives, and the entire web of life?” It's one of those things that you look around and you're like, am I banana pants or is everybody else?BAm I fully disconnected from reality or is everyone else? AYeah, yeah. And the answer is kind of everyone else, honestly.BMm hm.AI mean ourselves included because we're all like, she says, we look to other people to gauge risk.BYep.AHow are other people acting? We follow their lead, and frankly our leaders are not acting like this is the crisis that it actually is.BRight.ASo she's part of a group that helped make the phrase climate emergency a thing. We'll talk about what that is shortly. She advocates for disruptive but non violent climate activism and my reactions and my resistance as I read the book, have really helped see where I need to grow.BHm.ABecause I wish there were a way to make a difference without making waves. But change doesn't happen that way, like meaningful change doesn't happen that way.BSystems resist that.AYou've certainly looked this in the face more directly than I have. How do you feel about the climate emergency? How do you feel?BBad is too small a word.AIt is all encompassing though.BIt is all encompassing. Yeah. I feel, it's depressing. It's enraging. It's frustrating. It makes me want to change everything I do. It makes me feel like it won't make a difference if I do. It makes me want to run for office to fix something. I get all the feels about it.AYeah. And overwhelmed from all the feels.BRanging from the positive, I know how to fix this. Someone should let me, to Despair.AI don't know if this is an apt metaphor, but I love the good place. The TV show.BMm hm.AAnd I think it's season three, the part where Chidi, suddenly all truth is revealed to him, you know, the truth of the universe, and life and death, et cetera, and it's not good news and he goes out of his mind and he cooks a gigantic pot of chili in front of his philosophy class and adds marshmallow peeps and M and M's while wearing a who what where wine T shirt. He tells his class, nothing matters. That's what you need to know for the test.BHe has a moment where he says, this broke me. You get to a point of information where logic just gives up.AYeah. So when I think too hard about climate, I'm like, why not cook a pot of peep chili in front of my class? But then Eleanor kind of brings him to his senses and says, well, what other choice do we have but to try?BI think that's a pretty good metaphor.AYeah? All right. Are you ready to face the truth? I mean, you already have.BAre you ready to face the truth, listener?AIt's telling that the word truth pings my conspiracy alarm bells, like what does that mean?BThe fact is that there are in fact conspiracies, they're real, they've been uncovered. Conspiracies that specifically that Exxon knew. In the '70s. Like they were aware in the late '70s that climate change was lock things up.AYeah, I mean, it is kind of a conspiracy, but it's one that works because it makes us feel better to buy into the lie that it's not that bad. So here in two sentences, the truth of the climate emergency is, here. Read this for me.BCertainly. “Scientific consensus says the accelerating climate emergency and ecological crisis threatens human life through famine, disease, accelerating natural disasters, conflicts and social collapse. Only an emergency mobilization of resources to rapidly transform our entire economy and society (Meaning zero emissions and drawdown) can possibly protect the future of humanity and the living world.”AWe're not going to go over the science. That's out there. We're not trying to convince anyone that this is real at this point. We're trying to be real about the extent of the damage. She talks about how we actually expend energy trying to bury our feelings about it and protect ourselves. And the media and the fossil fuel industry have really given us a hand in this regard, even if we know they’re scum, their campaigns have been extremely effective. They don't have to deny climate change, they just have to scatter enough seeds of doubt that we can discard info that may be true, but it is hard to face. It gives us that plausible deniability.BWhat is the matter with you cat?AAnd they, so the fossil fuel industry followed the big tobacco playbook, right? And we have an entire major political party that denies the science of climate change. The Republican Party is the only major political party in the world that does that.BAmerican exceptionalism.AAnd, you know, in efforts to be bipartisan and whatever it, in efforts to appease that audience, all legitimate efforts to curtail climate change are going to be dragged down to a negligible level.BMm hm.ASo the Inflation Reduction act was passed in 2022. What do you know about that one?B It's kind of a big change from a lot of legislation that we've had lately. It is an industrial policy piece of legislation that, I think that it has something like 360 billion somewhere in there dollars earmarked for climate change, various efforts, which is the largest in the world so far. I say industrial policy because it aims at getting these industries up and going through whatever means necessary.AWhat industries? Renewable energy?BRenewable energy, electrification of various aspects of our industrialized society.ASo, it's a step in the right direction?BYes, it's a step in the right direction.ABut it's not enough.BIt's not enough and from the bill that it was taken, which you probably heard of the green new deal. It's basicallyAWatered down?BYeah, it's like 5% of that.AWow.BThat's the problem with compromising with lunatics.AYeah. So that should tell you how behind we actually are. And she talks about the justice aspect of this too, is that the effects of climate change are not being borne equally. The gap will only widen with the worst harms on the most marginalized peopleBwho caused it the least.AExactly. Exactly. And she talks about “a future where electric cars and trucks offer a temporarily tolerable lifestyle for the privileged, while electric tanks at the border stop desperate migrants from coming in.”BIt's an interesting comment. The electric tanks, Mm hmm. Militaries the world over have been by leaps and bounds the worst emitters of carbon dioxide, the worst. due to national security reasons, they're not added in to calculations.AReally?BYep. If you know how much fuel,A Oh my gosh.B If you know how much fuel an army is using, you can make a guess about how many vehicles of what types.AHow do you know this?BIt's in the book.A This book?Bmaybe it isn't in this book. I think it might be in Greta Thunberg's The Climate Book. A AWow.BWhich is also a great read.AWhat a loophole.BTo a much smaller extent, global shipping, air freight, container ships, that's not captured by any country, it's only 3% to 4% of carbon emissions but it's one of those had to deal with ones because, you know, long distance transportation is hard to do electrically.AIt makes me so mad to look at the billions being indiscriminately spent on defense in our country. Mm hm. BAnd no one questions that it goes up every year.AAnd we're apparently not able to keep account of the carbon emissions that result from our huge military.BMm hmm. Fun side note, I don't, I don't know if there's been a second one done, but the Pentagon has failed its audit. They can't account 21 million dollars of spending.AWhat? Did they check the couch cushions?BIt's a lot of couch cushions.AThe money is there because somehow as a society, we've decided that this matters more than anything else. We just need to shift our focus. What is it, is it that climate change is not a person? It's not an enemy that we can't wrap our heads around like this is actually a bigger threat than some other country.BI think there’s a lot of, a lot that goes into the psychology of not dealing with it. Part of it is that frog in the pot analogy, things have been changing slowly, so you might not have noticed over time how, for example, you don't get as many bugs on the windshield at night anymore because insect populations are declining.AWe live in Minnesota, it's late December, we have not had snow on the ground, BRight? That isn't unheard of, especially in southern Minnesota. But as nice as it is to work outside right now, it still is unnerving.ANot to mention, in the summer when the Canadian wildfires polluted our air in southern Minnesota, to the point where we were advised to stay inside. The position of climate denial is, it may have worked for a while. By now it's like it's keeping you in your house. How do you explain that away?BIt’s like Don’t Look Up.AI don't know, but people are very motivated to. Yeah, watch Don't look up on Netflix or listen to our episode on it. What is it, A tech comm prof and a space enthusiast react to Don’t Look up.BSo another thing that makes it really hard to address is that the easiest solution, the best solution, is less consumption and that is less imaginable for most Americans than the complete collapse of human civilization.ABut we need to be really cautious about thinking that the solution lies at an individual level,BRight. It doesn't.ABecause that's something that the fossil fuel industries, you know, that was masterful propaganda to say recycle and you individually can make choices to save the world while they're the ones Bprofiting from its demise.AYes, I think we need to be reasonable about individual actions we can take to reduce our own carbon footprint. You know, weigh them against the efficacy of other individual actions that are meant to push us towards systemic change. Does that make sense?BYes, everyone can do something, but the most important thing that we can do is change the systems that, you know, like suburbs make cars necessary. Yeah. The way that our society is laid out. It's just needs to change.ABut I absolutely see what you're saying is that self interest is something that's also causing us to avoid looking at the consequences of our lifestyles because Mm hm. It's hard to give up the privilege you have.BRight.ASo let’s talk about some of the common psychological defenses that people use. There's outright denial of course.BMm hm. AIntellectualization: it's real, but it doesn't affect me emotionally. Willful ignorance: I don't want to know what's happening. Mm hmm. Wishful thinking. It can't be that bad. We're making progress, which is false, by the way.BRight.AI don't think she talks about it. But would you lump techno optimism in with wishful thinking as a psychological defense?BI would consider techno optimism a subset of wishful thinking.ASo that belief that science,BScience will figure something out. Science already figured it out. That's the thing. We just need to have the will to do it.AWell, we want science to come up with an answer that doesn't require us to be uncomfortable.BRight.AIn any way.BWe want a drop in solution that doesn't change anything but somehow magically fixes the problems that our everything have caused.AYeah. Projection, it is real, but it's other people's fault. Mm hm. Which again, is largely true BFor every individual. It's largely true except for, you know, the 100 richest people in the world who've done most of it.AGradualism, we can't scare the public. We need hope, not fear.BMm hmm.ABut doesn't that sound so nice and balanced and reasonable?BYeah.AAgain, it's the civilized response. It's the response that allows us to not make waves and toBit's tone policing.AOoh, good call. It makes it possible to silence the people who are being uncomfortably loud about it.BMm hm. ABut we should be scared. Climate communicators are not being honest with us if they're not scaring us. And she also says that the claims against public fear are not supported by evidence. So that whole line of, we can't scare the public, is not actually true.BWe can't scare the public, well, the historical evidence is not in, does not support that. What happened after 911?AExactly. BWhat happened after Pearl Harbor?AYeah. Fear mongering is perfectly acceptable if it supports a military intervention.BMm hmm.AHow convenient. So she says that public discussion is trapped somewhere between denialism and gradualism right now. And the Overton window is too small to accommodate the reality.BYes, the Overton window, I think ironically it was actually coined by a right winger, It's the window of things that are okay to discuss, that are politically acceptable to discuss Athings that are in bounds.BMm hm.AIn other words we can't talk about radical climate action without being seen as silly or overreacting in the United States.BRight.AThe good news, she says, we're not powerless.BOh, thank goodness.AWe feel this way, We feel helpless for a reason. She says “larger forces have conspired, both purposefully and inadvertently, to deny the truth, making us feel helpless.” And that helplessness breeds passivity, which allows the status quo to continue. And she talks about World War Two as an example of the United States rallying around a common cause.B Yeah.AAnd not just like, let's go Bkill the baddies.AExactly. But home front like mobilization and self-sacrifice.BYeah. There were lots of scrap drives to get the important metals, materials that were needed for the war effort, for things as simple as building or retooling factories.AVictory Gardens?BVictory Gardens. Yeah.AAnd of course the up ending of society so that women went to work in the factories and they actually created government subsidized childcare.Bthat even included at times the ability to pick up your kid with a hot meal to take home at the end of your factory shift.ABut yeah, the country was largely unified. They had a common sense of purpose. It's possible. Covid was an opportunity to have that sense of purpose again.Bto a small extent, I think that some people captured it.AYeah. And with World War Two, I don't think there was an entire political party that was resisting forward motion. I mean, BNot in this country anyway.AWell, I mean, there were certainly American Nazis.BYeah, that's true.AAnd what do you call them? Isolationists.BYep.ABut I don't think they were the presence that climate deniers are today.BYeah. They had the good sense to shut up after Pearl Harbor.AMm. Are you feeling bad, Benton?BYeah.AWell, we're coming to step two. Welcome fear, grief, and other painful feelings.BArgh.AAnd by the way, it took us a long time to get through step one, but the rest of these won't take that long.BOkay.AHere's what I wanted the author to say when I first started reading this book. Don't worry about it. Obviously, because you're so distressed, you're a good person who cares and that's what matters. You can't do anything about this, so stop stressing. Do self care, go to therapy, meditate, take a bubble bath, journal.BI'm smiling. AWhy?BI mean, you weren't all wrong there. Go to therapy. Self-care, certainly.ANo, these are good things. These are good things. But they don't get at the root of our climate anxiety. BSoothe is not the right strategy.AYeah, I think those things should be done in addition to meaningful action. She says feel the feelings, they are justified. Stop trying to tamp them down. There is freedom in feeling your feelings. You feel this way because your fears are justified. I don't like feeling bad feelings, Benton. You can try to bury them but they're still there. She talks about approaching your feelings with self compassion and curiosity. So for my part I need to be compassionate towards myself for trying to bury or rationalize the feelings around climate change because it was and is an act of self protection.BMm hmm. AThis is how humans are built.BIt's an act of psychic, psychic self preservation.AYeah. And I really liked what she had to say here. “Your painful feelings spring from the best parts of yourself, from your empathy, sense of responsibility, love for others, and love of life.”BThat was so good to read.AYou know, we talk about grief even as being a sign of love.BYeah.AThat we've loved someone. And I think feeling grief about what we’ve lost, what our planet has lost,BWhat we've already lost.AYes. Is a sign that, that we truly do care about it.BMm hm.AWhat was that stat she had about the percentage of biodiversity that plummeted?BOh boy. It was really, it was really sad. I know that, like I had mentioned earlier, the insect population as measured by Bug strikes on windshields, which, sure, it's citizen science. It's not perfect but it's a good gauge.AMm. “The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2018 documents a 60% decline in the populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians in the last 40 years. The insect apocalypse is the tip of the spear, but it's also the base of the food chain.”BMm hmm.A“Number of insects surveyed by weight decreased by 75% between 1989 and 2016. Monarch butterfly population in North America has declined by 90% in the last 20 years.”B In the last 20 years. Man.Agrieving is not the same as giving up, she says. And here she talks about the climate doomers that you referenced at the beginning. “They use grief as an endpoint, an excuse for inaction” when we should be channeling grief into action. Step three then is reimagine your life's story. See yourself as a hero on a mission. And what gifts and challenges and experiences have you had in your life that can contribute to this mission? This kind of involves acknowledging that you can't live the life you've imagined. Or at the very least, our kids are not going to be able to live the lives we've imagined for them and their kids. She talks about this will to live that is part of all life, really.BYep. That's, that's one of the impulse, that's one of the impulses of, of life. Is that will to live. I know that she also talked about how, gosh, what was it during the Cold War? There was some study that talked about the oppositeAWill to die?B Yeah. Basically the apocalyptic thinking that is more or less dominant now. With the advent of mutually assured destruction as military policy, it sort of began that people were like, you know what, We kind of deserve it.ASo what does action look like? And that brings us to step four. Enter emergency mode versus panic mode, which is freezing, right? Or resignation mode,B right? So panic would be a whole bunch of action that accomplishes nothing. When you panic, that's what you do. Yeah. Run around and don't do anything useful.ASo right now we are in normal mode, which means we are acting in denial of the reality of global warming. And although we would all say we're not denialists, we know it's real, we are not acting like it. And that's what matters. We feel safe. In normal mode, governments can invest in multiple priorities. Emergency mode says everything goes to solve our one biggest existential threat. Like nothing else fucking matters, right? Spend without limit becauseBThe cost of not, is everything.AYeah. Yeah. And Like I said before, our government seemingly spends without limit on the military. So there is precedent for it.BYeah. The rhetoric of what it's going to cost, and the expense of the green transition and all of that is very much status quo. Not only that, but it's also not the way that those terms are used. Costs don't have a valuable product. Investments take capital and they give you something. Investing in a green future is what we would be doing.ASo try to shift the discussion from action costing something to it being investing in something. Is that what you're saying?BYeah, I think that that's the right way to do it. Investing yourself in a cause. Investing in upgrades to your home or whatever.ASo we need to follow the lead of climate groups that are acting like the problem is she mentions extinction rebellion, the sunrise movement. Are there others you know of?BJust stop Oil was one in the UK. They actually disrupted the flow of, I can't remember, probably just gas in Britain for 6 hours, whole country. With coordinated efforts of, you know, valve turning and that sort of thing.AWow. And people complain about that, right? And people say, I understand, I agree with them. But they shouldn't,BThey shouldn't disrupt.ARight.BSo step one is don't be that person. Don't complain about being disrupted.AYeah, I mean, you don't have to like it, but that's the point.BExactly.AShe also talks about the group Act Up, which helped bring awareness to the Aids crisis in the '80s. They obviously weren't covering climate issues, but they modeled disruptive nonviolent protest in a way that was effective. Also, if you are interested in Act Up, then the movie BPM, I would recommend. It's a French movie. It shows, I think, a really realistic picture of organizing and how there were disagreements and they had to prioritize and make decisions but they had a shared mission. Thanks to Matt for the recommendation. But the idea is that in emergency mode, people shift from thinking in terms of what is good for me and start to think what is good for the cause. When we personally shift into emergency mode, we should tell people because others need to see us setting that example, which means we're going to be the annoying ones.BYes, Awe're going to be no fun to be around. And she says, “ talking about climate is the one mode of engagement that I recommend to everyone.” On the one hand it's like how could that do anything, but on the other hand,B it breaks the culture of silence.AYeah and if you're listening to us and you're feeling uncomfortable it’s because you were already feeling uncomfortable and It's just coming to the surface now. So own it.BWe're giving you permission.A Yeah. Feel bad. BMm hmm. If you don't feel bad when things are bad, there's something wrong with you. AOr you are engaging in a very human response of self-preservation.BRight? I should say feeling bad about things being bad is an appropriate response.AYeah. Step five, join the movement and disrupt normalcy. She talks about how the original climate movement was dominated by gradualism, coziness with business interests and insider politics. And how that is not the approach that's going to get us where we need to be anymore. “Sustained escalating disruptive action is the fastest, most effective route to transformative change.” She talks about how disruptive action does not fit her personality. I think that's important because I have told myself, you know, that's just not me.BMm hm.ABut I believe in the research that it's the most effective. And she says that there are many ways to support the movement that don't involve, you know, being out in the streets rioting or whatever.BPeople out in the streets don't riot, they protest.AThank you. Good catch. My bad.BThat's an important rhetorical move by those trying to criminalize speech.AExactly.BWhich, I got to make a plug for Drilled done by Amy Westervelt. Yes, it's a podcast. She has a whole season on the real Free Speech Threat and it's how business, specifically oil, is trying to criminalize free speech largely in the sphere of protest.AThat's dystopian.BYeah, it is. AThat kind of investigative journalism, that is something we can support with our wallet. BMm hmm.AAnd she has, you know, sort of a checklist of questions you can ask yourself to gauge, like where might you fit in? What risks are you willing to take? Number one, your body, for instance, are you willing to be physically arrested BPhysical confrontation with police or counter protesters.AYep. And she says if you have racial or economic privilege, this is a great way to deploy it. At the same time, I don't think you should force yourself into literal danger. It’s, everyone has to decide for themselves like what's the limit.BHere's where the individualism comes in. You have to decide what your level of involvement in in the cause will be.ANumber two, your time. How many hours can you give to the cause? Your skills, and she lists a number of skills here. Project management, publicity, tech support, social media, accounting, video production, childcare, recruiting. Tech comm professors listening, I hope you see an overlap with several skills that we teach students. So this could be an opportunity for a community engaged assignment or class experience.BYeah.AAnd I haven't focused specifically on climate in my courses, but it inevitably comes up and some students choose to do projects on it and they care. And when I see that, I just want to say keep it up, like this is what we need is people who are openly passionate about this issue. You could easily theme a whole course around this. Hm. Partner with a local climate organization or something. And then your wallet, what can you give? And I'll be honest, that's my go to, I believe in throwing money at things. And that's because I'm privileged to be able to do that. Not everyone is. And it's also conveniently the one that least disrupts me, of everything listed. But it's a way of supporting others in what they're already doing. We're not saying go out and start a nonprofit. There are people out there who know their stuff. They can tell you what to do. There hasn't been much in the way of super local climate organization? BRight.AI know you've attended some meetings, but I don't know that they've been, that those groups have been able to sustain themselves.BAs an example, we live in Mankato, Minnesota. So Mankato Zero Waste is one group that's out there that’s, it has a specific focus for environmentalism. It isn't exactly focused on climate, but that is one group that's local and active to some degree, at least Asort of anti consumerist?B anti landfill. it's really just trying to keep things out of the landfill that could be recycled or composted or so on.ASee, I can get behind a like don't buy a ton of stuff philosophy. But yeah, you on the other hand, you won't buy stuff, but you will collect anything free that you think you could possibly get a use out of one day.BThat's generally true. Yeah. So free is hard for but I'm working on it some days more than others.AI appreciate that.BIn terms of other slightly less local, there is Minnesota350.org which is just the Minnesota State Chapter of 350.org, 350.org being focused on 350 is back in the '90s. Scientists determined we could probably get away with having a stable climate at 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.AWhat is our current parts per million?BOver 420. So we just need to stop and go backwards a few decades, ARight.BIt's a big goal, but it's one that I can get behind. There's also a Twin Cities chapter of Extinction Rebellion. I would really like to be involved with Extinction Rebellion, because they do the disruptive stuff.AHm. And how does the media portray them?BOh I think the most devastating way that the media portrays them is not at all.AOh, wow.BAnd when they do portray them, it's like look at the, look at these radicals. These, far, you know, it's marginalizing of the people involved,A right? They're extreme and they're silly.BThey're extreme and they're silly and they're disruptive. By no means we'll talk about what they're trying to accomplish.AYeah. So that's another thing we can do as communication specialists and human beings. Is help try to turn the tide against that kind of sentiment when this is going on. Yeah. Like, calling protesters rioters or a mob.BYou know, it's exactly that sort of a rhetorical move that benefits stability which benefits business which hastens ill effects of climate change. I did want to bring up something that I don't remember if it was actually covered in the book. This is more from my listening to podcasts. Also notice that this is, this is discussion on, this is not endorsement of anything but in the United States, property rights were something that was essentially fundamental to the founding of our country, the right of our property to be not taken away from us by the king. Because of that, there are more laws about protecting property than there are about protecting life. Non violence sometimes gets wrapped up in that. There was a group called the Earth Liberation Front in the '80s, I believe there's only one member that is still at large. The rest of have all been wrapped up by law enforcement. They were identified as eco terrorists, which is a term that I think is probably back in vogue now. They never hurt anyone. They did a lot of property damage, arson, destruction of machinery, to stop pristine forests from being logged, and to stop basically things that would damage environments.AFerngully. BYeah, Ferngully. They were labeled as terrorists. They were labeled as violent. They never hurt anyone. They were violent against property. That is a concept that should be completely foreign, that you can be violent against property. You're standing in for an environment that can't speak for itself and you're stopping the violence. And so in assessment of how you're going to join the movement and disrupt normalcy, I mean, I know that the laws are very much aligned with damaging property, being considered violence. It's a philosophical question to also ask yourself. Is actual sabotage or that sort of thing a way that you're willing to expose yourself?AYeah.BAnd on the current events flip side of that, you know, you can be called a terrorist for not hurting anyone, but you can't be called a war criminal for purposely targeting civilians in the midst of a besieged apartheid state.AYou're talking about Israel?BI'm talking about Israel, yes.AYeah, man, there are a lot of missions out there that need disruptive action. Where do we start? BOh.Ainvest in the organizations that have the right priorities and the right focuses.BMm hmm. I think that the age in which awareness of climate and environmental issues has risen to prominence coincided with the increased focus on intersectionality. As a result, of all social movements, this most recent has had the most justice focus to it.AFollow the people of color, the indigenous people, the marginalized people, because making a better world for them makes a better world for everyone.BAbsolutely. You could go as far as getting religious on it, what you did for the least of these you did for me. You don't need to start something new at this point. You could start a new chapter of something extant. You could start a local thing, of a national organization that's doing good work that you believe in. Not that that's easy. But they would be able to help you.AYeah. BMost important, know that you're not going it alone. Work with others. Know that there are others working with you to the same end.AAny closing remarks, Benton? You have no fungus updates I'm sure.BI did see, I did in fact see oyster mushrooms having been recently harvested or eaten by a wild animal when we were at Seven Mile Creek.AOh, cute.BMilder winters means a longer mushroom season. Such fun.

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An interview with Dr. Dawn Armfield of Minnesota State, Mankato about how accessibility intersects with artificial intelligence. She shares about AI in teaching, visual AI, inclusivity, ethics, classroom technology, and her current research on virtual reality for young adults with cognitive disabilities. Find Dawn at her faculty bio or her Instagram @dawn_armfield.

Plus, what does AI have to do with fungus?

Sources and further reading Baquero, C. (2022, August 3). On the Ethics of Writing With AIs. Communications of the ACM. https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/263291-on-the-ethics-of-writing-with-ais/fulltext * Who’s Afraid of A.I*.? (2023, May 12). What’s Next: TBD. [Podcast]. Slate. https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2023/05/why-artificial-intelligence-needs-regulation-now * Floridi, L., & Cowls, J. (2019). "A Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society." https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/l0jsh9d1/release/8 * IBM AI Ethics: https://www.ibm.com/impact/ai-ethics * Post Reports: Meet the hackers trying to make AI go rogue https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/meet-the-hackers-trying-to-make-ai-go-rogue/ * What Next: TBD: Who's Afraid of A.I.? https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2023/05/why-artificial-intelligence-needs-regulation-now * Nick Bostrom: What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? (YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnT1xgZgkp * Nick Bostrom: What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? (YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnT1xgZgkpk * “The Slime Mold and the Universe.” 8 Apr. 2020. Planetary Radio [Podcast]. https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/0408-2020-slime-mold-universe

TranscriptAB: Hi there. This is Abi with TC Talk. That's Tech Comm Talk.

BB: I am Benton, also here with TC Talk.

AB: We are here for a special episode to be part of the Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2023. The theme is Artificial Intelligence: Applications and Trajectories. This is the fourth year of the carnival and we had a great time contributing last year, our aliens episode.

BB: It was fun because we watched movies with aliens.

AB: Specifically how communicating with an alien life form is an epic technical communication situation. When I saw that the theme this year was AI, I thought, well, we have something to say about that. In fact, we did an episode on that in the spring that was possibly less informative than just entertaining for us to play around with, to see what stereotypes AI has about technical communicators. But things have shifted since then, the tools have shifted. Professors and researchers have had more time to figure out how to fit it into classrooms. That doesn't mean there's not still problems to be solved, like accessibility

BB: and workplace issues.

AB: Labor for sure. We're good ones to be talking about this. Not as in you and me, but we, as in the field of tech comm,

BB: I think we should talk about it too, and we're great.

AB: Oh, nice. Well, in fact, it occurred to me when I saw the theme for the carnival come out. Hey, we have an AI expert in my very own department.

BB: That's right.

AB: So I figured this would be a great time to hear from her. She is surely more informed than you and me.

BB: Yeah, I don't even read articles. I mostly just read headlines.

AB: Shame.

BB: I know

AB: because they're probably AI generated headlines. Due to scheduling issues. Benton wasn't able to be part of that conversation with Dr. Dawn Armfield, but we will play that interview in just a moment. Let me tell you a little bit more about her. She's an Associate Professor of Tech Comm in the Department of English at Minnesota State Mankato. She teaches courses in visual communication, usability and user experience, content strategy, international communication, all areas in which accessibility and ethics play a key role. And we'll see those themes come up in our talk. She has research interests in emerging technologies, AI, AR, VR and ethics. AI, of course, artificial intelligence, AR, augmented reality, VR, virtual reality. Those terms may come up in our talk as well. I will link to her faculty bio and her Instagram in the show notes so that you can follow what she's doing. You couldn't be a part of the conversation, but you did listen to it.

BB: I did.

AB: Let's hear from you. What should not readers, listeners, be on the lookout for?

BB: My perspective coming in with a pro labor stance and wanting to be in solidarity with the writers strike and the actors strike. I was prepared to go Luddite and be like, no more AI. We stop them, we must fight them in the trenches. But the more informed perspective that Dawn brings, it helps to give pause and give consideration to that impulse for me.

AB: Good.

BB: In my mind it turns into a false binary of being an AI fan boy or post- technologist

AB: Living in the woods,

BB: living in my camper.

AB: That's great to hear, and I think Hollywood does not do society any favors in terms of presenting AI as actually intelligent.

BB: It's not a small part of the sci fi landscape. The robots takeover genre,

AB: that is not the issue that we're facing. To treat it as such gives it too much power. Everything that chat GPT spits out is based on something that humans have already created. It's algorithms deciding what to spit out. It's not some mysterious mind behind it,

BB: Right

AB: Therefore, it's not something that's fully out of our control either. We don't need to give into the doom and gloom perspective. Were there other things that stuck out to you?

BB: AI accessibility. It was really when Dawn was talking about it as a field, but putting those two concepts together. AI is already used a lot in increasing accessibility by auto subtitling. But in that context, it still needs to have a human looking over its shoulder.

AB: Yeah, I think there's two issues at least, when it comes to AI and accessibility. And one is, how can AI be used to increase accessibility, which we talked about. And another, how can AI tools themselves be designed to be more accessible?

BB: Yes. Accessibility of AI.

AB:. Right. Cool. Stay tuned. After the interview, we will have our classic Fun with Fungus segment where somehow Ben is going to connect mushrooms and artificial intelligence. On to the interview with Dr. Dawn Armfield.

AB: I think a good place to start would be the big question, what does accessibility have to do with AI? And if in the course of answering that question you can give us a little sense of what you think of as AI and accessibility, that would be helpful too.

DA: Sure, when I think about accessibility, it's mostly about how can a wide range of people access whatever it is that we might be working on. When I teach accessibility, I talk to my students about not just about computers and websites and things like that. While most of them are computer science students, that's how they will think about it. But I also talk to them about when you're going into the grocery store, are the aisles wide enough for a wheelchair or would someone with a walker be able to handle them? Are shelves too high for somebody who may have some reach issues or, you know, who might be impaired in the ways that they can raise their hands or have any tactile problems. So I actually use the grocery store a lot because we're all familiar with the grocery store. So how accessible is a grocery store for somebody who might have some kind of difficulty, or even just for someone who is shorter than average or somebody who is taller than average trying to get to the bottom. You know, there are all these things that we need to think about. And so I want them to think about accessibility every time they walk out the door, and the majority of people access this space.

When we talk about accessibility, we really try to, of course, we talk about universal design, which means that more people can access it than not. And that we make everything as open as possible for as many people as possible. But we know that there will always be somebody who slips through the cracks because we just can't make everything work for everyone. We try as hard as we can. Accessibility is that, is trying to make as much of whatever it is in wherever you are for as many people as possible.

AI, of course, is artificial intelligence. And when I think about AI, I'm not just thinking about the things that are in the news right now which are Bard and Chat GPT the writing, although Bard has expanded a bit to include visual, but there are a lot of visual tools out there right now that do AI. That is one of the problems that we're seeing with the actors’ and writers’ guilds. They're talking about how visual AI will be able to recreate an actor's face or recreate, or how textual AI can recreate a writer's tone. But AI goes even further. It can use machine learning in order to give us good search results. For instance, algorithms will use artificial intelligence to give us all kinds of information. It could be used in our cars, in especially the newer cars with computers, or the electric cars, especially to adjust the ways that the car functions in order to make it function more economically. AI is a vast area. While we tend to be more concerned with the ChatGPT and Bard areas or the visual areas in our work, we've been using AI for decades. At this point we just don't realize it.

AB: I like how with both of those concepts, you've just expanded them so much from how we typically think of them, where accessibility is not just about computers, it's about the grocery store. AI is not just about chat GPT, but it's about electric cars. How do you see those two intersecting?

DA: Right. There's actually a field called AI accessibility.

AB: Oh cool.

DA: Oh yeah, there is a field that really looks at the way that AI can help make things more accessible. For instance, when we are in our electric car, we can read a read out, but it can also talk to our phones, can talk to us now through Siri or Google Assistant or whatever. These are all AI functions that help us work through different ways of having accessibility to the things that we use. There is a caveat to this. In order for AI and accessibility to work together, we have to be diligent as the humans behind it and pay attention to whatever it is producing. There has to be human oversight at all times. We can't just rely on the AI to make things accessible. We need to test it, and we need to make sure that it's working properly and not giving output that would be disinformation or misinformation or that could be harmful or it's just giving us gibberish, right. There always has to be that human oversight into the ways that AI is helping with accessibility.

AB: Yeah, and I think it's really easy for people to have a set it and forget it mentality about AI, like let's just let it do its thing. And our field of technical communication, I think we have this tendency towards being more critical. It seems like it's a great fit for people in our field to be aware of those kinds of things.

DA: Yeah, so this summer I actually had my foundation level students do an e-mail using AI. So they had to write me an AI about what is technical communication and how will it work for them in their field, right? So they actually had to bring their discipline into the AI output, but then I also asked them to answer a few questions afterwards and say, okay, so what did it get right and what did it get wrong? Where can you see this going way off the rails? And what did you have to correct in that e-mail to me in order to make it correct? I think it's up to us in tech comm to really think about these things and say it's a tool, that's what it is. It's a tool and it's an awesome tool, but it can also be a really dangerous tool. And we have to be those critical thinkers about AI and think about how can we use it to make our jobs easier, but not use it to the point of where we just do leave it to do its thing.

AB: Mm hmm. So now that we have the broad strokes of accessibility and AI, now I want to move on to the tell me about yourself question. But I'm especially interested in what kind of background, whether it's teaching, or professional, or personal, that led you to your interest in this topic.

DA: I've worked in IT since I was in my '20s and I worked in IT departments and did a lot of the IT work. Usually it was for public service, like the county or a university or things like that. I've always worked in and around the computer area of those businesses or those organizations. Whatever it is with computers or with technology, I'm always really interested in what is coming and how will it affect the humans. On the other end, even in the early '90s when I was first doing online chat, and I would think about online chat at that time, people were always thinking, all right, it's just a computer out there, right? We weren't thinking about the people on the other end. And then eventually we got to this place where we were thinking, okay, there are actually people on the other end, but I've always thought about that, how is this affecting the people who are either using it or who are engaging with it or who are having it used on them. So how can we think about these technologies and the humanity that is engaging with them? My professional life engaged in that.

But then when I started doing my education, all of my work was about technology. I didn't major in technical communication in my undergrad, but I actually did a website for one of my junior level writing classes. And my professor said, oh, there's an entire field that does this kind of work that you might be interested in, right? That's how I got introduced to technical communication. And it just seemed like that right fit for me, that I am very technology oriented and even though technical communication is not just about that, it fit with the kind of person that I am and the kinds of interests that I have, but also with accessibility. Having worked in web design and in distance learning and in instructional design and things like that, taught me about how accessibility is super important. I've had these two things coming at me all of the time, the technology and the accessibility, and thinking about the people at the other end of this and how to use both of those in order to meet our audience's needs at all times.

AB: You majored in geology, am I right?

DA: Yeah.

AB: Okay. Glad I remember that correctly.

DA: Was a double major actually, it was English and Geology, but I wanted to write for National Geographic.

AB: Oh, that sounds fun.

DA: I thought, oh, if I have a science background and an English background, then I could do that.

AB: My next question, you answered this earlier. What are some examples of accessibility challenges with AI technologies?

DA: Yeah, of course, it's the human oversight, but it's also that we need to think about AI just as that tool and not think about it as a cure all. AI can be an amazing tool. Like this summer, I was playing with it quite a bit to create visual information, just to play with it and to use images that I was creating in AI for say like a logo or, my nephew and I were making up band names and we were creating band paraphernalia with AI. But we also had to be really careful and think about are the things that that AI is pulling in, are they copyrighted? So we have to think about where's this information coming from or where’s this image coming from or where is this data coming from? Is it copyrighted information that we are using? And if I wanted to use it as a logo or just to have fun, am I being a responsible user to the artist who first created this or is this a wholly newly created thing that the AI actually came up with just by me telling it what to create? The answer is typically no, that it's pulling images from all over the place to pull into the system to use in whatever it is that you're creating. We have to be really responsible and think about the ethics behind it as well.

And then I think that an overreliance on AI could create spaces that might seem accessible, but that could actually cause problems. For instance, we might use AI to create a syllabus which is fun. I did that for a class and it was fun. Of course, I had to tweak it quite a bit. But one of the issues with it is that when I asked it to, and creating a syllabus for a class that I'm not even teaching, I was just trying to play with it. It had information that could be considered not appropriate for all audiences. Not that it was using swear words or that it was using information that was R rated or X rated or anything like that. It was nothing like that. But there is a bias in AI because typically AI algorithms are written by white men, right? And so there is a natural bias built into this, where if I asked it to pull up authors, it was pulling up white male authors for me for that syllabus. I think I saw one female author in there and no people of color. So we have to really think about those biases that AI is creating as well.

When I've done visual information and I'll just say create a woman walking a dog, it almost is always a white woman. I have to specify a person of color, we have to think about those biases as well. That does create a barrier to accessibility, because if people of color are not seeing themselves in the AI or not finding that accessibility within the AI, then they're not a part of that conversation and they need to be. Accessibility can be even more foundational. I think it's not just about getting along and getting into a space, but it's about how we fit within those conversations.

AB: And with the syllabus example, it's a good reminder that when you use AI to generate a genre, it's pulling from what is, not what ought to be right

DA: Right.

AB: or not what's inherently right. I was wondering too, if your syllabus had policies, because I can imagine from an accessibility standpoint, if it's drawing from what's out there already, then if instructors haven't been thinking in terms of accessibility, then that's not going to be reflected in things like attendance policies or what mediums you can use to create in. Did you see any of that?

DA: Yeah. In fact, one of the biggest ones was you cannot use a phone in this class. But in my classes, that is never a rule. I'm like use whatever technology you can, just be responsible about it. I would never have that in my syllabus, but it seems to be a big enough rule out there. I'm guessing, especially say like in a math class where they might use it for tests or whatever, things like that. But I don't do tests. I want them to use their technology. But that was one of the big ones. But that's also an accessibility issue. We might have a student who needs to record the class because their brain just might not process things as fast as we're talking. So they might have to go back and re-listen, and re-listen and re-listen in order to get to where we need them to be. Right? So that could be an accessibility issue. Or they might need to be able to pull things up because they can't remember things as easily as somebody else might be able to. And that's okay. I think these phones have made my memory go. So I totally understand that. Right. Because we have so much at our fingertips now that we don't have to remember as much. So creating those kinds of policies is definitely an issue.

AB: Yeah, yeah. And I can see instructors possibly pushing back and saying, well if somebody needs an accommodation, they can ask for it. And it's like, yes, that's usually built into like a university's accessibility policy. But the point of accessibility is to not require someone to have to overcome that obstacle in the first place.

DA: Yeah, so that's really interesting. I also follow some Reddit forums on accessibility and on professors. And a lot of professors write about accommodation, a lot of them do. And how they demand that their students bring in a form from disability services before they will ever make accommodations. So that might be built into policies as well. And I didn't see any of that in mine, but I also did, I didn't have it look for disability services policies. So yes, there would definitely be that kind of an issue as well. Because I know that that conversation is going on with other professors, not just in the United States but also in parts of Europe, because the Reddit boards have people from all over the world on them. I think that that definitely could be an issue.

AI has actually been a really big conversation in these discussion boards. I think so many of them are against it. It's really interesting, even computer science professors are against their students using it. But isn't it incumbent upon us to be the responsible people to say use it wisely? Let me show you how to use it, or let's talk about how we can use it, because you might be able to show me a different way of using it, right? Let's have that conversation about using it and being ethical about it. The very first thing I have my students do is they read an article about the ethical use of AI. We start there, then we build from that.

AB: Yeah, because people are going to use it.

DA: They are. I don't see it as any different as using a graphing calculator. That's how I look at it. For a long, long time, those were barred in classrooms. But then it got to the point where so many students had it that there had to be policies made up about it, right? There had to be talks about how to ethically use this in the classroom.

AB: Don't get distracted playing snake or whatever that little game was.

DA: Right. Exactly.

AB: That would be the least of the concerns I'm sure.

DA: But, but the AI things can totally be that way. We can totally have a lot of fun with it. But you can also see where if you're not asking your students to think about it critically, then they could just use it to write a paper, not even think about that paper. But then they're missing out on the whole point of the paper, right? They're missing out on that growth potential in creating something. Even if they use AI and they go back through and they edit it. At least they're thinking about it. They're thinking about that topic. They're seeing what AI is saying about it. But then they're also saying, okay, but that didn't quite make sense and I need to rework this. So if we give them those tools to use it responsibly, then I think that we're doing a better job.

AB: Yeah. That active engagement and that reflection is so important.

DA: Yeah.

AB: My next question is about, well, you've talked about teaching a little bit, but what has your research revealed about accessibility and AI? And I know you've been on sabbatical for the past year, so this might be your chance to let us know what you've been up to.

DA: Well, the majority of my research has been on using, using extended realities, which AI does have a part in this, especially in augmented reality. You'll see AI in augmented reality quite a bit, but it's also in virtual reality. Not necessarily as much in the ones that I've been working in, but what we have seen, because we've actually been using AI models in helping us think about how to create our presentations or how to think about different parts of our writing process. Or to even think about what kinds of questions could we ask our participants in our project. Our project has been working with young adults with cognitive disabilities to create their lived experiences of using public transportation and going to work. They create their lived experiences through virtual reality experiences. They take a lot of pictures and they do recordings of their voices. And they do videos, and then they put these into a virtual reality environment.

But one of the things that we were doing when we were actually creating one of these is thinking about, okay, well, how could they use AI to help them do this as well? How could I assist them in creating their spaces more easily. Because virtual reality environments, even if you use the easiest one out there for someone with a cognitive disability, it can be difficult. Or if they have mobility issues moving anything, right? So we have these accessibility issues in creating these environments. So how can we use AI in order to help them create this?

One of the things that we thought about doing is actually having the students talk to the AI and use voice recognition instead of typing. Talk to the AI and say, I want to create an environment that talks about this and this is my experience. And then they can get a more robust description of their experience. And then they can copy those words and place them into a VR environment. Or they can use the visual. The visual, sorry, I have way too many acronyms going on in my head. They can use the visual AI in order to create a scene that they hadn't actually participated in on the bus or that they had and they hadn't gotten a picture of, right. So they could do a scene.

And my nephew and I actually did this. We were talking about, okay, You didn't get a picture of you at night time on the bus. So let's create an image of that using AI. And we did, but we actually did it riding a bus in space, right? So he had a moon behind him and he had this space mobile or something like that. But it actually added his personality into that environment in a different way than just his image and his voice. So he and I had talked about doing that. We didn't actually put it into our final presentation, but it was something that we had discussed and we had talked about making in order to kind of give him some creativity in that. Because sometimes virtual reality can seem like you just replace this here and this here and this here. And where's that creativity when you're trying to explain a situation or give instructions? Even because really, basically what the VR experiences are, are instructions on how to ride a bus when you have this kind of a disability. How can we put some creativity into that, beyond just creating the environment? That's what we've been working on and the ways that we've been thinking about using AI.

AB: It seems to me that one of the goals of this work is to help designers gain more empathy for these audiences. Does that sound right?

DA: Yeah, not just designers, but also thinking about community services. If somebody from the transportation department in this specific community sees how people are using their buses or having difficulty using these buses, how can they make accessibility to the buses better? Or how can the teachers understand the issues that the young adults are having? Because they're in a transfer program, so they actually have teachers that are doing all of this with them. Accessibility is at the core of this research. It is everything in this research, understanding accessibility to public transportation or accessibility to jobs is really where we started, and we just are using technology to help build that out and help create more equitable spaces.

AB: Yes, you're using AI really thoughtfully and intentionally to create more access, whereas I can see how uncritical use of AI could shut out more audiences.

DA: Right, exactly.

AB: What do you want technical communication students or instructors or professionals to know about accessibility and AI?

DA: Oh, that's a good question. I think this would be with anybody. I want them to know that AI is a powerful tool when it comes to accessibility. It can open up spaces, but it's also incumbent upon us to use it just as that tool, use it as one of the tools in our toolbox to create a more equitable space. We have to be intentional and we have to be empathetic about the ways that we use it. We have to understand that it automatically leaves some demographics out and it will be important for us to bring them back in. It's just a tool, that's all it is. It is not a cure. All it can help us create these environments that are more accessible, but they are not completely accessible. We have to intervene and make the space even more accessible.

AB: So it's not a cure-all, but it's not necessarily something to be scared of either.

DA: I don't think we should be scared of it at all. I think that we should just see it as an extension of our documenting process, right. Word has been telling us and giving us suggestions or Google Docs has been giving us suggestions for years. It's already using AI. But now instead of just giving us a little words or phrases to end our sentences or to include, now it's giving us entire paragraphs or entire papers. But we have to really think carefully about that, would you? When you're writing your e mail and it says, here's the end of that phrase, right? And you can hit your enter just to include that phrase. Is that really the phrase that you wanted to use? Does that convey the meaning? As we in technical communication know every way that we use a word has a different meaning and it can impact our audience in either positive or negative or neutral ways. We have to think about are those words that the AI is using, Are they the right ones? If they're not, where do we go in and correct for that?

AB: I did get a suggestion in my Outlook as I was drafting an e mail that I probably should have listened to. But at the time I was like, what does that have to do with anything? It was like giving suggestions for tone. And I'm like, this is the most boring e-mail ever. How could tone matter? And after I sent it, of course, I saw that instead of hello, I had typed, hell, I mean, I doubt the recipient thought I was, you know, opening an e-mail with profanity. But it was just kind of funny.

DA: But it's true, right? It gives us that opportunity to just click, and just go through or to click no or whatever. And we do it just automatically these days because it's just right there. We're so used to it, but we have to start thinking about all of that intentionally. I don't always use those suggestions like you didn’t. Sometimes I do. Especially if it knows that I've written the same sentence like 50 million times, I'm going to use that. Or it might also make me think, okay, you might overuse that phrase, why don't we try something new? AI has this really great possibility of helping us think even more deeply about language or even communication as a whole. Because if we're talking about the visual AI as well, I think it can help us really think about the way that we communicate. Deeper ways to ask us to be more exact and to be precise in the ways that we communicate. It's going to pull in a lot of randomness or a lot of generalities. But in most things that we do, we need more precision. It will require us to really read carefully and think about that precision.

AB: That's such a good point. Is there anything else that you want to share? Anything I should have asked you that I didn't.

DA: I think maybe about AI policy, when we're thinking about AI policy, instead of thinking about it as something that could ruin a classroom, think about it in ways that it can be a positive fixture in a classroom. But beyond that, I was actually listening to a podcast this morning about the writers’ strike. And they were actually talking about AI and how the writers are really concerned about AI taking over. The podcaster said something to the effect of, right, well if it's the writers now, it could be the teachers tomorrow, right. AI could take over their jobs or AI could take over a secretary's job or something like that. It's up to us to start creating policy about the use of AI and to encourage our unions because that's what they were actually talking about, was unions to include that in the language of our contracts, to say AI is a tool but it is not a replacement for the kind of works that work that humans do. We have to be, again, very intentional about AI and how we let it run us or we run it.

AB: Perfect. Thank you so much.

DA: You’re welcome.

AB: What about Fung?

BB: What about fungi?

AB: Yeah

BB: This summer I've got a stack of logs in the backyard that had oyster mushrooms spontaneously fruit out of them, which made me happy. Oyster mushrooms are relatively easy to identify because they only grow on wood and they don't have poisonous lookalikes.

AB: Excellent. Did we eat them?

BB: We did. I mean, at least I did.

AB: Okay.

BB: I think you did too.

AB: You snuck them into something?

BB: I think that I just sauteed them and had them with like rice or something.

AB: Oh, okay.

BB: I thought you had some, but maybe not.

AB: I probably did and forgot. Let's try to connect it. Do you think AI could be used to successfully identify mushrooms that are safe to eat? It probably already is. I know there's got to be an app out there somewhere.

BB: I know that in my foraging groups, not only for mushrooms but for plants too, people will use something like Google Lens. You know, it's basically AI. Take a picture of this with my phone and tell me what it is,

AB: like a reverse Google Image search,

BB: Kind of. Yeah. So again, if you haven't heard me say before, the first rule of foraging, never eat anything you cannot positively identify.

AB: Google lens is not sentient.

BB: No, it is not. This is definitely a case where we do that whole human over the shoulder thing. On the foraging groups, like someone will have a screenshot of like Google lens told me it’s this, is it actually this? Mushrooms are pretty hard to discern in some cases anyway. Real mycologists will weigh in and say, no,

AB: You have real mycologists in your foraging group?

BB: Amateur mycologists are real mycologists, but there are a few in there.

AB: Citizen technical communicators.

BB: Yeah, there was something I was going to say

AB: About oyster mushrooms?

BB: Oh, it does connect to AI. I believe the growth patterns of slime mold actually map fairly well onto the distribution of dark matter in the universe.

AB: Mind blown.

BB: Yeah, I actually heard about this on Planetary Radio. Host interviewed the person who noticed the similarity and used the growth pattern of

AB: slime mold,

BB: of slime mold to help inform the automated looking for dark matter algorithm? Algorithm.

AB: That is wild stuff.

BB: Yes.

AB: There you go folks. That's your fun with fungus segment. I wish I could say that you can follow TC Talk on Twitter, but I have been using it less and less.

BB: Why is that?

AB: Let's not get into it now.

BB: He who shall not be named?

AB: Right. I will still engage minimally just for TC Talk promotion purposes but it's A R, underscore Balle B A K, K, E if you want to follow me there and if I decide to jump ship, I will let you know to where I am jumping.

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An interview with Dr. Dawn Armfield of Minnesota State, Mankato about how accessibility intersects with artificial intelligence. She shares about AI in teaching, visual AI, inclusivity, ethics, classroom technology, and her current research on virtual reality for young adults with cognitive disabilities. Find Dawn at her faculty bio or her Instagram @dawn_armfield.

Plus, what does AI have to do with fungus?

View Details

How to turn off your inner literature professor and create a habit of reading for enjoyment.

Books mentioned Dies the Fire, S.M. Sterling * Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss * The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo * Republic, Plato * Sophie's Choice, William Styron * Moby Dick, Herman Melville * Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney * Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls * Garfield, Jim Davis * Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson * White Teeth, Zadie Smith * The Expanse, James S. A. Corey * The Boxcar Children, Gertrude Chandler Warner * Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder * Farm Boy, Laura Ingalls Wilder * Quiet, Susan Cain * The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin * The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg * The Fellowship of the Ring*, J.R.R Tolkien

Sources and further reading Bogel, A. (n.d.). What Should I Read Next? Podcast. https://modernmrsdarcy.com/what-should-i-read-next/ * Libby App. Retrieved May 25, 2023, from https://www.overdrive.com/apps/libby/ * Saturday Night Live (2017, May 14). Sean Spicer Returns (Melissa McCarthy)—SNL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbpUcfpbnrs * Woodside, C. (2016, September 11). How ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Built Modern Conservatism. POLITICO Magazine. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/little-house-on-the-prairie-conservatism-214237 * Yankovic, W. A. (1993). Livin’ in the Fridge: Alapalooza*. Rock N Roll Records.

TranscriptAAre your class sizes mysteriously ballooning?BAre you tired of walking from one end of the lecture hall to the other?AOr from one campus to the another?BIs it impossible to find time to grade?AFrom the creators of Course Hero, a revolutionary new classroom technology -BGodium, the podium that lets you lecture on-the-go.AConvey the superiority of the sage on the stage, with the mobility of the guide on the side.BWith space to hold a laptop, textbook and optional plexiglass COVID barrier. Zero turning radius allows for steering seamlessly between backpack straps and charging cords. AThe whisper-quiet motor mean you can sneak up on the student using ChatGPT in the back of the class.BIn addition to classroom mode, there's also autonomous mode.ASimply input your GPS coordinates and Godium will take you where you need to go at a blistering speed of 4.5 mph. grade papers uninterrupted during your commute. How else are you going to do the work of two full-time professors?BAsk your administrator if Godium is right for you. Rental options available for contingent faculty members. Do not use Godium while intoxicated. Only use Godium with IRB approval. In rare instances, whiplash, injury, death, or exploitation may occur. AI Grading software, heat-seeking plagiarism detection, and cupholders available at additional cost in the tenure upgrade package.AWe're TC talk, a tech comm podcast.BMy name is Benton.AMy name is Abi. I am a tech comm prof.BI am not.ABut we chat about things that are of interest to technical communication scholars, practitioners, and maybe just everyday people.BI hope so.AWho encounter and use tech comm in their everyday lives and perhaps even create it, without knowing that that's what it is.BWoah.ABenton, it's our last episode of season Two of TC Talk.BLast one?AAnd I thought it would be fruitful to revisit the topic of how to read. You'll remember that was our first episode of all time.BYes.AAnd it had gotten more listens than most, which could just be the fact that it was the first one and when people discover a podcast, they like to go back to the beginning.BList order bias?AAlthough there's nothing really chronological about our topics,BTrue.ABut it could also be that this is a topic that people care about. So assuming that's the case, I will forge ahead. I did go back to that episode to kind of see what my baseline was. And it was cringe as the kids say. But in looking back, I can see that just taking that moment to talk about it and be intentional about my reading goals and habits, et cetera. I am in a totally different place than I was then. How about you? If you can even remember?BI remember it was upstairs and downstairs. So that's a totally different place too. How long ago was that?Atwo years? Summer 2021. Because I was starting my sabbatical and the pandemic kind of pushed us into podcasting. Well, not really. It just seemed like the thing to do. I think everyone else had the same idea, but hey, we've kept it up for two years.BThat's true. I credit you with the determination and follow-through to keep that going. Because I just show up when you ask me.ARight. But reading wise, do you think anything has changed for you in the past couple of years?BI tend towards a little bit more non-fiction now I think. That doesn't mean that I'm uninterested in fiction. I do love blitzing through good novel.AI think everything you read has to do with climate one way or another.BThe thing is, everything everyone reads has to do with climate one way or another. Every part of society boils down to carbon. It does.AWell, I guess books are printed from trees, right? And even screens are surely not carbon zero.BRight.AYeah. So I think your reading is pretty focused. You've got a niche that you like. I feel like I've been more adventurous with my reading. By adventurous, I just mean diverse, perhaps in terms of genre and format.BMaybe.ANow, onto reading for fun.BOh boy.AAnd yes, I know some of you find scholarly reading fun. I do too. But I'm talking about something that is for you and not forBNot for professional developmentApurposes of tenure and promotion or whatever. Because like I mentioned before, as soon as you're obligated to do something, it takes it takes away a little bit of the ability to enjoy it, at least for me.BYeah, I think that if someone had laid out all the non fictions that I have read and said, read these I’d be like, those are such big books.AAnd it literally could have been a syllabus for like an environmental communication class or whatever.BProbably.ASo I asked a few people about this. Colleagues, friends, students, just to get some perspective on how other people fit leisure reading into their busy lives. Because I can sit here and talk about, here's what I do. But that only works for me a fraction of the time anyway.BYeah.AAnd it evolves a lot. So I think it would be more useful for listeners to kind of hear that variety.BYeah. In contrast, I won't make fun of my coworkers, but one of them attempted to insult me because I read I read books when we're not doing things in the truck. just as my fallback thing, instead of dinking around on my phone all the time,AInsult? What did he say?BHe said You're such a librarian.AOh I would take that as a compliment.Byou have to imagine too like, certainly someone who's going to listen to this podcast is not going to be like books are dumb. But he, he said that he had he hadn't read a book since high school.AOh, no.BWhich is mind-blowing to me. Like, I don't I don't get that.AOkay. People are allowed to care about different things.BThey certainly are,AAnd we'll talk more about that in a bit. But yeah, I mean, that's right up there with one of your teachers calling you and intellectual tyrannosaur, is it not? What grade was that?BThat was that was in 11th grade. For correctly identifying Macedonia on a map.AOh, wow. I did do one of those like can you identify the European country quizzes. And I manBdidn't do well?ANo.BHow long ago was that?AOh, just a few weeks ago when I couldn't sleep one night I was like, I mean the 50 states. I've got that nailed. That. Let's try Europe. Nope.BSo what did you find?ASo I looked through the responses for trends. Because I can't resist turning everything into a qualitative study.BYou.ABut here's the first thing I want to say. You don't have to read. You don't have to read for fun. You are not a better or worse human for having a regular reading habit or not.BGive three supporting details.AOne thing that came up in the responses with that was that it is hard to read. It is hard to find time to read. Kelly said, “it took me a while after grad school to get into a reading routine. I felt like I didn't have any space left in my brain not to mention time for more reading outside of what I do for work.” Joseph said “in my first master's, I learned that the academic setting is where reading for fun goes to die. The studying and the work of research, office assistant and teaching writing, complete with grading, made reading become my job and I lost track of reading for fun. I was a sci-fi fantasy nerd up to that point, but after reading for work all day, I lost the desire. When I graduated that MS my program chair gave me a Barnes and Noble card. I actually wept. I was so ashamed that I had not read a book in over 18 months except for school. I immediately purchased Dies the Fire by SM Sterling and read the series.”BPretty good. By the way.AIs that the one with.Bthe Ember verse, the one where electricity and explosions both stopAWhat's the one that you read with the annoying main guy?BThe self-important magic one?AYeah. Yeah. Yeah..BThat's The name of the wind by Patrick RothfussAOkay. Not the same.BYeah, a guy who should really get the fuck off is asked and finish writing that trilogy, write two to books and then dither.AOkay. And Matt says, “I will confess that is a perennial struggle. Ever since grad school, the amount of reading that I do that is connected to my academic work, means that pleasure reading often gets pushed to the margins of my free time. Furthermore, the fact that so much of my job as a film studies professor is tied to viewing, means that often my free time is taken up by watching movies that broadly aligned with my overall academic goals and responsibilities. In short, leisure reading has been one of those things that I continually try to re-prioritize in my life, but I've had mixed success.” These professors are all talking about seasons in their life that leisure reading has been a struggle. And my, again, my response to that is, that's okay. You don't have to read for fun because I needed someone to tell me that. Like my first year as an assistant professor. You may recall, I worked every single weekend. I never felt caught up. On top of feeling like I was barely surviving, I also felt guilty for having such a shitty work-life balance, you know. So it's like guilt compounded upon guilt. But it was a season. It didn't last.BRight.AI'm not working every weekend.BNo, I'm glad.AAnd so if you're in a place where you're just trying to stay above water, don't add in something that feels like a chore because you think you're supposed to.BRight.Abecause you think that's what makes you a worthwhile human being.BYeah. That that goes beyond reading.AYes. I have friends with newborns. LikeBYour hobbies become taking a nap.ANo joke.BThat's true. That's a blind spot of mine because your experience and a lot of academic and desk driving professionalsADesk driving?BLike working at a desk.AIs that a saying? Desk driving. Because here's what it makes me think of. Melissa McCarthy playingBSean Spicer.ASean Spicer on SNL with the podium on the segue.BThe segue podium. Yes, That was that was epic. you better put a link to the YouTube video in the show notes.ARight. I mean, can you imagine having that in your classroom?BYeah.AI feel like we need to record a fake promo at this point for segue podium.BOkay. I like this project.AI totally interrupted you. Desk driving professions.BYes. So people who have to do like a substantial amount of reading that is a regular part of their job.AKnowledge workers.BMm-hmm. I can see how that would make it very hard to want to do that leisurely. Kind of like how I'm less inclined now to just go for a walk when we're at home or go outside because I'm outside 10 hours a day.AYeah. No joke.BEveryone needs a balance of focused and unfocused time. And that balance, of course, is dependent on the person, but you need both to have a healthy brain. And I spend a fair amount of my workday, observing for safety purposes the other or my co-worker who is flying the boom to make sure that they don't accidentally like fly it into a power line because that's a bad day.ASo sort of an environmental awareness?BYes, being present, but there's lots of space for your mind to wander. Versus if I'm reading a book, you have experienced, like, especially when it's time to get the kids ready for bed. If I am reading a book, that is the world, that is the entirety of the world. I am focused on this book and reading the text and understanding it. So you need the balance and if you're like, if you're looking through reports and you're like thinking about how do I write this report? Like that's, that's very focus centric. And it's not very scattered focus or diffuse focus kind of work.ARight. And I think, I think reading is the kind of activity that has such range within it that even if you are parsing theory all day, like you can go home and read a murder book, which I do. Earlier this year, I had a bunch of deadlines kinda bunched up. And then as soon as I had all that behind me, I was like murder books. And they were bad books. I sat there and I told you the plot. And I was like, I cannot believe this drivel. And then I went on to read every page.BYeah.AAnd I think that that's part of recognizing that you're a human being and you can't be on 24/7 and that you deserve space to blow off steam and read tasteless trash. Now, I will say that even if you don't choose to read, it is hugely important to be able to cultivate some kind of hobby outside of work, which I am embarrassed to say didn't happen for me until the pandemic. And, you know, we bought a piano and I learned it.BAnd you learned how to podcast.APlaying music is something that engages a different part of your brain. And just to have something to care about that's not work or parenting was really important for me.BYeah.ASo I would encourage anyone who feels just too busy to just start with something. And at the same time, like if you're in a season where you can't, awesome, don't do it. But the season shouldn't last forever.BMaybe get ideas for how you're going to reward yourself for getting through to the promised land.AOr maybe you love watching movies or watching TV. in my mind, watching TV has always been the same as wasting timeBor eating junk food.ABut I savor a good episode of TV. In part thanks to you.BYou're talking about Stranger Things?AYes. Which I wouldn't have watched where it not for your prompting. And yes, I'm years behind the curve on this. As I am on most everything that's ever popular because I'm like, oh, something's popular I must go against the flow.BToo cool.AAnd then years later I discover it and I'm like, Oh, society is right. There's a reason this is great. So yeah, and to me, like sitting and savoring a good episode of TV is not the same as mindlessly turning it on and vegging out. Though there, though there is space for that too of course. Same as scrolling TikTok, right?BYep.AI think the question is, how do you feel by the time you're done with it? Because for me, I look up and 45 min have gone by and I've been watching Instagram Reels or whatever. And I couldn't tell you a single thing that I watched in the previous 45 min. Yes, I enjoyed myself while doing it, but I have literally nothing to show for it. Well, no, that's not true. I bookmark the good animal videos.BIt's true. And then I share them with the family.AI do the same with memes on Facebook. One of these days I'm gonna, I'm gonna barrage you with my folder o memes.BI look forward to it. Put them in a slideshow for me.AOkay.BMaybe you love gaming. Again gaming has a bad rap, but I think it's a lot more active than other kinds of hobbies. It is intellectually stimulating.AThey can be, yeah.BI'd rather my kid play Minecraft than just watch TV.ABut I would rather my kid just watch TV rather than play Grand Theft Auto or something like that.BYeah, that's true. Not all games are created equallyAFor young children, Yes, indeed. And I think it's also completely fair to choose your reading based on your personal or professional goals. So this comes from Lenny. “For me, I typically read non-fiction books and books that will directly help me grow in a certain area I'm interested in. It's very rare you'll find me reading a fiction novel. I typically find myself looking for new books to read whenever I have a desire to grow, learn, or become something new. And I recognize that I lack the necessary knowledge to feel confident in that area. Reading books helps me chart a pathway through unknown worlds and identities, but I want to claim for myself.” And he talks about getting into ultra running and how reading books was instrumental to him gaining some confidence in that area. And I totally get that. In the past. When I've needed a boost to do something I know that I need to do or want to do. I think reading about it can often do, can often give me that boost.BI feel like that specific thing though would feel very much like maybe not assigned reading, but dutiful sort of.AYeah. I guess one thing that comes to mind for me is if I'm feeling the urge to declutter or something. Pick up a Marie Kondo or one of those books with all the beautiful color coordinated drawers and everything.BThat’s when I need a bolt things down there so they’re there when I get home. What?ANow, Let's say you do want to be a reading person. You want that to be your hobby. You don't have to read what you think you're supposed to read. This is another thing that has been super hard for me to accept as an English major and as someone who has generally valued being a smart person most of my life. I do have this Platonic ideal of a reading list in my head that has led to a lot of guilt when I'm not reading that important stuff.BDo you ever see people put stuff like that on social media?AHave I ever seen anybody pose with Plato's Republic for their high school senior picture?BOkay. You got me.AIn your Hawaiian shirt no less. At least you read a few paragraphs of it while you were in the library are getting photographed.BWhile I was waiting for the photographer to get set up there.ALike do I see people bragging about their reading on social media? Or like, you have to read this book before you die.BLike most Americans have only read ten off of this list ofAOh, yeah.BI've read 23.AThe peer pressure kind of thing.BYeah.AYeah. Yeah. And it's bullshit. There is no such thing as a canon.BWell, tell that to the Civil War.AI recall, this was one of my first college classes I ever took. And I wrote my paper on women in the canon and the lack thereof. And for my cover page, I used a photo of a woman in a literal canon.BVery nice choice.AThank you. Okay. I'll give you an example. When I was a kid, our family had a subscription to Reader's Digest. And I remember reading an article that was like Laura Bush’s top 25 books everyone needs to read in their lifetime or something along those lines. And I put those books on my reading list. And so I'm like 12 and reading fucking Sophie's Choice.BI don't know what that is.AThat sucks when as a kid, you're told that the definition of great literature is a book in which the narrator is just trying to get into a Holocaust victim’s pants the whole time.BOh, wow.AYou know, maybe there are folks out there who are like, I love Sophie's choice and it's a great literary achievement. Fine. But I have spent so many years like trying to read the classics. And you know, at this point, I would say nine out of ten books I read is by a woman. And this is not me being anti-man. I'm simply making up for lost time, right?BYeah.AI saw a terrible tweet that kind of encapsulated this attitude. “I would 100% prefer my kid to be able to read and understand Moby Dick, but hate it and read rarely than to love reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid and its like frequently. A love of reading is nice, but it's not the goal of literary instruction.”BWow.AI mean, this guy got thoroughly dunked on.BOh good. Yeah. That's, that's like the nemesis in Ratatouille. Who is super gaunt and says, I don't like food. I love it. A food critic.AOh right and he's very anti the everyone can cook cookbook author? Yes.BSomeone who is regarded as an expert because they don't like the thing.AYou know what, Moby Dick is still on my platonic ideal reading list.BYeah.AMaybe I'll read it someday.BI know I'm never going to read that book. Sure. Maybe this is a lack of imagination on my part, but I cannot imagine that there's anything I need to learn in life from a guy who was obsessed with murdering a whale.AYeah, I can't do any animal cruelty. People die in a book, no biggie. A dog dies, I'm out. Don't get me started on where the Red Fern grows. So there's, there's so many things wrong with that attitude, especially towards childhood reading. Yet I have noticed myself like needing to be aware of that and push back against it because Zoe loves graphic novels. And I don't know, there's part of me that feels like they’re somehow less seriousBLike it’s cheating.Aand I wish she would read quote unquote real books. But at the same time, like graphic novels, are a beautiful blend of the visual and the verbal. I am not wired that way. And I respect that Zoe is.BYeah. I know I have exactly that kind of an impulse. Like for me it's more of a, It feels like a step towards watching the movie instead of reading the book. You know, it feels like cheating because we didn't have it in my day. Eh, back in my day.AYou know you would have loved graphic novels if there had been a wide assortment for you. Did you read any comic books? Well, these are comic books per se, but you had a whole pile of Garfield books. Which incidentally, Zoe loves, and I blame that 90% on why she's such a smart ass.BYeah. Yeah, I should get her I should get a Calvin and Hobbes now. I think she's ready.ASo all that to say. If you want to cultivate a reading habit, start with something that you love. No matter how unserious it may feel. Start with a childhood favorite. I, we read to our kids before bed every night and re-reading my favorite childhood fantasy books with Zoe is like one of the best things in my life. To like re-experience that and experience her reaction to it too. Except she hates when we have to end.BEvery night.AEvery night, it's like, NooBAright We need to go. that's it for tonight. No.AOne more page. Read a young adult novel. Read a book that's described as impossible to put down.BYeah.AAnd this has worked for Matt as well. He says, “I try to first return to the authors and types of writing that I find most pleasurable. I've always enjoyed literary fiction in particular and have attempted to at least somewhat keep up with a handful of authors who I’ve loved since high-school. Zadie Smith in particular is an author who I've remained relatively good at staying current with.” Reread something that made you feel passionate about reading.BYeah.ARead an author that you know you're gonna love. Yeah, if only to give yourself a strong start, if you're trying to build a habit, right? You're not going to build a habit with Moby Dick.BNo.AMaybe.BHopefully you don't build a whale killing habit with Moby Dick. Yeah, I like sci-fi. I like sci-fi, that is hard. Sci-fi, meaning the science is not the fiction. Jumping into a series, that gets critical acclaim or that is, that has really good reviews. like when I started in the Expanse series, which is a nine book series. They're big books, but they are page turners. To me.AI can see the appeal of a series because you don't have to reacquaint yourself with the world and the characters every time. I am not a big series reader, I kinda feel like if I'm going to read a book, it needs to be able to stand alone. Again, that might just be me making unfair judgements about books, but I also really like variety. And I feel like if I'm reading something in a series, like it's too, too much repetition. Which boxcar children did you get to?BOh gosh.AWith Zoe. I'm so glad that was you and not me. I would've torn my hair out.B40s or 50s. I don’t remember. There is a lot of repetition there. They like to play house, they like to cook. They like to do the same thing again and again, and they solve mysteries.AYeah. I will say the original boxcar children was one of the first chapter books that I read with Zoe because that was one of the first chapter books that my mom read with me.BOh,Ayeah. Same with Little House on the Prairie. Or no Little House in the Big Woods.BWhich sadlyAis super racist?BWell, yes, it is super racist, but it's also a reinvention of history to make it seem very rugged, individualist, very self-reliant. There's all of this stuff that talks about how they keep their farm and how they, how they provide all their own needs. And that is not the way that frontier life was.ASo you're telling me Laura Ingalls had an agenda?BYeah.AI need I'm going to use a source for this one.BGeez, which podcast was it? One of the things that I really did appreciate about those books, the first one and the second one. Farm boy?AOh yeah.Bthey give a very like up-close understanding of preindustrial skills, which is really just the way that people lived 150 years ago.AAnd the way we'll have to learn to live when the climate apocalypse descends upon our world?BWell, that too, but I mean, just the process of how a shoe was made. They talk about how they, how they made nice rows for their potato plants way by dragging a board with nails in it this way and then the other way, and then made little mounds for it where the lines came together.AAnd I tell you what, I will never forget the pig bladder balloon. from Little House on the Big Woods. Apparently you forgot about it.BYeah.AAnyway. That would be my first tip. Find something you love. Number two. Accountability. And this can include accountability to yourself in the form of setting goals and tracking your progress. But one thing that has been a really good jumpstart to my reading in the past year or so is doing a book club with a group of friends. We take turns choosing a book so that has opened me up to genres and topics that I may not have chosen on my own but that I've really enjoyed and have kind of like set me on a path to appreciating other books. And even if I don't enjoy a book, then it's nice to have people to complain about it with, right?BYeah.AThe other thing. And thanks again to Lindsey for introducing me to this is an app called Story Graph. And Kelly uses his too. She says, “I keep myself accountable to reading a certain number of books per year by tracking my progress on GoodReads and the story graph. I especially like the story graph because it keeps track of different stats. Like how many books I read in each format and each books mood. And from those stats that gives pretty good recommendations for what to read next.” here, have I showed it to you yet?BI don t know that you have.ACheck this out. Data displays.BAh Yeah.AI mean, how could I not. pie charts, bar charts, line charts. So it's got like a progress bar for myBHow many books you want to readAMy numeric book goal, I guess. And then it kind of takes the data from the books that you've inputted. And you can see, well, I'll let you interpret it. What does this say about me as a reader?BIt says that you like books that make you feel reflective and emotional. Those are you two biggest moods and the pie chart. Pace that you read atm page numbers. 63% fiction,AWhich was not the case two years ago for sure. that's a major shift in my reading life.BThis is a little bit funny.AWhat?BThe books read and it's got the rest of the year that hasn't happened yet and it's like, Hey, you're doing great and then it flatlines at June.AYeah.BSo you’ve got what is it, five books out here that are thriller, memoir, history, historical. SoAThose are kind of my top categories. But you'll notice there's a bunch of categories for genre. Which I like because I like a lot of different things. So this is anonymous. No one's gonna be able to find me on here, right? This is largely for myself, but I still have this ghost of a English literature professor telling me I should have more classics on here, or, why is murder books at the top?BYou're killing it. There, SeeAThere. Landed a joke. The self tracking part. I just started using it this year. I don't know if it is inspiring me to read more or if I just wasn't paying attention to how much I was reading previously. But it's fun to have a better handle on that. Largely because it's helping me think about the books I want to read through a better filter than just genre. Here's what I mean by that. There are stats like, so when you review a book, you can review it for things like, is it more character-driven, or more plot driven? Is it more fast paced or medium paste? does it have likable characters, stuff like that. But those lenses can be more informative than just you like to read sci-fi. I'll give you an example. Two of my favorite genres are sci-fi and historical fiction, which on the surface, they seem like total opposites? Future and past. So anyway I'm like is there a common thread here that explains why I like these books beyond just they fall under this category. And I realized that when I'm reading sci-fi, I'm not reading it for the science or the technology or the futurism. What I like about sci-fi is how it sets a stage for ethical and philosophical questions.BI like that too. That's really the calling. The purpose of sci-fi is to get you to not realize at first that it's talking about right now.ARight. I think the, the technology isn't a turn off for me though, if it's not super realistic or hard, as you say.BIf it isn't too?AMeaning I can see you reading a book and being like, This is so unrealistic. This is not how physics works or something like that. And that being a turnoff to you.BYes.ASo I discovered there's this sub-genre of philosophical sci-fi. And I'm like, that's where I'm at.BI heard the creators of the Expanse talk about how they actually, from book to book, they were able to play with different types of books that they were writing. Like the first one was, was, noir, it was a crime novel. And then the second one is more of a political intrigue kind of book. And then in each one has a, has a different field with the same characters.AAnd then when it comes to historical fiction, I like books that are set in war time. And I don’t actually like war. I mean, I don't, I don't care a whit about military strategy.BI played too many strategy games to not. It's baked in at this point.AI gave it a good shake. I tried I tried playing Axis and Allies with you.BYou tried. Yes. I would have literally had more fun with an Excel spreadsheet.AYou made it through being Russia on Russia's first turn. And after that you were like, I'm done.BWhat I care about is the motives, the personalities. And with Axis and AlliesANone of that.BRight. It's just like how many kinds of this battleship are you going to put in this atoll?AStrategic and tactical.BBooks set in the time of Nazi occupied Europe in particular, I feel do a great job of kind of tearing away the superfluous, What am I trying to say? It centers on like genuine moral dilemmas. And I like reading about people navigating that. Like you and I were talking about Anne Frank not too long ago. And like I was saying, it's like living out the trolley problem on a daily basis.AYeah. Which we have the luxury ofBviewing from a distance. Right.AUnless you're Chidi Anagonye.Bthat's true.ABut There's that question, how would I respond in this situation in a world where there's no good answer, how do you survive?BThat specifically is one of the things that, you know, that quandary is why post-apocalyptic media very much appeals to me. Because, you know, after an apocalypse, there is no good answer for anything.APut people in a survival situation and you see a whole new side. Also in story graph, there are reading challenges which you can sign up for. So I'm doing A to Z book titles, which is sort of a secondary goal for me right now compared to like what I do want to do is read X number of books in a year. But having that alphabet challenge can nudge one book higher on the read next list for me, you know, I'm gonna put this title next in the queue. Which incidentally I do need a Q book.B Quiet.AOh right. In praise of introverts. Right? And we're back.BWe're back.AI just spilled a full cup of coffee onto the keyboard, onto the floor, onto my clothes, onto the wall, et cetera. It may have splattered the microphone. And it was a special coffee too. Had whipped cream on it.BSalted caramel whipped cream.AYeah. Alas. This is not even the first time this week this has happened.BMaybe it's just that you have a bowl with a handle for a coffee mug.AWhere were we? My next tip is to mix up the format. I have gotten so many suggestions to try audio books that I finally gave in and tried it. I've listened to one. That experience was not enough to convert me. But I can see the appeal. I think the main problem for me is that listening to audio books would take up the time that I used to listen to podcasts and I love podcasts too much.BYeah. I don't have 130 subscribed podcasts like you do.AI don't listen to every single one. I just like having choice.BThat's actually a really great way to make use of a commute. If you aren't listening to either a podcast or an audio book while you're driving somewhere, I feel for youAYou ever heard of music?BWhat is this thing you speak of?AFor me, I can't sit and listen. If I'm going to sit and read then like holding a book feels more active, I guess. So I would save my my listening for driving or dishes or something.BOr when you just want to lay down and close your eyes.AThat's right. I do listen to podcasts a lot to fall asleep when you're not reading Ursula Le Guin to me. So don't take it from me. I'm not enough of an audio book enthusiast to tell you why you should do it. But Joseph says, “in my second master's, I started adding audio books so I could read during my commute. In my PhD, I would use the read to me feature from kindle and the Adobe reader read out loud to accompany texts I was reading for school so it was only natural that I would continue this into my reading for fun. Now that I'm working full time, I've purchased a program called text aloud. and I can turn any text into a computer read mp3. The voices are getting better and I find that it's cheaper than buying audio books so I've been buying the books on PDF, converting them to MP3s, and then reading as I listen. I think it helps retention and pacing.” And Kelly says “about 80 per cent of the books I read are on audio. I listen while I get ready in the morning, drive, Cook, clean, etc.” I will say this. A barrier to me adopting audio books is that I thought I needed to buy a subscription to Audible. I was like, I don't know enough whether this is going to be worth it for me to make that investment. But you can check out audio books and e-books from your local library.BNot available in all areas.AProbably. Yeah. Libby is what, is what that's called and it actually has an amazing selection.BDo they have an app?AYes. I actually I have it on my phone and my iPad because then I can pick up where I left off if I'm out and about and have some downtime and can just pull up my phone and keep reading. Yeah, that's really nice to is the syncing. And Lenny spoke of the distinction between podcasts and books too in a way that I identify with. He says “podcasts usually expose me to new questions and topics and help me learn by osmosis by just listening into the meandering dialogues of podcast hosts and guests. While books are usually more structured and coherent forms of knowledge, with a clear thesis the author is putting forward. both books and podcasts have their place for me.” And I think that may be why I have a harder time dipping into audio books versus podcasts is because with most books there is that need to follow the thread. Whereas with a podcast, those feel more informal. My attention can shift in and out. And I won't feel like I've lost a major plot point that I'm going to have to go back and reread, you know what I mean? Have you tried e-books, audio books?BI've done a few books on CD that I've checked out from the library and just fed them one after another into my car's CD player.AFun fact, my old car did not have a CD player, It had a cassette player.BIt did.AAnd that was a selling point because along with the car, we also threw in all of your Weird Al cassette tapes?BIt's true. When we were sellingAon Craigslist, yes. But the buyer said that piqued their interest, did they not?BI don't remember that.Amaybe it just gave them a sense of there's a real person behind this who knows.BRight now, you should pause this podcast, go listen to the entire works of Weird Al. So you know what we're talking about,AWhich you have memorized.BMore or less. Living in the fridge, you can’t stop the mold from growing. Living in the fridge. Can’t tell what it is at all He only makes gold. I mean, he only remakes gold.AHey, so you have heard of music.BYes, I have heard of music. Some people prefer to watch The Daily Show to get their news. I prefer to listen to Weird Al do popular music.ADo covers of pop songs.BBecause he makes it better.AYou've seen him in person?BI have. And he was a freaking dynamo on stage,AReally?BWhich it's hard to imagine someone holding an accordion being a dynamo, but he certainly was.AOkay. Would you ever try e-books? What do you think of having a book loaded into your phone so that you can read it during a slow day.B I'm not opposed to the idea.A It would make it harder to rile up your right-wing coworkers.BThat's true.AYour giant Greta Thunberg book sitting prominently out on theBUh-huh.Ayour Bernie stickerBon my car. Yeah. I mean, I don't have any problem with using an e-book. I know that there's some, some benefits that it would that it would have because there could actually be like links to like if it referred back.AYou know what I really like about it is getting to look up words immediately. So I was just reading a book about the Middle Ages. And there was a lot of stuff I could have gathered from context, but it was also nice to, you know, be like what is a lintel?BThe thing that's above the door?AYes. Who needs an eBook when you've got you? And then the next kind of category of advice I got was about making it a habit by setting aside designated times to read. That was a common refrain. There is something to be said for establishing a habit, because by definition, a habit kind of makes something automatic. And so if picking up a book feels like a chore to you, or it feels like you're going to have to summon up your willpower every single day to get into it. It won't always be that hard. That was that was the experience for me. At first I did, right. Because it's infinitely easier and more compelling to scroll through your phone than to pick up a book. But I think I can fairly say that reaching for a book has been my go-to recently.BYeah.AMatt says, “I've tried to reserve certain times of the day for leisure reading, either in the morning before work or before bed. This means moving myself away from distraction, phones, computers, and reading in a part of my apartment where I can physically detach from reminders of work, stress, etc. Lindsey says, “I have found that leaving the phone, charging in another room overnight has helped immensely. That way I read a book to unwind and get tired instead of scrolling. I also bought some bookmarks and a reading light that functions well, and funnily enough, it feels a little luxuries to use them.” Which is adorable, right? And kind of goes along with the whole, I'm going to create a reading nook, which honestly I'm going to read on the couch or at the table or in the bed like wherever I am anyway. So my beautiful fluffy reading nook tends to go unused.BWhat is that?AIn the office with the chair in the corner with all the pillows and the 14 lamps. Maybe I don't like reading there because it's associated with work. So maybe designate a reading spot. But then again, that can also feel like more pressure because you have to go to this out of the way space and it feels harder to detach from everyday life. Whereas, and this was something that you suggested in our first reading episode, is you have different books for different contexts, right?BMm-hmm.ASo you have like a dining room table book. And you've got a bedtime book, and you've got an Everywhere book. And the same is true for me.BYeah.AWhat's your living room book right now?BIt’s the climate book by Greta Thunberg. I did want to say that one thing I like about that book is that it’s like an edited collection.AIt’s curated.BIt's curated. But you get to hear from experts about various aspects of a problem or a concept, and you don't have to track them all down. That's been done for you.AHm. What would you think of like a short story anthology?BOh yeah, a short story anthology. I've read a few of those. Sometimes an author will make a collection of their own short stories in a book. That's one direction. I’m sorry what were you doing?AI was going to sing One Direction lyrics, but thought better of it.BThank you for not. You know, the anthologies of different writers in a similar genre are interesting because reading out of a bunch of different fictional worlds in short order. It opens your mind up in a way.AAnd I imagine it would be useful for folks who can only do snippets of reading.BFor those who aren't prepared to just sit down with a Tolkien. Deep.AI would consider it if there were a freaking glossary, an index,Ban index of?ANames and places,BDramatis personae is what you're looking for.AWell, but I would also want the page numbers that they are on. So I can be like, Okay, when was this person first introduced? I can't remember them. And every book should have a map.BThat is one thing that Lord of the Rings excels in.AYes. If they did, I would know my European countries better than I do. Timelines and geography, those are things that are easy to lose track of in one setting.BOh, that would actually, things like a timeline, for a novel. You wouldn't want something where the whole timeline is instantly viewable because that would spoil it.AThat’s true, that's true.BBut if you had a, like an e-reader type thing where it unlocks parts of the timeline and you can look back. That's a fun idea.AThat is really fun.BCopyrighted and trademarked.AAnyway, it's easy to make it a habit before bed.BYep. As long as you're not reading stuff that's too thought-provoking orAwhich often that happens to me. But better that I be reading something than staying up getting sucked into a Reddit argument. I don't argue on Reddit. I read other people's arguments. I'm here to say, someone is wrong on the Internet.BYou're just here with the popcorn. You’re like Ooh.AYes. Alright, the last thing I wanted to touch on is finishing books. You may remember the first time we talked about this I said, I have a really hard time not finishing books.BMm-hmm.AAnd I think I've gotten a lot better about that. I mean, accepting that I'm not going to finish every book. Or at least I've re-framed how I view it. Because there is no such thing as a universally good book. So if I'm having trouble getting through a book, it's easy to turn the blame towards me. Like I'm too lazy to want to finish this or I'm, you know?BYeah. You didn’t make this book.ASo what? Maybe a book isn't for you, but it's for other people. Great. And so I'm starting to think of like when, when I start reading a book and I just can't like I just don't care to continue, I'm viewing that as part of the process of getting to a book that I love. It's almost like honing my internal algorithm where I can be like, What is it about this book that's not quite grabbing me?BI don’t love this!Ayou only have one life, You only have so much time. And don't waste that time on William Styron. Sophie's Choice. Sorry.BOh.AI have feelings. And there's a podcast that I recently found that I think has helped me understand this. It's called What Should I Read next? And the whole premise of it is that there's this book expert, who asks her guests to say, what are three books you love and one that wasn't quite for you. In that way she's able to build a new reading list for them based on not just like, I like these books, but why do you like them or not like them? Which is very different from a universalizedBEveryone needs to.A13 can't miss sci-fi. Okay. But why? Oh, here's another thing I do. It's kind of cheating. If I've read most of a book, I'll call that read.BThat is kinda cheating.AI mean, 80% not 51%.BOkay.ABut then that's especially good for nonfiction, where it is easier to skip around to the stuff that's more relevant. And if I held myself to the standard of needing to read 100% of a book to consider it finished, then I would just not engage with it any further. So I need to leave a little bit, a little bit of that flexibility for myself.BOkay, alright.AOr all of the Ursula Le Guin I'm missing because I fall asleep. By the time you're done with that, I'm going to mark that as read. Even though I may have only been conscious for like 35% of it. So how about you? How do you feel about not finishing books or finishing them or?BI try to be pretty picky about the books that I engage with. My narrow selection is kind of a part of that. But there have been a couple of books that I've read in the last few years that I did not finish. Oh, there was one book that I started reading and it didn't quite feel right. I got a chapter or two in. Then I looked it up and I realized it's a sequel.AOh no.BSo plot points from the first book, completely spoiled.AYep. I think it's fair to say that you are, you maybe have a better sense of yes, this is a book I'm going to like, whereas I really have found enjoyment in dabbling.BThat's fine.AI think freeing myself from this unreal expectation that I need to finish every book I start. That, opens it up for me to be more adventurous in my selections because I know I'm not committing myself to something that I'm going to hate. There’s an off ramp. What else do you have to say?BI think in summary, the last thing we want is to induce pressure on you. Our dear listener. You've got enough internal pressures that you need to be cognizant of and try to dismantle them on your own. Like with the perceived what I should be doing, what I should be reading how, when, how much, all of the right, all of theseARight you don't need the ghost of Laura Bush breathing down your neck.BNobody does. Is this George W. Bush's?AYes.BOkay. She isn't dead yet actuallyAOkay so she wouldn't be a ghost.BSpecter?AYes, that's it.BMoreover, if she said you should read it, you probably should not.AI know. I mean, Reader's Digest wasBIt was still a dominant forceAIn my life.BYeah.AI would guess that the target, our target audience is probably the type of person who has that internal pressure. Oh, I should read.BYeah.AThere is a limited number of books you will be able to read in your lifetime. Some of those may be like challenging and rewarding in their own way. And others might be trashy murder books and each has their place. I think the thing is whatever you're doing, take some time to be intentional about it so that it is reflective of what you truly want versus I don't know who else, who else is a good representation? Oh, yeah the Moby Dick idiot on Twitter. I hope that this has not come across as prescriptive, but just these are things that people do that have helped them accomplish the goals that they want to accomplish. Any, any closing remarks? Any season closing remarks?Bif you're still listening to us, good for you.ABenton's going to talk about recycling in the future. I don't think I can commit to regular publishing of TC talk going forward, but I'm not ready to say goodbye fully. So don't unsubscribe, even though you don't, you won't see us for a few months,BRight.AWe may pop up now and again.BWe'll be back. Get to the choppa.

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This is part 2 of 2 about the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. In Part 1, we described how IBM, through its German subsidiary Dehomag, supported the mass extermination of the Jewish people. How do we know IBM's involvement made a difference in the scope of the mass murders? One clue comes from comparing how things went down in the Netherlands vs. France. We also talk about surveillance, ethical hacking, why the logical fallacy "argumentum / reductio ad Hitlerum" shouldn't be a thing, and what the story of IBM and the Holocaust has to do with UX design.

Sources and further reading Black, E. (2001). IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. Dialog press. * Gabriel, M. (2011). Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. Little, Brown. * Gannon, L., & Rucker, R. (2022, November 17). Breaking Bad Energy. Building Local Power podcast https://ilsr.org/blp-breaking-bad-energy/ * Is “Holland” the Same Place as “the Netherlands”? (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2023, from Brittanica https://www.britannica.com/story/is-holland-the-same-place-as-the-netherlands * Katz, S. B. (1992). The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust. College English, 54(3), 255. https://doi.org/10.2307/378062 * Purnell, S. (2020). A woman of no importance: The untold story of the American spy who helped win World War II*. Penguin Random House.

TranscriptALast time we talked about the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black and how Thomas Watson, the CEO of IBM knew Hitler, respected him, defended Germany against critiques from the world and overall did a great job hiding all this to the point that most people think of Watson as America's businessman and not as a Nazi enabler. Does that kind of sum it up?BYeah, that sounds about right. How different would you say the term enabler and sympathizer are?AMaybe the distinction is in the motives? Like sympathizer, I presume means you will agree with someone. Enable means you make something possible for them regardless of belief. What do you think?BYeah, I think that definitely a sympathizer knows what's happening. An enabler may not know what's going on.ASo you think by that definition, Watson wasn't an enabler, he was a sympathizer?BI think so.AWell, if it, if it comes down to awareness, then Watson was very clever about remaining strategically ignorant about certain things. But I think it's hard to claim that he had no idea. As for his motivations, I think greed is as good a guess as any. He kind of said the right words to the right people to get what he wanted. I want to tell you a story that Number one, is very interesting and number two, helps demonstrate how essential IBM actually was to the Holocaust being able to exterminate so many people so efficiently. Because I can, I can anticipate that objection. People being like, well, wouldn't Hitler have just found someone else to do it? Or how much did it really has to do with IBM versus any other number of factors. Which is true. I mean, both of those are good questions to ask.BFair question. Yeah. So if Dehomag hadn't been discovered and acquired by IBM, might it have just remained a German company and then been found independently by Germany for its own purposes?AYeah, that's also a good question. I think given the scarcity of raw materials though in Europe at the time, the fact that IBM New York was able to swoop in and provide the paper for the punchcards,BAh yes.ALike that was a key piece of it.BMaterial support.Anot to mention, you know, they had the infrastructure to train people for these systems. They didn't even sell them. They leased them.BCapitalism at its finest,ARight. Yeah. I mean, that's a perfect bargain for a company if you canBFern, get down.AIf you can control the terms of how someone is using your hardware and also require them to use only your software. One way to help illustrate the importance of IBM to the Holocaust is to compare its implementation in two different countries, Holland and France. As you'll remember, every time Germany invaded a new country, it was time to do a census in that country so that they couldBCount them up. Weed them out.ASo they could identify the Jewish people and send them to concentration camps. When Germany took over the Netherlands, punch-card technology was already established in the country. So that country had the existing infrastructure. It already used Holleriths to do their census, as well as bill people for their utilities, inventory food, issue ration cards, all those kind of basic functions. And the Reich appointed a data nerd to run the census of the Netherlands as soon as it was taken over. And this guy's motto was, “To record is to serve.”BWow, that's so dystopian.AYeah. So he probably agreed with the Nazi ideals, but also wanted to prove himself and prove the capability of statistics. So he was very motivated for this to be a success. Although he was working against a more resistant population than average,BThat’s true.AI think it's fair to say because the Dutch people saw the census for what it was.BI know that there was a popular movement of non-Jewish Dutch citizens wearing the star.AAbsolutely. And they also registered as Jewish during the census because they wanted to stand in solidarity with their Jewish neighbors and they wanted to screw up the system in whatever way they could.BThey're braver people than Americans.AEngaging in the Holocaust is emotionallyBTaxing.ATaxing. And I find that I have to go like resupply some hope in humanity.BWhere do you find it?AWell, in stories like this.BOh.AYes, some Dutch people wore the yellow star even if they weren't Jewish. But according to the book, “it was not the outward visage of six gold points worn on the chest for all to see on the street. It was the 80 columns punched and sorted in a Hollerith facility that marked the Jews of Holland for deportation to concentration camps.” In other words, when we think of the Holocaust and the persecution of Jewish people, we think of that yellow star. And we think of, that is what singled them out. It was those behind the scenes records that made possible their mission to exterminate the Jews. The yellow stars served a different purpose, I thinkBOstracism, right?AExactly. It sent a message to the German people about who they should be rejecting. They didn't have access to the Hollerith lists, but they could see a star on somebody.BI find it interesting that you said that it was a data nerd. I mean, I have heard that nerds will rule the world someday.ABut will they rule it ethically?BYes, that's exactly what I was going to say. Is that, that's definitely true, but is that good?AYeah, I mean, think of how many self-styled nerds haunt incel forums on the internetBOr the halls of power, whether they be political, governmental, or corporate.AAnd this isn't to knock nerds. You are a paragon of nerdity.BMe? Yes.AAnd you're proud of that.BSure, yeah.AThat's what made me like you, you know, no, no. It was the Hawaiian shirts.BIt was the Hawaiian shirts?AAnd the faux leather orange throw pillows.BYeah.AThat was what told me this guy, he's a keeper. Tech comm classes and other writing classes can really help to show that data is not neutral.BYeah, absolutely. Like tech comm, you know, it selects for nerdery. And it's definitely a place where like you imagine, like the scientist focusing on the task or the engineer focusing on the design constraints. Like they are only looking at problems that are not necessarily having to do with people or with interacting with people. The tech comm professional, however, is like the bridge fromAthe liaison,BThe liaison from the siloed technical professional and an audience that to some degree is less technical than they are. That definitely places tech comm in a role where like the onus is especially on them to bring the ethics, to be the beacon of should this be done? I fight for the user.AYou know, different stakeholders are going to have different measures of success. There needs to be that voice. At the same time I don't want to imply that the humanities is going to solve these problems. Like, let's not forget, Hitler had a giant library and he appreciated art, right?BYeah.AHe also appreciated children and dogs, which horrifies me because all of that serves to humanize him.BOh my gosh. You mean he didn't, he didn't eat babies for lunch, breakfast, and midnight snacks? Hitler was still a human.AAnd I think it's important to humanize or cultural villains, not to hold them less accountable, but to shorten the distance between us and them and to recognize how part of being human is the capacity to be a monster.BYes.AAnd that is hard to accept. You want to, you want to other-ize the villains, because you don't want to think you could become one.BMm-hmm. In a sense, the logical fallacy of argumentum ad Hitlerum is a step in the wrong direction. I mean,AWhat is argument ad Hitlerum? The fallacy is inBThe fallacy is in making that connection too quickly. Making that connection without justification like, oh, Hitler loved parades. You like parades. You're like Hitler. Okay, that's, that's ridiculous. But you know, banning books, burning books, censoring books. That's a continuum.AThere's absolutely fascist stuff going onBRight now in Florida.ASo, okay. Let me see if I've got this right. You think the term argumentum ad Hitlerum is unhelpful because it suggests that any comparison to Hitler is inherently too extremeBor fallacious.AYes,BYeah, exactly.AWhen in fact, it's recognizing the similarities that we need to do, before it gets to the point of, let's murder a specific group of people.BYeah, I mean, it sort of sets up a false binary of like, well, there's an uncrossable chasm between not like Hitler and like Hitler.ABut I think it can be a fallacy. But I wouldn't call it ad Hitlerum, I would call it false analogy in that case where it's fallacious.BThere you go. There, we solved it. You're welcome, world.AYeah. And I think it also depends on are you throwing it out there to win an argument or stop a certain thread of argumentBStop the conversation.AYeah, exactly. I think that's inappropriate. I don't think it's inappropriate to look at a definition of what fascism is, see what's happening in the United States and call for action against it.BYeah. And of course, the United States isn't exceptional.AWell, right now I'm reading about Nazis in the United States during the war. Yeah, sorry, we got off on a tangent. This is why everyone hates moral philosophers. I don't know. Back to Holland. The Dutch people resisted bravely, but it was not enough to stand up against the literal machine. Of the estimated 140,000 Dutch Jews, 102,000 were murdered, a death ratio of 73%. So keep that figure in mind while we move on to France. It was a different story in France. France was more laissez-faire about their statistics and documentation in general.BIt's a French term, so I'd imagine.AYep, right? For instance, when they did take their census, they didn't ask about religion. Furthermore, the puppet government, the Vichy regime, horrible as it was, wanted to exercise some facade of independence and came up with all these exemptions for certain of their Jewish citizens, such as veterans.BHmm.AThe general attitude was less enthusiastic about Let's use machines and punch cards to account for anything and everything. The census effort after Germany invaded France was a mess. There was no consistent method. They did things by paper form, also known as Tulard files, which required up to five pages per person. Things were just not going according to the Nazi requirements. They needed Holleriths. A guy named Renee Carmille was the Comptroller General of the French Army in the Vichy administration. And he steps up, he was a punch-card believer. He even had some Hollerith machines of his own. So he promised that his machines could quote, “deliver the Jews of France” unquote. So Vichy started planning another census. And the debate was whether to stick with the trusty Tulard files or the newfangled Hollerith punchcards. Carmille was lobbying hard for his proposal, but the Tulard forms won the day, at least until the Census Office found themselves buried in forms with nothing but Remington typewriters to help process them.BRemington? The gun makers had a chance to crank out a few typewriters, huh?AWe know that IBM made machine guns. So eventually they relented and arranged for the forms and materials to be transported to Carmille’s group. While they waited for Carmille to tabulate the forms, the Nazis commenced their raids on the Jewish people using the info they had gotten from the Tulard files. But those had such out-of-date information thatBThey were raiding the wrong place.AYep. And Adolf Eichmann personally visited Paris to oversee the deportation of the Jews. Eichmann wasn't happy with the progress they were making or lack thereof. They were still waiting for Carmille’s lists. And Carmille had the only copy of the card file. Meanwhile, Germany was losing battles in North Africa. This was 1942, 43. Somehow, an organized French Resistance Army had cropped up and valiantly kept the Germans at bay in North Africa. Where did they come from? It turns out that Carmille was a secret agent. He had used his Holleriths to help organize this army. Using the punch cards, he was able to track people's professions and military specialties in order to organize and mobilize them quickly. And he never punched column 11, asking for Jewish identity. Supposedly he tampered with the Holleriths to disable the ability to even track that. Carmille was caught,BOh shit.ATortured at the hands of the Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie. But he gave up no names and ultimately died in a concentration camp. Let's compare the numbers. Estimated 73% of Dutch Jews died. In France it was approximately 25%.BWow. Yeah, that's a big difference. To be fair, there is a cultural difference between France and Belgium? The Netherlands?AHolland, Netherlands. Yeah.BNetherlands.AWhat's the correct term? What do they like to call their country?BI think that the Netherlands and Belgium were, well, Belgium got its independence from. You'll have to fact check.AYeah, well,Bthat's what I'm getting around to. I don't know.AAh, you admitted it. [The correct term for the country is The Netherlands. Holland describes the two most popular provinces within the Netherlands, which has 12 provinces total. However, Holland is often used to stand in for the whole of the Netherlands, in a type of synecdoche.]BI'm currently reading through kind of a history of the late 1800s of Europe and France in particular, you know, they were the first European country to have their monarchy dissolved. The French Revolution was in 1789 before it was cool. It kind of relapsed with various attempts to reestablish a monarchy or a dictatorship, an emperor in France. During that whole time, getting resistance groups organized, it was like a joke. It was like a sad, bad joke because there were all of these different groups that were on the political left that wanted an end to whatever reactionary regime was in place at the time, but they had infighting and wouldn't work together. I imagine that Holland didn't have that fractious, sectarian kind of a system. Like they didn't have as many splinter groups in their society. The more communal, like, you know, we will stand by our Jewish neighbors and wear this yellow star.ABut you'd think that that attitude would ultimately work against the Nazi’s effortsBTrue.AHere's the thing. We can't know what a difference Renee Carmille made. There are a multitude of factors that explain the different outcomes for these two separate countries. But you cannot deny that what he did was heroic.BYes. What he did was heroic and he personally, individually, I'm sure that he saved thousands upon thousands of Jewish lives in France.AYes, he not only foiled the Nazis efforts, he actively worked against them. And it's one of those things you can't measure the impact. But the more I research about World War II, the more I realize it's not down to one hero. Like it's not just you know General Patton or Eisenhower or Churchill.BIt was a time for the valiant.AIt's a combination of actions by individuals and choices by individuals that in the moment, in their little corner of the universe, might not have felt impactful. But in combination with others’ actions, made a difference.BMm-hmm.ASo I suggest we look to those people as role models for our kids. Don't have your kid do a book report on Thomas Watson. Have them research Rene Carmille or Victoria Hall. [Her name is Virginia Hall, not Victoria Hall. My bad.]BThe unsung heroes of World War Two.AYes. She was an SOE spy. Special Operations Executives. That was sort of the guerrilla warfare spy group that Churchill created to kind of sneak into, to parachute into France and do sabotage and organize resistance. Victoria Hall had a wooden leg. She was a woman. Those were things that blocked her from certain positions in society. And yet she gave her entire life to protecting the enemies of the Nazis and coordinating military actions against them. And she didn't look for glory. But I tell you what, she had to deal with a lot of men who wanted to be James Bond and wanted to be a spy because it was sexy but they didn't put in the work. And they didn't put in the care and the cautionBAnd it cost lives.AYes. I bring up the story of Carmille also because he's been called the first ethical hacker. Thinking, you know, thinking back to what we were saying about technical people. How it can sometimes be a challenge to look beyond the immediate consequences of their actions or to think that the work I do in this cubicle or in this lab or what have you is, it's just science or it's just numbers and thereby distance themselves from potential human consequences of the technologies that they're developing. I think this is a story that can show the power of a single technology to do harm and also when in the right hands to counteract that harm.BYeah, holler at the machines were definitely used to run the Holocaust. But car mile figured out a way to use a hollow Earth machine to defeat the Nazis in North Africa.AI don't want to fall into the trap of saying any technology is simply a tool. It can be used for good or for bad. To some extent that's true. But technologies can certainly be designed to lend themselves better to bad versus good consequences, for instance. And so that's something we need to be alert to as well. Is that it's, it's not just how the machine, how the technology is used, but how it's developed and for what purposes and with what capabilities?BYeah. Definitely.ABecause I think it's very fair to say that the technology that was used to I don't want to say innocuously because it wasn't innocuous. But the technology that was used to conduct the 1940 census in America, was as good as it was because it had been honed in a different context for a different purpose,BChilling.AYes. And we know that the results of the census were used to put Japanese-Americans into internment camps. Which you'd think, you'd think we'd learn a lesson from the enemy.BJust learned the wrong one.AYeah. And that should cause us to question the narrative of progress as an inherent good.BRight. It's the myth of progress, even.AYeah, and I'm sure many of my colleagues listening will have instantly connected the story of IBM and the Holocaust to Stephen Katz’s classic article, The Ethic of Expediency, which for those who aren't familiar with it, Katz opens with an example of technical communication that by all accounts is pretty much doing the job that tech comm needs to do, or it conveys technical details, it's formatted properly as a memo, it has precise specifications. And then you discover that it's a memo discussing improvements to a mobile gassing unit.BYeah.AAnd then you read it through a new lens. You realize that words like “merchandise” are used to describe human beings. And you realize that genocide is being discussed dispassionately, technically, neutrally. I know for me in graduate school, that article was a turning point in me recognizing the ethical implications of technical communication, that it's not enough to ask if something is effective, you have to ask, is it ethical? You have to ask who is this for? Who does it harm? Who might it harm? Another thing that's notable about that, the euphemisms, in the memo.BThat's a choice.AIt makes you wonder were they trying to distance themselves from the horrors that they were carrying out? Or was it for posterity so that the strategic ambiguity would help them skirt accountability. I don’t know. But that's another lesson for technical and business communication. And it's a lesson, it's a line that Watson learned how to walk very well. As I was reading IBM in the Holocaust and reading about like, wow, the Germans were just obsessed with surveillance and tracking and sorting and ranking and categorizing. And yet the people at the top don't want that transparency turned on themselves.BThey never do.ASo I want to show you a picture and tell me what you see happening in it.BYou vill show me picture.AOkay. Describe what you see here. This is an ad for Dehomag.BAh. I see a giant eyeball in the sky. Looking down on, it looks like a, it's probably a punch card, but it looks kind of like an apartment building behind a factory with a big old smokestack. And so it says in German “oversight with Hollerith”, lochkarten? I don't know what that is.AHere. It says in the caption. “See everything with Hollerith punchcards.”BOh.AWhat's the what's the message here?BOversight is good.ASurveillance.BUh-huh. Yeah. I mean, it could just be that it's printed in black and white, but I imagine that it looks pretty Orwellian in whatever color as well.AYeah. There's absolutely a power imbalance in who gets surveilled and who is privileged enough not to. And I think that needs to be accounted for anytime you hear somebody saying more data is better. And then one more connection to tech comm. As I was reading IBM and the Holocaust, it occurred to me that there's a parallel here with Katz's work in that he's talking to or he's using this written memo as an example of how technical communication isn't inherently good or neutral. And I think in this case, you can point to, you could almost call it a participatory design process. Because of how each punch card was so customized to a particular purpose and a particular user. And that by all accounts from, from a superficial glance at the situation would be an example of good UX practice. That's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to involve the people who will ultimately use your product and capture their needs andBCapture.AIt's not enough to stop there. If the victims of the Holocaust were included in this design process, it wouldn't exist to begin with. Do you see what I'm saying? Let me read a little bit from the book here. “None of Germany's statistical programs came easy. All of them required ongoing technical innovation. Every project required specific customized applications with Dehomag engineers carefully devising a column and corresponding hole to carry the intended and corresponding hole to carry the intended information. Every order was different. Each set was meticulously designed, not only for the singular client, but for the client's specific assignments. The design work was not a rote procedure, but an intense collaboration. It began with a protracted investigation of the precise data needs of the project, as well as the people, items or services being tabulated. This required IBM subsidiary field engineers to undertake invasive studies often on-site. So hearing about that process without context, you would say, Yeah. That's what a good UX designer does. That's what a good engineer does. That's what a good technical communicator does, isBSupport your product.ALearn about your audience. Anticipate your client's needs. And I say this to make clear that participatory design in and of itself doesn't necessarily guard againstBBad participation?AI don't want to say the word evil, that's too cliche.BSo it doesn't guard againstAharm, we’ll say. Who are you participating with? To what ends? Who will be affected? Whether or not your client, whether or not they're the one using the product or paying you for the work.BYeah.AThat looks like a dick. Sorry. It wasn’t on purpose.BNo? Oh, okay.AI doodle.BYou doodle.AI doodle on my notes while we talk and that was accidental.BYeah. And in a sense like it makes sense because the we don't want mob justice either, because that's participatory. But it doesn't mean that it's going to be good.AYeah, participatory design. Deep embedded field research and observation and interviews is not inherently socially just.BTrue.ASo what does that mean for teachers? For people doing UX? What takeaways do we want to leave our listeners with? I don't want to say don't do participatory design, right?BSo for practitioners of UX, I would say it may not be popular to say every time you get involved with a project that you should have been involved earlier. But do it. Ideally, every project, every, every thing that's supposed to have a great impact should start with an ethical study. Academia has the IRB step as like the gatekeeper for doing research. Industry no, nothing.AI'm surely there's some regulations to keep things in check.BWell, yeah, the gatekeeper is whether a manager thinks the expense can be justified. Pretty much. Occasionally someone will think to involve legal in the discussion. But, you know, I have a feeling that people who are in legal departments for corporations probably feel like a lot of UX designers who are brought in three days before launch to get their blessing Instead of to get their input and direction.AYeah. It doesn't matter how closely you collaborate with your client if the end result is to better surveil, or locate or control people who don't have a say in the product. So what do you think? I'm trying to I'm trying to wrap up.BYeah.AWhat do you think? I'm surprised that IBM has managed to keep its reputation so untarnished given this history.BNo kidding.AI'm sure we use and benefit from IBM products too. So it's not simply a matter of boycotting it. ButBThey were probably one of the early adopters of the idea of brand renovation. I don't know if that's the right term even but it’s the only way I can put words to it.AI don't mean to say that IBM is the one and only bad guy.BOh no.AThat was another one of the annoying critical reviews I read on Amazon is, why are you singling out IBM? If you do that, then you have to call out all these other companies that were complicit. And it's like,BSo let's do it. Call them all out.AYeah. Like why not do a deep dive on one if it means that we can better recognize moves that make this possible?BI know that it isn't exactly the same thing, I heard a podcast about denialism and how its roots go back further than tobacco. Its roots,ACorporate denialism?BYes. Corporate denialism.ALike saying we’re not part of the problem or we didn't do this?BYeah, that sort of thing. It goes back, in fact to electric companies. In almost all places they have what's called a natural monopoly. And so they kind of don't have to really compete because you can't just pick another electric company to give you your power. They fought hard against rural electrification because they didn't want to run all of those transmission lines. They wanted to power cities, they didn't want to power farms. They basically created studies to show that this wouldn't be feasible or that farmers don't even want electricity.AOh, use data and science to support their preconceived preference?BYeah. So they, when tobacco’s turn came, there was a rule book.ATemplate.BThere was a template already. And I imagine that IBM was just keeping it warm from, from the electric companies on to big tobacco. Oh no, no, no, we weren't, We didn't really like what Hitler was doing. I mean, it wasn't that bad. So the whole deny delay minimize all of the strategies used for when your business model actively creates harm.AWell, thanks for listening.BYes. Until next time.AIt was a challenge to read this book and not constantly report what I was learning because I didn't, because I wanted to make sure we talked about it on the podcast.BOh, it wasn't out of respect for me reading my own book that you held back, it was because you wanted to have something to hit me with that I hadn't heard before.AYeah. Get a more genuine reaction. It's not like you don't interrupt my reading to show me your meme of the day.BOh, come on. You get plenty of cute animal videos too.AYeah. That makes it all worth it.BWhen it comes down to it, cute animals, that’s what makes it all worth it.

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Nazi Germany systematically identified, relocated, and murdered millions of Jewish people during the Holocaust. But how were they able to kill so many so efficiently? IBM equipment played a key role. Meanwhile, IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson got rich off of Nazi Germany and strategically escaped scrutiny for his collaboration. In this episode, drawing on Edwin Black's book IBM and the Holocaust, Abi explains how intertwined IBM and Nazi Germany were by tracing their paths through the Hitler years.

Sources and further reading Black, E. (2001). IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation*. Dialog press.

TranscriptBHi, this is TC talk.AI'm Abi.Band I'm Benton.AI teach technical communicationBand I don't.ABut you're married to me so you get to hear all about it.BI do.AFor new listeners. Let's start with a brief definition of technical communication. I see technical communication as communication, whether verbal, visual, etc. that helps somebody make a decision or perform some action. The most effective tech comm is highly attuned to its audience and the audience's knowledge, their values, and so on.BThat sounds good to me.ANow, effective tech comm isn't inherently good or ethical, as we will get further into in this episode. Today we're going to talk about the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. It was written in 2001. And this is another of those books that I did not plan to talk about for this podcast. But once I started reading it, I knew there are multifarious connections. Is that a word?BMultiply nefarious?AWell, multifarious and nefarious, certainly in this case. Myriad.BMany.ALanguage. Many. Thank you. It was getting some buzz on Twitter on Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, and I knew I had to pick it up.BWhat day in January is that?A27th.BOkay.ABecause I'm interested in history generally. But we'll certainly get to the implications for tech comm. I might just pull a Peter Jackson with this one. It's a very long and dense book. I may need to extend it into multiple episodes. We'll have to see how efficiently we can get through this.BWe'll see what the CGI budget for this one is going to be then.AWell, in fact, I don't think any of the episodes we've done this season have been planned like very far in advance. And I did actually go into the fall with a list of topics I wanted to do. And then other stuff just came up and it seemed more interesting at the time. But I still wanna do those topics. Okay, Benton, What if I told you that there was a man whose loyalists called him The Leader, assembled and sang celebratory songs about him. And who was instrumental in the efficient mass murder of millions of people. Who am I talking about?BThat sure sounds like Hitler to me.AI'm talking about Thomas J. Watson, the CEO of IBM, International Business Machines. Were you aware of this? Like what is your kind of background understanding of what IBM is or what or who Thomas Watson was?BI did know that IBM has existed for a lot longer than electronics. Well, as we know them today.AHence, the machines in its title.BMachines, yes.AVersus computers.B I know that they were instrumental in the US Census going from a process of several months of collating data before the punch card reader was used to being like a matter of weeks, maybe?AYou're talking about the American Census.BThe American Census.ANo it took years actually to compile the data before IBM came on the scene.BOkay. It was a substantial reduction, that much I knew. So being a kid growing up in the '90s in an Apple computer home IBM was known as Big blue. They were the evil empire. They were they were the bad guys in computers.AFor real?BYes.AWhere did this notion come from?BBecause they were the other team.AWhat about Microsoft? Where were they?BWell, they were on that team.AOh, Apple versus everyone else?BYes. I admit it. I was a techno-jingoist when I was a kid.AWell, you weren't wrong. I mean, I wouldn't say Apple is innocent.BThey're not innocent and they never were.AYeah. Okay. What about Watson? Do you remember the Watson supercomputer?BWas this Jeopardy or was this chess?AIt may have been both. What I remember of it is that it went up against my childhood hero Ken Jennings.BAh. So definitely Jeopardy.ARight. You know, it was created by IBM, named after its founder. Obviously,BI thought it may have been named after Sherlock’s colleague, Dr. Watson. Or maybe there's the Watson Crick model of DNA.AIt was indeed named after Thomas Watson. I just want to start by saying, I think this book offers a good lesson in who we choose to lionize. Who are our heroes? Even before I got very deep into this book, I did a quick Google search, like who is this Watson guy? And in some of the top results, there were articles like Encyclopedia Britannica and whatnot. Based on what I read there, there was zero reference to his dealings with Nazi Germany.BOh.AAnd he was only presented as one of America's best-known businessmen. Again, I wasn't looking deeply. It's not some hidden secret that IBM worked with Nazi Germany. But any elementary school kid trying to write a report on this guy would only come up with praise of him. And that speaks to Americans’, I think, tendency to respect rich people simply on the basis of they’re rich.BYup.AThe facade is starting to slip.BThe resistance to that. That general trend is definitely getting more pronounced and widespread. Thank goodness.AYeah. Elon is not doing himself any favors with his antics. Jeff Bezos, I can't think of a single person who looks up to the guy,BDr. Evil with his giant phallus rocket.ABut as this book shows, it's actually dangerous to unquestioningly respect someone even if they are a quote, unquote good businessman. Because in a capitalist society, being a good businessman means you make money. Let's get into the overlap between IBM and Nazi Germany. And as Edwin black argues, IBM added the Blitz to blitzkrieg. And the author is very clear about this. Hitler still would have murdered the Jews without help from IBM. But there is no way he could have done it quite as efficiently. Like any rhetorician, I like to get the context for what I read. What was the reaction when it came out? How are people reacting to it now? And it was generally well received thanks in part to its just absolute trove of documentation. So what Black did with this book is he pieced together this collaboration that they were very strategic about keeping hidden, as seen in all of the plausible deniability built into their correspondence and in how Watson's public PR stunts failed to align with his private decision-making. So in my search for context, I made the mistake of reading Amazon reviews.BAs we sometimes do.AThe critical ones were along the lines of this book failed to convince me that Watson was a genocidal maniac. Of course he wanted to sell his product. That's what companies do, make money. I'm just like, do you see the problem here? The value of capitalism and money-making is so deeply embedded that it seems like an obvious excuse for aiding and abetting fucking genocide. Right?BMm-hmm.AI mean, obviously not everyone thinks this way, but I don't know, the tone of that comment gives us a window into how some people react to this. So, sure, Watson may not have been a genocidal maniac like Hitler. But Watson was not against it enough for it to matter.BYeah.AAnd in my mind, whether you're motivated by a deep and abiding hatred based on lies or greed, the end result is the same, right? And these are the people who fly under the radar because they're not spouting the overtly racist stuff. But again, if you enabled the Reich, what does it matter? The swastika only represented a dollar sign to Watson.BAlso, again, getting back to capitalism, IBM, their leadership had a financial obligation to obfuscate the truth.AHow so?BWell, a corporation exists for the profit of shareholders.ASo like I said, I want to show how intertwined IBM and Nazi Germany were by tracing their paths through the Hitler years. If you want the depth, I do highly recommend the book, but I don't think you'll need to read the book to get the important lessons out of it. Which like I said, might be a future episode. Okay, background on Thomas Watson. So he worked for the National cash register company, NCR. He was a devious salesman, drove out any competition. NCR’s quote, “war tactics were limitless. Bribes, knockoff machines at predatory prices, threats of litigation and even smashed store windows were alleged.” So in 1912, Watson and other NCR execs were found guilty of criminal conspiracy. And I'm going to tell a story because it perfectly illustrates Watson's tactics for shirking accountability that he will fully deploy at IBM.BHm.AThe same spring that Watson and friends were being investigated, there was massive flooding in town. This was in Ohio. 90,000 people were displaced. Quote, “NCR organized an immense emergency relief effort.” They converted their factories to be able to produce rowboats. They opened up their facilities for hospital patients. They offered food, water, organized repairs of the railroads, so on and so forth. They became heroes. They used that hero status to get others to push for pardons for them. Eventually Watson's attorneys got him off the hook for a technicality. He learned two lessons from this event. Number one, you can avoid accountability by becoming indispensable. Number two, don't put everything in writing. The evidence for the jury to convict him was overwhelming. And he wouldn't make that mistake again. Watson took charge of IBM in 1922. And IBM acquired Dehomag, short for in German, German Hollerith Machine Company. What's a Hollerith machine? It was a type of early computing device that sorted punchcards for various purposes. This was invented in the late 1800s by an IBM worker, a German immigrant, named Herman Hollerith, who devised the machine while working for the US Census Bureau. Dehomag may as well have been called IBM Germany. But keeping IBM out of the company name helped him stay under the radar as the public started scrutinizing Germany, as Hitler rose to power. And by this point, IBM had already made a fortune off Germany even in the midst of the Great Depression in the United States. So Watson was sneaky in the way that he reported his profits.BNo.AIn fact, much of the book just covers his shady business dealings and his ongoing fight over finances with Willie Heidinger, the enthusiastic Nazi who owned Dehomag at the time IBM acquired it. I won't touch on that here because I don't have a business or legal background and frankly, I wasn't able to follow it very well. But the upshot is that Watson was greedy and cunning throughout all of this, and he micro-managed Dehomag to ensure he could squeeze as much profit out of it as possible and to conveniently obscure to the public and the US government his close relationship with Nazi Germany.BConvenient.AAlright, what's special about 1933 in Germany?BIs that when Hitler was elected?AI believe it was when he was appointed Chancellor.BChancellor.Aby President Hindenburg. Hitler came to power and it was no secret that his goal was to eliminate the Jewish people. This was one aspect of his platform that he never wavered on. You know, his Mein Kampf is full of the ravings of a racist madman. I say that to preempt any excuses like, no one could have known.BMaybe not everyone took him seriously at the time.AThe 1920s, he had that failed Beer Hall Putsch andBThat put him in prison when he wrote Mein Kampf.ARight. And Hitler learned from that experience that the way to get to power is through legitimate means. Or at least the appearance of legitimacy. After 1929, the stock market crash in the United States, America was like, Oh hey, pay those loans back. It was a financial crisis that prompted people to be like, oh, Hitler knows what he's talking about. But the anti-Semitism was already deeply baked in to culture at that time. Again, not something that just emerged out of thin air. Right away, Hitler started implementing laws that disenfranchised the Jews. The persecution ramped up over the years, starting with pushing them out of their workplaces, stealing their assets, moving them into ghettos, and ultimately sending them to concentration camps for either quote “extermination by labor,” unquote, or to be gassed.BI know that one of the, one of the camps had the slogan over its gate. Work makes free.AThat sounds familiar.BBecause it will free you from your earthly body. Enough work.AYeah. And this is a question I had always wondered about before I started really digging into the history of World War Two. How did Hitler know who all the Jewish people were, right? Because by that point, many were very assimilated. Many had even converted to ChristianityBYeah.ALikely nudged by the racism against them.BPolitical racism and individual racism.ARight. But I always wondered, how do you pick them out? Especially if you're defining Jewish as both those who practiced Judaism and those who were Jewish by blood, even by a small portion. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 kind of officialized this broad definition of Jewish. So how could you possibly identify them without collecting and cross-referencing data from multiple censuses, church record books, and other documentation? The answer, Hollerith machines. I'm going to give you an example of one function of the Hollerith machines just to illustrate how it worked. But it was used for many, many different purposes. And Nazi Germany was obsessed with documenting and tracking.BOh, yeah.AUm, so they also did a horse census. They did a cow census, they did a vehicle census, they did a fucking butter census.BNot only genocide. Hashtag, not all Hollerith machines.AOh my gosh. Okay, so here's an example of how a Hollerith machine helps to run the activities of a concentration camp. Black writes, “prisoners were identified by descriptive Hollerith cards, each with columns, with punched holes detailing nationality, date of birth, marital status, et cetera.” So with a spreadsheet you can filter, you can sort, you can list. But before computers existed, there was no way to do that efficiently. But if every person has their own punch card, then you can set your Hollerith to say, alright, spit out all the Jewish people who are men ages 18 to 24 or what have you. And then you send the punch cards through.BSay you've got a need for strong backs to do hard labor.ARight. Hole 3 signified homosexual. Hole 9 signified anti-social. Eight, Jew. And then there was also a code for reason for departure.BDeparture?AFrom the camp.BOh.ATwo was transfer. Suicide was 5, special handling was 6.BWhat the hell kinda thing is that?AIt was commonly understood to be extermination either in a gas chamber, by hanging or by gunshot.BSpecial handling.AYep. Does it make sense in general you know what Hollerith machines were able to make possible?BMm-hmm.AOkay. And they were used toBYou got a stack of cards. Every person is a database entry. Yeah. And when you pull their card, you call them, they get in line and they perform whatever task they were called for.AYeah. Right away Hitler was like, alright, we're gonna do a census. We're going to use the Holleriths. Of course they tracked religion. And it wasn't enough to just count the Jewish people. They needed to know, I shouldn't say needed, they wanted to know exactly who they were. One statistician at the time said “In using statistics, the government now has the roadmap to switch from knowledge to deeds.” BThere's a saying in, in business. I think it's in business that you can't control what you can't measure. Be careful what you measureAYesBbecause you'll start to think that it's important.AOh my gosh. Yeah. Well, I mean, we'll talk about this more. I think there's definitely connections here to big data of today. So I just want to call attention here to how Hitler marshaled these institutions of science, statistics towards his racist ends. They sort of borrowed the credibility of science to invent a pseudoscientific branch of race science.BMm-hmm.AAnd I think that's a move that we need to be alert to. That happened certainly in the United States, as we discussed in our episode about racist medical experimentation.BMm-hmm.AAnd then, I want you to read this quote. I want you to read this quote from Willy Heidinger.B“The physician examines the human body and determines whether all organs are working to the benefit of the entire organism. We, Dehomag, are very much like the physician in that we dissect cell by cell, the German cultural body. We report every individual characteristic on a little card. These are not dead cards. Quite to the contrary. They prove later on that they come to life when the cards are sorted at a rate of 25,000/h. Our nation's capital P physician, Adolf Hitler, can take corrective procedures to correct the sick circumstances. Our characteristics are deeply rooted in our race. Therefore, we must cherish them like a holy shrine, which we will and we must keep pure.”AWhat do you think?BThat is some grade a use of persuasive rhetoric. Not that I'm persuaded, but he uses the positive. A physician. Physicians are there to help, we’re like physicians. We're here to helpADehumanizes.BIt is not a human, it is a cell that may be sick.AIt's a tumor.BYes.AThat's going to harm the rest of the body if it's not excised.B“We must poison the tumor.”AAnd the punch cards are inextricable from this mission, right?BRight.AOkay. In 1935, one of the things that Roosevelt is best known for, Social Security Act.BYes, the New Deal.Awhich required tracking 30 million people. Guess who got the contract?BIBM.AAccording to Black, “Watson's people boasted that his was the biggest accounting operation of all time.” But actually it was the second biggest. The dress rehearsal had already taken place in Germany. I mention this to show how IBM was starting to become essential to the operations of the US government as well, right? Watson was elected chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce.BI imagine that meets in New York?AWell, that year the conference was in Paris. But once Watson was in charge, guess where he announced the next conference would be?BIt will be in Berlin.AYes. Meanwhile, IBM was becoming more essential in Germany. And just to clarify, in case you think that Germany could have done this without Watson. They did supply the punchcards. Billions a year.BGeez.ABecause of trade sanctions and whatnot at that time, Germany had a hard time acquiring the raw materials it needed and paper was in short supply. So they relied heavily upon IBM New York at this point. In 1937 was the International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Berlin. And at this meeting, Watson received Hitler's medal, Merit Cross of the German Eagle. This was in honor of Watson's vocal support for Germany, for helping keep a trade route open, for providing the technology that enabled the rounding up of the Jews, for the credibility he granted to Germany due to being quote, America's businessmen and a consultant to Roosevelt. At this meeting, there were lavish dinner parties. He was entertained by Joseph and Magda Goebbels. This was quite audacious of Watson because at this time there were boycotts, protests, public outcry against Hitler's regime. So again, already, the world was becoming wise to Hitler's dangerousness.BWary, at least.AWatson really was instrumental for Germany at this point because he went out of his way to defend them. Even if in vague terms. And his high-status with Roosevelt gave an implicit green-light to their activities.BBeing a publicly viewed as successful businessmen, that alone will get you access to politicians, but donations, they definitely put your name at the top of the list.AWatson donated large sums to Roosevelt's campaign.BYeah, and this kind of gets to the idea also that certainly Roosevelt was not a saint. ANo.BObviously under Roosevelt's watch, we turned away boats of Jewish refugees from Germany. Said, Go back.AYes. 1938 Hitler starts to expand. Not that way,BSorry. I couldn't help it.AStarts to expand Germany, not himself. Benton just did a gesture of blowing up like a balloon. Watson visits Germany again earlier in the year. He argued passionately for Germany's demands, according to Black, “that the world redistribute its raw materials and lower so-called trade barriers as the path to peace. Even as the mass media regularly published explanations that Germany desperately only needed those raw materials to arm its war machine.”BWell, there didn't need to be war if nobody fought back. Eye roll.AAnd Watson praised the rising standard of living in Europe even as the Jews were being dispossessed. I have to read you this quote from Watson. “You know, you can cooperate with the man without believing in everything he says and does.” And I point out his calls for world peace because of how disingenuous they were. And that's another thing we need to be alert to is that if the price of peace is eliminating an entire race of people,BSubjugation.Ait's not worth it. Germany continues to expand, invades Czechoslovakia. Every time Germany claimed more land, it had to buy more Holleriths and implement more censuses so that they could immediately identify and round up the Jews living there. Jewish people had been emigrating from Germany for years at that point. Because of the policies that dispossessed them.BThey saw they saw it coming. So they moved to France or moved to Czechoslovakia.AYep.BIf I get out of these borders, I'll be safe.ABut then Germany would just catch up to them. November 10, 1938. This was a turning point. Kristallnacht. Tell me what you know about it.BIt was the night of the broken glass. From my understanding, this is when groups of political hooligans, brown shirts, Nazis, whatever you want to call them, went around and broke the store windows of Jewish businesses.AThere were beatings in the street. Synagogues burnt down. It was a very vocal, not vocal, but a very obvious threat, sort of a signal, that the flood gates have opened.BThe leash is off?AYes. The public outcry outside of Germany continued. US continued boycotting German companies. IBM was lucky that it didn't have IBM in the name of its German subsidiary. And they were lucky that they were only exporting to Germany, not importing from Germany. So that allowed it to stay under the radar. But by this point, Watson had had a very public relationship with Germany. I mean, he got a medal from Hitler. And so he finds himself in a sticky situation, fully of his own making, I might add. He really didn't want to tell off Germany, but there was such ill will against Germany at that point that from a PR standpoint, he just couldn't keep silent. So he sent a letter addressed to his Excellency, Hitler, asking him to consider the golden rule in how he handled minorities. By all accounts, a very mild critique. Even so, this letter somehow got lost, was mysteriously misaddressed. Watson's really trying to play both sides here. 1939, International Chamber of Congress is held in Copenhagen. During Watson’s speech, he says, “We regret that there are unsatisfactory political and economic conditions in the world today, with the great difference of opinion existing among many countries. But differences of opinion freely discussed and fairly disposed of resultant mutual benefit and increased happiness to all concerned.” And this, sorry, I have feelings.BYou have, you have feelings, huh.AI mean, it reminds me of people saying Let's just all get along. There's so much polarization and hate from both sides. And it's like when one side is aiming to dehumanize a specific group of people. Again, so-called peace is not worth it.BYeah. The hate is not symmetric. It's not equal in magnitude or in type. One side hates what the other is doing. The other side hates what this side is.AYes. And you know, it raises the question. Sure. Maybe there's anger on both sides, but whose hatred is actually harming human lives?BExactly.AHitler invades Poland, bam, World War II begins. They start another census.BOnce Hitler invades Poland, the Soviet Union doesn't want to miss out.ARight. They strike a deal.BWell, they strike a deal. They said that you can invade Poland. And we can invade Poland, but we will not fight each other once we, once our lines meet,ARight.BPoor Poland.AI know, right?BIt's a plane, it’s a geological plane. Nothing to hide behind. you, No, no mountains to fortify, just perfect for tanks.AYeah. As I mentioned before, they would relocate the Jews into ghettos. They would use Hollerith machines to keep track and know exactly how many Jews were under their jurisdiction and how much nutrition to allocate. Such as 184 calories per person per day,BOh wow, that's, missed a zero there.AExactly. Again, no, no secret what the end goal is here. So Watson still in a sticky situation in 1940. He's trying to create more distance between himself and IBM Germany.BAt this point, America is not in the war.Acorrect, but Britain. Let's see. It was in 1940 that Germany invades Norway, Holland, and Belgium. When the Nazis blitzkrieged France, they were on meth.BWowAThanks to whatever documentary taught me this, butBMeth NazisAIt blew my mind. It's like, why are these Nazis never stopping to rest?BShall go until we get to Spain, ya.ASo Watson, he didn't want to offend Germany, but he didn't want to look complicit and risk his hero status in the United States. So he tried to shirk the decision of what to do with this medal. He even asked the Secretary of State if they wanted him to return the medal so he could throw them under the bus. And they were like, I refuse to comment on this.BIn 1940, yeah. The US, they were tip toeing.AYeah. Despite Watson's friends in high places, there was definitely suspicion. Even the FBI started nosing around IBM.BOh, man.AAnd Watson appeared to cooperate by throwing his German workers under the bus and pretending like, oh, we have no tolerance for this. And then he did eventually give the medal back, publicly, of course. The Nazis were pissed. Dehomag started revolting. Dehomag was starting to make plans to make their own equipment and threatened Watson with that possibility. But again, they were just too enmeshed basically.BI'm sure there were patents and other binding international business reasons that they weren't allowed.AWatson is, has lost his biggest supporters in Germany, but no worries. There's another country he can get rich off of, the United States. Because in 1940, he could sense things were building up to them joining the war. IBM started making machine guns.BWow, international business machine guns.AThey acquired a munitions company or converted a factory or something. They started doing military research for the US. You know, Holleriths were even used at Bletchley Park.BThat is where they cracked the Enigma machine.AIBM was essentially aiding both sides in encoding and decoding their intelligence.BWhich is the perfect place for a war materiel supplier to be.AAnd over the course of the war, IBM became a precious war asset to the United States,BToo big to fail, huh?AAnd IBM supplied the equipment needed to conduct the 1940 census in the United States. There was some reluctance about this and the invasive questions in the census. Eleanor Roosevelt even took to the radio to call the census “the greatest assemblage of facts ever collected by any people about the things that affect their welfare.” Remember this for later. US government is starting to crack down even more. US Treasury prohibits transactions with the enemy. So Watson found labyrinthine ways around it. He did a lot of his communication through neutral countries, like Switzerland. He wasn't micro-managing anymore. He opted not to know.BStrategic ignoranceAPrecisely, but, and this is wild to me. He continued communications with Europe under the cover of the US government. Remember, he'd been cultivating contacts for years. He had friends in the State Department or at least folks who wouldn't dare turned down the man responsible for making social security, the census, and other government functions happen. Meanwhile, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, America joins the war.BEnd of 1941. And then America gets to let its racist flag fly.AYeah. Roosevelt orders Japanese people in the United States into internment camps.BAnd they surrender all assets.AHow did the government find them so quickly? Remember the census of 1940.B1940, wow, that's handy.A1942. The Nazis hold the Wannsee Conference where Nazi officials planned out how to get all the Jewish people in their conquered territories expeditiously to the gas chambersBThis was in a movie I saw.Awhere the final solution was unveiledBto the top leadership of people who would be involved in making it happen.AYeah. And again, to be clear, this wasn't an ideological escalation on the part of Hitler. This was always where he wanted to end up. He just lacked the infrastructure for it. So the Nazis begin their extermination plan in earnest. There was IBM equipment at every concentration camp. Holleriths and punch cards were used to assign work, track transfers, ID the prisoners. Quote, “The third Reich’s transition from the blind persecution of a general population to the destruction of individuals had come full circle. In genocide, Jews lost their identity. Now every corpse comprised a mere component in a far larger statistical set, adding up to total annihilation.”BThey had numbers tattooed on them, didn't they?AYeah.BAnd I bet those numbers corresponded with the punch card.AYeah. Hollerith numbers.BWow.ASo skipping ahead to 1945 when the war ends in Europe. IBM New York, writes Black, “was able to recapture its problematic but valuable German subsidiary, recover its machines”BRecapture?A“and assimilate all the profits.” And Watson's, you know, things are going pretty well for him, but he's antsy because war crimes trials are starting to be set up. IBM very much wanted to be excluded. What do you do? You become indispensable. One of the ways that he became valuable to the United States was the US strategic bombing survey. Are you familiar with that?BNo.AIts goal was to study the effects of the bombings on Germany, especially the effects on citizen morale. And they wanted that data to plan their bombing campaign against Japan.BSo this was a pro carpet bombing.AThe Nuremberg Trials began. One of the challenges was that all the evidence needed to be translated into French, Russian, German, English. But one company volunteered to do it free of charge.BI bet one company did.AYep. Thanks. IBM. I think this is a good time to pause. I have more that I want to talk about. But I think at this point it's safe to say the war is over. IBM is intact. Watson is scrooge McDuck, swimming in his gold. And millions of people have died, whether in battle or murdered in concentration camps or whatever other ugly means the Nazis used. I'll close with this quote from IBM and the Holocaust. “What seemingly magical scheduling process could have allowed millions of Nazi victims to step onto train platforms, travel two or three days by rail, and then step onto a ramp at Auschwitz or Treblinka, and within an hour be marched into gas chambers hour after hour, day after day, timetable after timetable? Like clockwork and always with blitzkrieg efficiency.”BHuh.AI am cognizant of the fact that a number, a statistic, doesn't convey the tragedy of each individual being dehumanized and murdered. 6 million is one of those numbers that you can't wrap your head around. So I actually, I googled how many seconds or how, how long is 1 million seconds. It was like ten or 11 days.B11 days.ASo multiply that by six, you've got what, two months?BMore than two months.ASo if every life is represented by a single second going non-stop, every second of every day for over two months, that would equal 6 million. That's a crude comparison. But just as a as a way of trying to wrap your head around the scope of it. So at this point, anticipating potential objection. How do we know that IBM made that much of a difference, right? Clearly, Hitler would've pursued this regardless of the support of IBM. So that's what I'm going to talk about next by explaining how the use of Hollerith machines differed from country to country and how that affected the results.BOkay.AThis is a riveting story. So you'll want to tune in.

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More jokes, ChatGPT-generated and otherwise, cut from the recording for the "AI is a joke" episode

TranscriptAAnd then the third joke I put on Twitter was getting away from profession- oriented humor. Why don't mushrooms ever shared their feelings?BSo this is a little bit of fun with fungus.AYou're right. We haven't had fun with fungus in awhile, but we are doing So right now. A: Because they’re a fungi, exclamation point. B, because they tend to get to mush-y, C, because they don't want to seem toxic. Again, small sample size, but also a smaller standard deviation because joke C got 91% of the votes, because they don't want to seem toxic. That was me.BIt looks like ten out of 11.AGive me some credit for being funnier than a robot.BYeah, oh yeah.AAnd then B, they don't want to get too mush-y. That was actually Zoe's punchline, 10-year-old. And then A is obviously then the AI punchline. And that did not get any votes.BIt’s a joke I would make.AIt’s a very bad joke. But I did like the addition of the exclamation point.BThat was very creative of the AI.AI give the bot a little bit of credit for that.BYeah.AI would like to use this opportunity to debut some of my original jokes.BOh, okay.AHow do mattress companies ensure their products are comfortable for their customers?BI don't know.AThey run snoozability tests.BOh.AWhy are project managers so good at gymnastics?BHm.ABecause they're agile. This one is so generic, I'm sure it's been said before, but why did the creative writing professor go to the graveyard? To find the plot.BYou had to dig deep for that one, didn't you?ANow, that is a dad joke.BWell, it'll become a dad joke once it's been done to death.AOkay. We started playing around with your profession. Technically, you’re what, an arborist?BMm-hmm.AThis one is from the AI. Why did the arborist go to the bank? To get a branch loan!BThis is the territory of failing so hard it wraps around to a win.AAnd then I asked you to come up with a couple. So you should deliver these.BWhy did the arborist go to the bank?AWhy?BHe saw their ad.A Aha.B Or, he had trouble logging into their website.AThat one would get my vote.BWhat did the arborist say when he planted an oak tree?ATell me.BAI says, this oak tree will grow and grow.AFunny in its ignorance.BThis is very much the same. Yes.AAnd then the ones we came up were notBInstead of a joke it came up with a truth statement. Wow.ANow this one, we didn't come up with great punchlines, but well, Okey-doke!BDoes this look oak-ay to you?AThen I wanted to ask a joke about academic podcasters. What did the academic podcaster say when their podcast was over?BThat's a wrap of knowledge.AExclamation point. My suggested punchline was, this was an exploratory pilot podcast.BNot funny but not bad.AAlright, one more and then I'll be done, I promise. When I was thinking of which one to put on Twitter, I was debating between the cross the road one and the trapped in an elevator one.BYou haven't said the trapped in an elevator yet.ABut I will. What did the technical communicator do when he got stuck in an elevator?BSo this is the question it came up with when you said write a joke about technical communicators.ACorrect. That was my prompt. The answer it came up with was “wrote a detailed manual on how to get out,” which is similar in theme to the crossing the road one. The one that I came up with was, he said finally, some alone time.BI think that's probably more of an assumption that technical communicators are introverts like you.AFair enough. So again, relying upon stereotypes. But if what my students report to me is representative at all of the tech comm population then they do lean on the introvert side. Last punchline I came up with. You get to read this one. Question. What did the technical communicator do when he got stuck in an elevator?BRecorded a three-part podcast series about risk and hazard communication. Hey.AYeah, that was a little personal.AI'd like to close with one more chat GPT experiment I did. So I'm famously bad at titles. I'm just not creative. So I asked it, what could I title my LOL-cats inspired cookbook. Secretly I wanted to see if it was going to include cheeseburgers.BMm-hmm. Because in the early days of memes when it was just captioned cat pictures.AI can haz cheeseburger. That's where you had to go for memes in the olden days. Anyways, I was curious if it, if it could draw on that history, that legacy, but it didn't.BNo?AInstead it suggested Cookin’ with cat memes, deliciously purr-fect recipes for every occasion.BDid it come up with anything else interesting? I see other stuff.AOkay. Well, yeah. I don't know if we have time for it, but in case we do. I asked it to title an autobiography for an engineer turned arborist who loves space and renewable energy.BWhat did it say?ALeaves and stars colon, a memoir of an engineer-arborist’s journey to a sustainable future. What do you think?BI mean, it basically just reformatted what you gave it, but.AAnd then I asked it to title an autobiography about an English professor who loves Disney channel original musicals, Ted Danson, and platypuses. And this is entirely hypothetical as I’m sure you can tell.BYeah. Asking for a friend, right?AA curiously magical life: The autobiography of professor Patricia Platypus. I don’t know where the Patricia came from, but there’s also Living an Eclectic Life: The memoirs of professor Edward T. Danson, platypus-loving musical enthusiast.BYou definitely got more of a word-salad answer.AYeah. You’ve got your work cut out for you, now that there’s a title for your book, you have to write it.BWhat in the? Fern. Silly cat. She’s gonna be trapped in there.AServes her right. Is that a wrap?BOf knowledge.AHa!

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We reflect on AI text generators, creativity, technical communication, writing instruction, algorithmic literacy, magic, and more. Importantly, we reveal the results of our Twitter experiment: Are we funnier than a robot? (Results were mixed.) Also, find out what happens when we drink an AI-generated cocktail recipe and ask ChatGPT to write a stand-up routine about the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Sources and further reading Bakke, A. (2020). Everyday Googling: Results of an Observational Study and Applications for Teaching Algorithmic Literacy. Computers and Composition, 57, 102577. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2020.102577 * Graham, S. S., & Hopkins, H. R. (2022). AI for Social Justice: New Methodological Horizons in Technical Communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 31(1), 89–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2021.1955151 * re:verb. (2022, November 11). E75: A.I. Writing and Academic Integrity. https://www.reverbcast.com/podcasts/2022/11/11/e75-ai-writing-and-academic-integrity * U.X. Podcast. (30 Dec. 2022). #305 Dyscalculia and ChatGPT*. https://uxpodcast.com/305-dyscalculia-chatgpt/

TranscriptAI am Professor Abigail R. Bakke.B And I am plain old Benton Bakke.AOld is right.BYeah. Lay off, you youngster.ANo, but you have, you have a curious history career wise.BIt's true.ABut that gives you all the more to draw from as we discuss the scholarship of technical communication.BYeah.APizza delivery driver to engineer toBLet's not forget, librarian.AAh, I too was a librarian. Well, not officially,BRight, same.ABut I also got to sit at the desk and tell people to use the self-checkout. So I was really worthless. And now you have swapped the desk for the great outdoors.BI have worked my way up in the world to cutting trees. In fact, sometimes way up in the world.ANice.BAs many as 70 ft up.AOkay, bottoms up.BWhat in the world? What is this?AThis is probably a good time to tell you that we are drinking a cocktail recipe generated by artificial intelligence. What do you think?BIs it an evil artificial intelligence?AI don't think it's bad. I was hoping it would be bad because I want reassurance that AI isn't getting too intelligent. You know what I mean?BWhat is this?AWhat part of it?BWhat is in this?AI basically said, give me a recipe with peppermint schnapps because that's the one thing in our liquor cabinet that I just don't know what to do with it. So it gave me a recipe and I asked it to name the drink as well. So we're drinking a peppermint schnapperscream. That was when I told it to give me a cute name for it. And then I asked it to give me a sophisticated name for it. Here's the sophisticated name. Minty snow float. So it's basically okay, it's ice cream. And our cat snuck in when we weren't looking.BOur cat is not an ingredient in this drink.ANo. Where was I? Ice cream, peppermint schnapps, club soda, and then it said to garnish with crushed candy cane. See what I did?BAround the rim?AThis was my own little twist on it. Yes.BI'm not a real fan of mint.AUgh, fine. Today we are not talking about disaster. Which feels weird because it's been literal months.BIt's true. And, you know, frankly, I am excited. I am so glad to be out of the hot seat and controlling things. In fact I would be pumped, turning it over completely to an algorithm to run this podcast.AOh, I see what you did. No, but I really enjoyed being the reactor. You know, you being the researcher and I being the reactor. That was a fun dynamic to experiment with. And I also figured it out. You are the Peter Jackson of podcasts. Do you know why?BTell me, Frodo.AI don't know if you’ll like my answer,BUh oh.ABut he took one book and spread it out into three movies.BYou are in this case talking about The Hobbit.AYes. But that's okay. That is a style that some people appreciate. Meanwhile,BThere was that much story to tell.ADid I ever tell you this? The first time I saw the Fellowship of the Ring, I was disappointed because at the end of the movie I was like, they didn't throw the ring into Mount Doom.BRight.ASo likewise, I would like to be able to condense multiple books into one episode, but that usually doesn't happen either. But today, we're not talking about books. We are talking about AI text generation, creativity, magic, technical communication,Band the end of the world.AWriting pedagogy.BOh, right.ASpecifically, chat GPT, which is all over the Twitter discourse. Everyone has something to say about it. And somehow I think I can add to the conversation so here I am. Chat GPT. I don't even know what the GPT stands for, but it's an app. It's an AI tool that you can ask it a question and it generates an answer from who knows where, everything on the web ever? And you can ask it to write in different styles or genres, like a recipe, for instance, a cover letter for a job, an essay for your English class. Hopefully, we can, we can put a little bit of a unique spin on it. Or at the very least, we can have some fun with it. Because I did. Professor twitter has a lot to say about it and people from different fields are weighing in and experimenting with it and trying to comment on how stupid it is or how smart it is and how this will change education for good or for bad, you know the drill. As with any new technology, we're hearing the gamut of, of reactions. One of the main concerns, of course, is cheating and writing instructor Twitter. That particular corner of Twitter, I should say, has more nuanced takes about it than in the mainstream. And I think that's because good writing pedagogy already guards against other kinds of plagiarism, so maybe there's less concern on the cheating front. For instance, having really specific localized writing prompts versus write a five-paragraph essay arguing in favor of…BCannibalism.ANo, that is not a paper that students write. Should hope not. You know, like, what's the most generic prompt you can think of? The value of a college education, say.BDefend the next $60,000 of your life.AOh yikes. Or write an essay comparing and contrasting, whatever. So with that kind of prompt, AI does pretty well, decent enough to cause some alarm. But teachers aren't asking students to write that kind of paper. I don't think. It's also been a very long time since I've taught first-year writing. I teach almost exclusively technical, yeah, just technical writing at this point. And I feel like tech comm by its nature, is very specific and exact. I'd like to think that's harder to replicate with AI. But, AI, even if it's not that intelligent now, it's only going to get more so in the years to come.BThat is of course, unless we’ll say, techno anarchists feed bullshit to the AI in order to keep them stupid.AI love it.BI need to pitch that to Hollywood right now actually.ATrolls for freedom. That's the title of the movie?BTrolls versus terminators.ANice. Even if we don't have to deal with a super smart AI right now, that's not always going to be the case. So I don't think we need to freak out, but neither can we rest on our laurels. Let it be known Benton finished his drink before I did.BYes.AThe other thing is that it really depends on the field and on what you're asking it to do, whether you're gonna get a legit response. So apparently chat GPT was able to pass an MBA exam.B I have seen that it passed the bar in, I don't know what state.AIf it's multiple choice I can see that. There's also been times where it's gotten basic historical facts wrong or math wrong. And like, there's an actual word people use for this, it hallucinates sources and facts.BWhat is it, Fox News?AOoh. So there is the fear response, there's also the excitement, like this is going to revolutionize the way we work. And if you're not on the bandwagon, then you're like people who were anti calculator back in the day kind of thing.BI think that like, like any technology, yeah, it's going to change the way we work. But what does that mean? Is that a good thing or is it not?AI'm honestly most concerned about the labor implications because okay. What was that meme that you were telling me about?BFuturists in the 1970s: automation is going to free us up from all of the menial tasks in our lives so we'll be able to pursue creative endeavors, the arts and music. And then it's like tech bro in the 2020s: Automation is going to free you up from creative endeavors and the arts and music so that you can be distracted from your menial task work-life.AAw. It is scary though, have you seen some of the AI art?BI haven't seen any good AI art, I’ve seen a lot of terrifying ones.AI mean, it's cool. It's cool. I'm also not an artist, so I'm not able to look and be like, yeah, this has quality composition or whatever.BThe meme pages I follow have put some really choice trainwrecks up. Most of what I saw was supposed to be people, but the faces were super fucked up. like fractal eyes or, like there's one I saw that was, when you ask AI to give you a picture about a handshake,Awhat did it show?BOh my gosh. Lots of extra fingers, like a hand with like eight fingers shaking a hand with four or something. There's one where there's a hand shaking another hand. That is basically like a wrist connected to another hand that's shaking a third hand.AOh, that's thinking outside the box.BYes.AWhich could be cool orBIt could be but it isn't trying to be.AYeah. So what's that one? DALL-E, no, DALL-E. Hey!BSalvador Dali?AThat must be what it's named after.BWhat?AThe art AI. An art AI, I should say. That didn't occur to me until I just said it out loud.BSurrealist.AYeah. Melting watches, right?B Pouring clocks in the bathtub.AWhere did that come from?BThat's a Dali, isn't it?AI feel like that's the punchline of a joke.BHow many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?ATwo giraffes and a bathtub full of clocks. So, yeah, I can't call out like yes, this art was definitely created by a human or a robot. And as much as they'd like to think I would be able to call out an AI generated essay, I don't think I could consistently do that. Although like from what I've seen, even if I didn't know it was AI, it would not get a very good grade.BI can definitely see that, that AI would not would not make an A essay.AYes, exactly that. It tends to be vague and wrong in places. And like I've done some experimentation and we're going to demonstrate it in a bit here. But I listened to a podcast interview recently that actually made me feel a lot better about this. It was on the Re:verb podcast. And they interviewed Scott Graham. He built a, an AI text generator into like a class project. I think he actually said write your papers using this and then revise it. And he said that the students hated it because it took so much work to bring the writing up to any standard of quality that they may as well have just written it themselves. So that's reassuring to me for the moment. But honestly, I am really glad that there are researchers and instructors out there who are incorporating this into their classrooms and not ignoring that it exists because it's one of those things. Students are going to use it anyway and so your writing class may as well be, and probably would be their one opportunity to think critically about how they're using it.BYeah.ASo thank you, innovative professors who are doing that work. I hope that there is room for me to be a little annoyed by the existence of this thing that suddenlyBCertainly, yeah.Arequires me to change up like projects and academic honesty policy and all that likeBOK, Boomer.AOh my gosh. That does really make me sound like a boomer. It's not like I'm teaching the same course again and again. Every time I reteach a course, I change multiple parts of it every single time and I always tell myself I'm just going to teach it the same way and see myself all this prep time, but I literally cannot, or I will get bored. And even so, I don't feel like pandering to the whims of AI.BBut it is fully reasonable to be annoyed that somebody made a thing exists that's going to change your job.AAlong with that, I think there should be room to be nervous about it too in terms of what the long-term consequences might be. Because the way things go in our country, people will settle for a lower quality product if it means they can fire their staff of technical communicators. That is my fear. At the same time, focusing on just the like, the text generation part of ChatGPT, that is a small piece of what technical communicators do. There is so much of a human element to that work that I think cannot be substituted with a machine.BI honestly think that in the realm of technical communication, like you said, because it's so specific and there's such focus of what needs to be done in this technical communication that you literally can't just make it up,Aright?BYou know, like if it's a user manual, pfft, you're gonna let a computer guess how it's supposed to work? Coming up with stories. That's one thing. Telling you how to use dangerous equipment is not the same sort of thing.AThat's right. And I don't doubt that there is a way to use it, supplementally or whatever, butBIt could be a failure of imagination on my part, but I don't see there being an awful lot of actual communication of technical information that can be done with accuracy, efficacy by an AI.AYeah, I mean we’ll have to see. Along the lines of long-term consequences. So it's that what could go wrong question that we did a whole episode about last year. I hope people are asking that question about this technology. I think they are. Whether it's enough to make a difference is another question. So some of my experimentation, I asked ChatGPT to write a podcast dialogue about the ethics of AI. You were there actually when it, when it spit it out. And we were both like, holy shit. Not because it was necessarily good, but there was definitely a sense of magic to it. Like, I can just conjure this. Let's do a reading. Try to make it sound as natural as possible. Okay, I'll be person one, you'd be person two. I highlighted your lines in pink.BOh, thanks.AOkay. Hey everyone. Welcome to our podcast about the ethics of AI.BYeah, let's talk about the ethical implications of the latest developments.AThat was pretty wooden. Take two. Hey everyone, welcome to our podcast about the ethics of AI.BYeah, let's talk about the ethical implementations. How am I supposed to say that in a non- wooden way? Let's talk about the ethical implications of latest AI developments.ASo what are your thoughts on the use of AI in healthcare?BWell, I think it's great that AI can help with diagnosing diseases and making treatment recommendations. But there's also the potential to misuse this technology.AAbsolutely. There are so many ethical considerations when it comes to using AI in any field.BYeah. And speaking of misuse, What do you think about the use of AI in military operations?AThat's a tricky one. On one hand, it could be a powerful tool for protecting people. But on the other hand, it could be used to commit atrocities.BExactly. We need to be carefulACan we just, can we just backup for a second? On one hand, it can be a useful tool. On the other hand, it could be used to commit atrocities!BYou know, I gotta say AI, you’re showing your hand. I mean, it's, it's basically already said that if we let it run military technology, it's going to commit atrocities.AOoh. Could be used. Oh, notice the passive voice there. I just find it a funny contrast like on the one hand, positives, on the other hand, atrocities, it's just this throwaway line. Do you not find that amusing? I mean, amusing is not the rightBIt does seem rather flippant.AYes, exactly that.BIt could be used to commit atrocities. Haha.AI need to hear more Pee-wee.BIf you see an AI committing atrocities, scream real loud. AHHHH. Huh huh huh.AWhat? Sorry, I interrupted our very natural sounding dialogue.BExactly. We need to be careful about how we use AI and make sure we're aware of the potential consequences.AAbsolutely. We can't forget the ethical implications of AI. Well, that's all the time we have for today's podcast. Thanks for listening. That's not the end of the real podcast, people. Don't stop your podcast player just yet. We need to analyze this. There's so much here. Deep subjects addressed superficially, plugged into a template. That's how it reads to me.B Yes, it is puddle deep.A It's almost like a Mad Libs forBYes. Mad libs for a podcast.ANo sources, obviously.BWell, yeah.ABut again, to its credit, I can see someone potentially using this to build out an outline like, Oh, we could talk about different fields or different applications of AI. And then you'd want to talk about it for more than a sentence.BThat I think is my favorite thing, it’s just like pinball, pinball, pinball over.AWhat's kinda cute about it is that whatever dataset it's drawing from people are very friendly to each other in their podcast dialogues. There's a lot of absolutely, Exactly.BOh, yeah.AYou're right. Great point. Yeah. That's not the worst.BThere’s no Are you out of your fucking mind?AYeah. So then I got to thinking, maybe I didn't give it a fair chance. Maybe the podcast dialogue genre is too superficial to let it really shine. So I was thinking to myself, what's a genre that's very nuanced and human: stand-up comedy. I asked it to write a stand-up act about the ethics of AI. I'm going to let you do the honors of reciting it, again as naturally as possible. We want to see how, how well this AI can emulate human comedy.BHello everyone. So I was thinking about the ethics of AI the other day. And it got me thinking, what robots do if they could vote? Would they vote for the same party as us? Or would they be like, Hey man, you're not a robot. I'm voting for the robot party.AInsert laugh track here.BInsert laugh track. Or what if robots had feelings. Would they be able to feel love? Or would they just be like, I'm a robot, I don't understand what love is. And then there's the question of robot rights. Should robots have rights? Should they be able to sue us for mistreatment? I'm thinking, Sure. Why not? It's only fair. Alright, thanks for having me, have a great night, everyone.AWhoo! Was any part of that funny on purpose?BMaybe I'm voting for the robot party. If you imagine, instead of political party, a bunch of robots getting together and dancingADoing the disco or whatever, whatever people do at parties.BI’ve never been to one.AI don't know what a party is, man. So yeah, it's capable of producing a funny image, but your human brain has to take it to another level. Potential situations that are being set up here could be played out in humorous ways.BI think you're giving it a lot more benefit of the doubt than I would.AWhat I'm saying is that if somebody were like, Oh shit, I've got my stand-up act on Friday and I'm not prepared. They could plug something in and they could read it and be like, That is shit, I can do better. How do I make this actually funny?BI'm going to do stand-up about this piece of garbage. It's got like the sandwich of the intro and the exit of a stand-up routine.Aand the storytelling like the other day I was blah.BAnd then it almost seems like the AI is coming through and trying to advocate for itself. What about robot rights? I mean, yeah, sure, It's only fair. You should be able to sue us for mistreatment.ALooked at through that lens that is a little scary. I think humor is one of the best tests of how human AI can come across. And in this case, I think it's fair to say it's failed, but like, okay, here's the thing about humor. It can be difficult to detect even among humans in the same room. There's so much that goes into a joke. For instance, there's inflection, there's facial expressions, all these like microscopic nuances. And then there's all that assumed shared knowledge that has to be in place for a joke to make sense.BYeah.ABut besides humor, do you know what else is context-specific, highly nuanced, and audience-centered?BOh, I know this one. I know this one. Is it fart jokes? I'm sorry. Technical Communication?AThat's what I'm after.BYay!AYeah. And so, like we were saying before, that's what gives me a little bit of hope that robarts. Roborts. It gives me some hope that robots aren't going to come steal our jobs in the immediate future. I got curious about AI's ability to write jokes specifically about topics that you and I respectively have a very deep knowledge of. Because I wanted to see, can the AI understand this topic in a nuanced way? Or are we just going to get like stereotypes or whatever? And that's where we get my experiment about whether we're funnier than a robot. On Twitter, some of you may have seen this, I had a series of polls where I put a joke and then I gave three punchlines and I asked people to vote for the best one. There was one AI punchline in the midst of each of those surveys. So now you get the results. I asked ChatGPT to write a joke about technical communicators. Why did the technical communicator cross the road?BI don't know.AI have three options for you. A, to understand the pedestrian experience. B, because the instructions said to cross the road. C, the question is not why, but how? This one got 30-some votes on Twitter,Bokay.AOh, and our friend from the Podcast of Podcasts chimed in and suggested to get to the conference center, which would be very fitting in ATTW season.BThat's a good one for academics.AShould we reveal which one is the AI punchline first or should we reveal which one got the most votes first?BMost votes first.AMost votes first. Okay. It was A, to understand the pedestrian experience, which I am proud to say was my creation.BWhat's that last one, It's the question is not why, but how? Was that one me?AThat was me and that was the one I was actually the proudest of.BI thought that was the best answer too.AAnd then it was B, because the instructions said to go to the other side, that got the second most votes. And that was indeed the ChatGPT generated punchline. And this was the first one we did and so it was alarming because I was like, that's actually a funny punchline.BThat's a plausible punchline.AAnd when robots are funny, You gotta, you gotta be a little worried. Anyway.BI'd be more worried if they were militant, butAFair. Fair. So I decided to even try this out in person. So I asked my colleagues at a faculty meeting. So everyone there, tech comm. I figured if anyone is going to get the joke, it'll be these folks. One person said punchline B was their favorite. Someone said punchline A was their favorite. That was the, to understand the pedestrian experience.BThat was the UX person, wasn't it?AOh my gosh, it was. Yeah, and if I remember right. She said, now that one is really audience specific and nuanced. And I was like, you know what's up. Shout out to Dawn. And then the other faculty member said, I like all three of them.Bwe should say that almost half of the people who answered on that first joke went withAA. So in that particular instance, yes, I was funnier than a robot, but I was also less funny than a robot depending on how you look at it.B True.AThe next joke I put on Twitter was, Why don't English professors ever tell jokes in class? A, because they don't have a sense of humor.BFair.AB, because the Moby Dick jokes write themselves. C, because they don't want to start a grammar discussion. So this one had fewer participants so we are less confident in the significance of the results.BAnd the vote was closer as well,ARight. It was pretty evenly split, but, oh, punchline C got the most votes, 40%. And that was indeed the AI generated punchline. Because they don't want to start a grammar discussion.BSo apparently, what ChatGPT knows about English professors is grammar.APrecisely. And the one thing chat GPT knows about technical communicators is that they write instructions.BMore accurately, they expect them to follow instructions.AYes. Ooh, interesting. That's what we're going to get is we're gonna get superficial,BStereotypicalAExactly. And that can be funny. You know, ss, as someone who is an English professor and a Technical Communication professor at that, I am happy to poke fun of myself in these ways. But in reality,BWhat would you guess is the,Ahow much do English professors actually care about grammar?BRight.AAh. I think if other English professors are anything like me they are in the field because they love language and part of what is beautiful about language is that it can change. And that it means different things in different contexts to different people in different periods of time. Which means there's an appreciation for what language is more so than what language should be. That's not to say there are not sticklers out there. And again, there are situations where attention to grammar matters more than others.BSo it is of interest. But the rectitude of grammar is of less interest.AYes. The second punchline, the Moby Dick jokes write themselves. Yes, that was me. Apparently I have the humor of what, a 12-year-old boy?BI mean, call me Ishmael.AWhat?BOkay. That was really, really badly played. That is the first line of Moby Dick.AI know that.Bfor anyone who doesn't know.AAnd then who came up with the first punchline, because they have no sense of humor? Was that me?BIt was.AThat sounded like a little mean. I have to say.BIt was right up there. It was neck and neck.AIt got a couple votes, yep.BSpeaking of bad jokes, the other day, I was thinking about how like dad jokes are almost universally puns and groaners and bad jokes. Whereas mom jokes,AThere is no such thing as mom jokes.BUh. Mom jokes typically are derogatory.AOh, your mom jokes?BYes. What does that say about implicit sexism in society?AHow about that? And in fact, that leads me to an observation,BObserve away.AIn all the iterations of the English professor joke. I ran this multiple times just to see what kind of variety I was getting in terms of responses. And in all the iterations, the English professor was a he. And by all I mean like four. And then for the technical communicator jokes, it was most often he. Maybe there was one she thrown in there. Which I mean, both are not representative of reality. Technical communicators tend to be women, in fact. It suggests something about either who is the default subject of a joke or who is the default image of an English professor. You know, it kinda reminds me of that Google Images thing years ago, that if you Google search English professor, it'll pull up multiple images of old white men withBsweater vests,Aelbow patches. So there is bias. Obviously. I mean, even the AI itself acknowledged it can be biased and can in fact commit atrocities.BThat's right. We’re on to you, ChatGPT.ANow, I want to talk more about the experience of using this tool. There was a cool and unexpected thing that arose out of this experiment for me, which is that I felt inspired. And I don't often feel inspired creatively.BOkay.ABut you saw me. I was like,BOoh, now let's try this.BIt put my brain in a different mode, almost. Yes, I started from the AI. But the more I engaged with it, the more I was also able to move away from it.AMoved away from it.BLike teachers are afraid that students are going to press the button and turn in the essay, right? And it's going to have no amount of actual engagement. You know what I mean? And that was not the case for me. I didn't press the button and say, Oh, I'm done here. Not that I have any pressing need to tell technical communicator jokes. But as I was seeing what this AI was churning out, I started getting ideas of my own that I think it's fair to say they weren't inspired by what I was seeing, but not necessarily derivative of them. Maybe they were, who knows what that means.AWell, it was probably spitting out something that keyworded your brain to activate this network, or that network.BYeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.AYou came up with something that wasn't, it may have been because of it, but it wasn't based on it really.BOr like the punchline it gave me. I thought of a better setup for it or vice versa. Overall, I mean, you were kind of in range as I was doing this but you didn't do it yourself, did you?AI don't think so. No.BYeah. You were just kind of hearing me go on and on. And I mentioned before that there was this sense of magic. Like you press a button and it gives you this fully formed thing that you can then critique and take apart and adjust. AndBFern? Meow.AThat was exciting to me. But whenever we get that sense of magic with a technology, that's a sign to stop and think a little bit. Not to be a wet blanket, butBWell, yeah, I mean, definitely in the case of AI coming up with content, text is absolutely a realm in which it is so bounded, that it has a chance. It has a chance, Yeah, okay, come on up. It has a chance to figure things out and to monkey-typewriter its way into believability.AMm-hmm. The concern I have about it is that what's going on behind the scenes is so invisible. Like I mentioned before, I don't even know where this comes from. What, what kind of repositories is it drawing from?BWhat datasets started it learning? I mean, even, even when you're talking about a neural net, that is kind of by definition a black box, but you feed something into the black box and that isn't unknown, at least to the feeder.ARight, right. But there is a point at which machine-learning kind of takes on a life of its own. And you really cannot backtrace all the decisions it's made.BRight.ANow, in defense of black boxes, this was an interesting thought from Graham and Hopkins. They mention the fact that our brains are a black box. We cannot know the intricate processes.BBrains were the original neural net.ABut that doesn't mean we discount its output.BSometimes we do, butAIndeed, as we should. But I think it was just an interesting point.BI think that it's very much a form of the uncanny valley. At a certain point of getting close but not exactly, they’re just too unnerving and it freaks people out. I think that specifically in this case, since it's, like our brains, a black box, that information goes in and unpredictable information comes out. It behaves like a human. If it wasn't for the lightning fast reply, when you ask it for something complicated, you would think there might be someone on the other end of this conversation responding.AI mean, that's in the title, Chat GPT, right? It's supposed to feel like you're having a conversation with someone in a way. And so you frame your prompts in almost a conversational way. And when you think of Google, more and more Google has gotten better at interpreting the conversational kinds of search phrases people might put in, you know, natural language processing. But at least with Google you still have some agency because it gives you options.BYeah, you choose where it brings you. It gives you choices of where it can bring you.AAnd with ChatGPT, it's like, well, okay. Do you remember when Google used to have the I'm feeling lucky button. Is that still there?BI don't know.AI don't know that I've ever clicked on it, but if I remember right, it brings you to the top search result for that query. Is that right?BIt may. My first experience with it, gosh, it was one of those things that went viral before there was really a means other than word of mouth to go viral. It was you type in Iraq WMD and you hit, I'm feeling lucky. And then it brings you to some page where, it was like a 404 page that was specifically mocking George Bush's like insistence that there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whichAWhat was your reaction at the time?BIt was comical, so I laughed.AOkay. It was subversive. But it does raise the question of how that could be abused, of course,BTrue. And Iraq, WMD, the more interesting question is, how this beat out all manner of news sitesAYeah.Bthat had just been had for years been cranking out, towing the administration line garbage. And this joke site came up and rose to the top.AAnd that's saying something because, so you know I did a study of Google where I literally watched people Google stuff.BWere you Google-ogling?AGoogle ogling, it’s a new research method.BAnd if you study this phenomenon…AGoogleogleology?BGolly what a day.AYeah. And so one of the takeaways there was that so much of our use of Google is kind of in the background as in like we aren't necessarily conscious about it. And I say we because other research has, has backed this up too but you know I noticed that in my own observations and my own use of Google, we go to Google and we don't stop and think, is there a different search engine that would make more sense for this particular query? We don’t think what would happen if I prioritized results lower down on the list that kind of thing.BI remember that early on before the natural language learning of Google, there were classes, instruction, on how to use a search engine.AYou had to know how to use the Boolean operators and everything.BYeah.AI mean, in some databases you still do that but, and I don't fault anyone for just going with the flow because that is Google's goal.BThey want to be invisible.APrecisely. With Google, I think in recent years, I've heard people complain that it's less useful than it used to be because it's so loaded up with ads and sponsored results and everything now.BCapitalism ruins everything.AAnd in fact, it is difficult to distinguish between ads and not ads. But you can still figure it out if you pay attention. When it comes to ChatGPT, it just spits something out. If you don't know where it's coming from, if you don't know who might have paid money to get priority in a result or whatever, that's dangerous. And I want to shout out to the UX Podcast for raising this possibility in one of their recent episodes, which I hadn't thought of before. You can see how Chat GPT, in the way its interface is designed, actually takes away more agency from the user compared to Google. Because it gives you one response.BYeah.AAnd it's just straight out answering your question versus providing you multiple sources that could answer that question in different ways or provide different angles on it.BMoreover, Google gives you sources, Google gives you links to the place where you can get your answer from. Depending on how well it understands the question, it might just have that little sidebar,AThe knowledge panel.BIt might have the knowledge panel that just gives you an answer.Awhich frankly is good in some cases. Because when you type in what, diabetes like, you, it's probably better that people get Mayo Clinic prioritized.BYeah. I mean, there's definitely functions where you want to know your source, but there's also functions where you don't want that extra click because you're looking for something that is so simple. It can just tell you. If you type in 34 yd in kilometers, you want an answer. You're not looking for like, the most authoritative source on this information.APrecisely.BOr when was JFK assassinated? Or very specific things that there is one answer and there is no debate reasonable or unreasonable about.AWell, there might be unreasonable debate about it, when you're talking about JFK because apparently he is still alive?BI'm, I'm sure that there are tinfoil hatters around that will say that he's secretly running the US government from the far side of the moon. Why not?AYes.BAnd if not, that one’s free. That one's free folks. You run with it.AType it into ChatGPT and see what kind of sci-fi it gives you. However, that does get really blurry. Especially when it comes to medical information. Where on the one hand, we have people saying, trust the science, the COVID vaccine works. Here's, here's its mechanisms and here's the studies that show it's effective in these ways. And then on the other side you have people skewing and fabricating and manipulating information. And that's not to say that these are two equally valid ways to view this question. But rather it's acknowledging that there are issues like that where there's enough polarization and enough just complete lack of common ground on the issues that it gets really hard to make those calls, like from the perspective of a company like Google. And we've seen how politics does make a difference in how CEOs run their companies.BOur chat here is inspiring. I'm getting like, Oh, oh, oh, oh, ideas about things I would ask chat GPT if we had it here and ready to rock. Is COVID-19 real? If it had anything more than yes as the answer, ha. Were the moon landings faked? Is the Earth flat? You know, stuff that people create controversy about that is not controversial.AYeah. Yeah, but all that to say. The less distance between a question and an answer, the less opportunity for reflection. I guess. You're taking away those decision points that allow people to say, Oh, okay, there's this website and there's that website. In some cases maybe that's better. But in a lot of cases, because this AI is pulling from an Internet that is inherently, that has sexism and racism baked into it. I would be cautious about that.BChatGPT doesn't compensate for bad actors. Maybe it does, but it's a black box. So I don't know. Maybe it has a way of even understanding that bad actors exist?AI have seen people post results where someone will ask ChatGPT to, this is hypothetical, but in the vein of saying, write an essay in praise of Adolf Hitler. And it'll come back and say, nope, not doing that.BThat sounds like a human said, okay, we want to make sure it does not do this because we don't want them to come with pitchforks and torches to our house.AYeah. Someone is asking that question, what could people do to abuse this tool? But people are endlessly imaginative when it comes to ways to exploit technology.BAnd people.AAnd I don’t know that an individual organization is going to be able to keep up. So all that to say, I think the role of writing instructors at this point in time is to, again, acknowledge that this thing exists. Acknowledged the fact that students are probably going to use it. But talk about that importance of algorithmic literacy and kind of having those checkpoints for reflection rather than just inherently trusting it because it's technology and it, and it materializes texts like magic. So that's that.

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This is the last of our 3-part series in which we discuss The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disaster, by Juliette Kayyem. In this episode, we talk about the importance of continually examining your systems, and learning from mini disasters instead of brushing them off. Finally, we put our newfound knowledge to the test when a baking attempt goes awry. Content warning: Gun violence.

Sources and further reading FEMA Mobile Products. (n.d.). FEMA.Gov. Retrieved January 24, 2023, from https://www.fema.gov/about/news-multimedia/mobile-products * Fire triangle. (2023). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fire_triangle&oldid=1134661143 * Kayyem, Juliette. 2022. The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. PublicAffairs. * Marshall, S., & Hobbes, M. (2018, September 17). Columbine—You’re Wrong About*. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270/3884057-columbine

TranscriptAWelcome to TC talk. That's tech comm talk. I'm Abi. I am a professor of technical communication and rhetoric.BAnd I am Benton.AIs this microphone pointing the right direction?BYes.AOkay.BI think it's the right direction anyway,Aso am I on top? On the bottom?BOh boy.ANo. Is my waveform. Which waveform is mine? Okay. The one on top.BOkay. I am Benton. I am not an academic.AAlthough you play one on this podcast.BI play one on this podcast.AYou're brilliant, but you lack a PhD in rhetoric and scientific and technical communication. So the idea is that we kinda play off each other. You rein me in on my academese. AndBAnd you rein me in on myAon your descriptions of blowout protectors.BYeah.AI had a less than fun time trying to edit that section in our last episode. But I did my best. Alright. It's way too sweet.BIt's way too. I like that.AOkay.BI mean, I'll drink yours if you want.ASo it’s the whiskey sour. But we didn't have simple syrup and I didn't feel like making it. So I used maple syrup, which I imagine is much more concentrated in its sweetness. But I think the flavor meshes well with whiskey. But the quantity I will need to adjust in the future.ASo the way we've been approaching it is that I do a bunch of reading in my field and areas of interest. And we talk about it. But for the last couple of episodes, we've flipped the scriptBNow I have flipped the script.AAnd it is facing you because you drafted it based on reading that you did in an area that is of interest to you, but that we both agreed connects very closely with tech comm.BAs a reminder, that area is risk and crisis communication. Specifically, how to respond to disaster that has already occurred. We’ve been discussion the book The Devil Never Sleeps by Juliette Kayyem. In our first part, we talked about changing the way we think about disaster in order to prepare and respond better. In the second part, we talked about the ways leaders can gather and share information to build trust with their audiences. And in this episode, we talk about the importance of continually examining your systems, and learning from mini disasters instead of brushing them off.AAlright, so we're just picking up where we left off, Have at it.BSo in Kayyem’s next chapter, “buildings don't just fall down.” She looks at what happens when you use the past as a reference point for the future. And a big chunk of how that fails is when we don't update and retrofit based on new data.AOkay. I have heard that saying many a time that those who do not learn history are bound to repeat it. Is that how that goes?BInteresting.Athe idea being that it's good to know your history, but she's adding a complication here.BRight. Marx put it this way that history happens twice. The first time is a tragedy, the second is a farce. So Hitler was a tragedy. Trump was a farce.ADid Marx really say that?BYes.AOh.BThe stars of this chapter were the Champlain Towers South condo that collapsed on its own and the Texas ice storm power outage. It was a matter of climate change, creeping change that enabled what was robust and acceptable enough to become not, not able to withstand what currently is.ARight. So old structures may have worked well in their time, but as the world changes around them, they become less stable.BExactly. Do you remember hearing anything about the condo that just went splat on itself?ANo. I don't even remember where it took place.BIn Florida.AWas it in the past couple years?BYes.AOkay. Oh, does she talk about I35 at all? Because that disaster is probably closest to home for us.BYeah. She May have.AThe bridge collapse. But the thinking being it seems to happen out of the blue. And she's saying that's not the case.BIt doesn't happen out of the blue, it happens out of the blind spot. If you're not looking, you don't see it sneaking up on you. And then ope. The way that building codes work in the United States is that they get updated periodically, based on changing storm data, changing state of the art in architecture. Things get updated and not because they have fallen apart, but they don't meet code anymore because the code has changed to be stronger. This condo was built to code, I believe. And when you have a condo that is looking at making building wide repairs, that cost for it is shared by everyone who lives there. And therefore has to be approved by at least some majority of the people who live there. So when there is a building manager who makes decisions like these, one person then needs to know how critical it is that this happens instead of everyone needing to know how critical this update happens.AYeah, that's fair. So not everybody understood the risks to not updating the building or they weren't in a financial position to do so.BThe pool on the roof had issues with the weight, water being collected in there. And it stressed the foundation. It stressed the structure to the point where the building cracked in half and, you know, pulled a Minard Hall.AOh, right. You're referring to my office building as a graduate student at North Dakota State thatBYes,Aliterally collapsed over winter break. And desks were hanging out of the building because there was like a missing wall.BThat was in fact a case of literal undermining.AOh, was it.BThey were digging right near it. And that it literally undermined the support of the building and then phhhlw.AAnd then the wildest thing about it is that they let us go in under supervision to collect our things. There's no electricity. There was no heat, just darkness and coldBExcept for except for the light that was coming in through the cracks in the building, right?ARight. It was incredibly lucky that it happened when there were no students or staff on campus.BMm hmm.AOkay, so what does this teach us about disaster communication or risk communication?BIt isn't necessarily so much about the disaster and risk communication as it is about the logical fallacy that went into the disaster that some of these residents were thinking to themselves. We don't need to update that. Buildings don't just fall over.ASo a little bit of that normalcy bias.BNormalcy bias, this is the way we've always done it. This has been fine for decades. Why do we need to do this now?AWhy do we need to pay more taxes to update the high school with mold dripping from the ceilings, asbestos in the walls.BAsbestos. It's a great insulator. Not very good for breathing.AAnd a great carcinogen.BYeah.AOkay.BSo her second example was the Texas ice storm power outageAWhen Ted Cruz went to Cancun.BSo Texas. They have their own power grid. The rest of the United States, there's two.AOh, really.BMm-hmm. And the reason that Texas has its own power grid is that they did not want to fall under the jurisdiction of FERC. The Federal Energy Regulation Commission.AThey said FERC that.BYeah. They said FERC That. So electricity going over state lines, over power lines makes it in the jurisdiction of the Fed. And so that's why there's, you know, there's more oversight and there's more regulation. But they kept theirs inside their own state, so they didn't have to deal with it. Texas is huge. So the thinking was thatAIt's bigger than California. Which I did not realize until I looked at a map recently.BIt’s substantially bigger. Yes. it is a very large area. And so if there's an ice storm in one part of the state, the thinking was, this is such a big state. We’ll Pump power in from a different part of the state. You know, if there's a hurricane on the Gulf side, we have power coming from the other side of the state. They weren't ready. They hadn't planned for a big ass ice storm. Moreover, they had so much of their infrastructure deregulated and not up to the resiliency standards that the rest of the country was. There was plenty of wind. Their wind turbines wouldn't work because they didn't have space heaters in them to keep them functional in cold temperatures.Abecause Texas never needed that beforeBbecause it's Texas. Why do they need to heat up wind turbines? Why do they need to heat up the alternator, the thing that turns rotation into electricity. Why do they need to heat that up?ABecause America's setting the planet on fire.BYes. And on ice, alternately.AYes. So the lesson here is keep checking on your systems in relation to the changing environment around them.BJust because an analysis was run by engineers saying that this system is good to go, that was done at a point in time, don't assume from that point in time that we are good forever. You know, like there's it's literally like the paradigm shifts. The paradigm shifts when the climate shifts.AYeah. So I think this gets back to the whole premise of the book, which is that we live in an age of disaster. And things are not the same.BYou have to expect it and be ready for when the boom comes. So she also, in this chapter, includes a discussion of risk homeostasis theory, which initially seemed like an odd pairing to me. What do you know about that?ARisk homeostasis theory?BYes.AZilch.BSo the theory is, and she demonstrated it through skydiving, a comment by a skydiving person that for every increase in safety in skydiving equipment, there's a corresponding increase in risky behavior among skydivers to keep the death rate constant.AWow.BThat isn't merely about skydiving, that is about everything that humans do that is risky. If you have ever driven in a car that feels like it's going to fall apart, or if you've driven a car that has a big vibration, you don't go fast in those. You drive to the point where you're like, I don't know, and then you back off a little bit. But super smooth roads without, anything like crowding in on the sides of them. That's why people drive 90 mi an hour on the interstate because they feel safe doing it. Even though they're not. They drive to the point of ah Yes, I am now taking risk. Yeah, so that is risk homeostasis theory that the safer something feels, the more risky a person put in that situation will behave.AOkay, that makes sense.BHuman psychology strikes back at engineering.AI actually heard that as one argument against masking is that if people are told that masking keeps them safer then they'll just go out more instead of staying at home and flattening the curve. This was early on.BYeah.AI don't know. I mean, I guess what they didn't account for in that scenario was people saying to hell with all of it, COVID’s not real. So what do we do about that then? Just be aware of it?BI think that the common theme in all of it is vigilance, constant vigilance. Making sure that your assessment of the safety of your building is still valid or the resilience of your power grid is still valid.AAnd the behavior of your people isn't undoing the safety you've invested in.BYes.AI mean, just make the changes. Don't advertise them like hey, because our cars are so much safer now, you don't. Oh, how is this for an example? A Tesla.BA tesla?AAutopilot. When that's touted as a safety measure. Then people disengage their brains from it and things go awry.BI mean, I definitely feel like, assuming a technologically advanced civilization in the future, that self-driving cars will be the primary sort of cars.AOh, yeah. I hope so. BIt'll be boutique to be the one controlling on a moment by moment basis where your vehicle is heading and how fast and all that.AKind of like driving a stick shift now.BRiding a horse.AI fully agree with you that I hope for a future where vehicles are largely automated. I think that would be much safer on the whole. If Elon Musk is heading up that charge, I do not have high hopes for that.BOh man. So we've talked about one logical fallacy in thinking about disasters. And now we'll move on to another one. And it's titled the near miss fallacy. So this fallacy is that a near miss can be treated as an oddball or an outlier instead of what it really is: a warning.AOoh.BThink of Challenger and Deepwater. All of these little oversights had been commonplace. And instead of being punished by a regulatory body or a disasterAOr corrected?BOr corrected? Yes,AYeah. The Challenger. The O rings. Some people were trying to blow the whistle. There was just too much inertia.BYes. The one guy was trying as hard as he could and got sidelined. And Challenger, I don't remember if we had mentioned it because it's been so long ago. But a part of what the Challenger was being pushed for in terms of like, let's, let's get this launch done today. Let's do it today. The next day was State of the Union address by Reagan.AReally.BHe wanted to have a great feather in his cap. Instead, he had a rocket blow up.AI did not know that that was one of the pressures in play.BI don’t know how overt or how, you know. Having pressure from the top is when shit happens because the top doesn't know what's going on beneath.AMm-hmm.BDespite that, this chapter actually highlights a few wins. I'm sure you remember the big Chipotle E. Coli outbreak?AOh yeah. I haven't eaten at Chipotle since, actually.BThat’s funny.A Not necessarily because of that, but happenstance.BCoincidentally,AYeah, yeah. So what did Chipotle do?BSo the company had actually taken previous near misses seriously and they were able to respond when they had a contamination issue.AHm. They didn't put all their resources into preventing contamination, but they put some resources towards we need a plan when it happens.BYes. They had done the thinking through of, Oh my gosh, what if this had gone this way? Well, what plan should, what should we do about it? Within six months they had bounced back from being hit really hard in the media.AWhat did they do though?BAfter finding out about the contamination, they recalled stuff, they pulled stuff out of coolers and threw it. The cost of inaction was greater than the cost of overaction.ASo in other words, they, they threw out stuff that probably wasn't contaminated, to be on the safe side,BRight. I mean, that's that's the way that a lot of recalls actually work.AExactly. Doesn't this kind of go against what you were just saying about the the risk hypotenuse theorem, hypothesis? Hypo.BHomeostasis.AThank you.BStay the same.ABecause like for Chipotle, if they're like, Wow, we really went above and beyond making our stuff safe. Does that then mean they become lax in training employees in food safety measures? I don't know.BBut I think that in this case, it's more a matter of response. You know, they were prepared with response as opposed to having your suppliers be extra vigilant about testing and that sort of thing. Before disaster, as opposed to what you do after disaster.AOh, I see what you mean.BYeah. It's more about response and formulating your response while you don't have the pressure on. Because that's when you can think clearest. Another win is the ever given. The ever given was the name of the ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021.AThis was a win?BSo the photo that went viral, of course, was this backhoe that just looked like a kid's toy next to this giant shipping container hauler. Looking like there is no way this thing is gonna do anything to get it loose. But shipping companies had this exact sort of scenario play out from 1967-1975. From the Six-Day War to the end of the Yom Kippur War, there were like 14 or 17 ships that were in the Suez Canal when war broke out between Israel and Egypt. They couldn't go anywhere. And all of these ships were just like, Well, I guess all we've got is each other. And so they kind of formed their own little community of boats and linked together and because they were literally stuck in the Suez Canal, they could not leave. Because of hostilities on each side. Eight years seems like a long time to be stuck in a canal on a boat. But shipping companies had to send ships around Africa to maintain trade. The Ever Given was only stuck a week. But shipping companies knew this would cause a backlog because they were accustomed to a certain flow rate. And so a week's worth of shipping had to get sent around Africa so that there wouldn't be a week's worth of shipping constantly built up on each side of the canal.ARight. So because of this six days war, six years war, these companies had shipping routes around Africa. Is that what you're saying?BYeah. These shipping companies, they had to figure something out. But in 2021, they just had to dust off these old handwritten, typewritten accounts of what the plan is when we can't use the Suez Canal.AIt seems wild to me that this doesn't happen more often. You know what I mean? Because that was, that was several decades in-between a ship getting stuck.BTo be fair, there was probably some smaller things.AWhat was special about the Ever Given? That's what I want to know.BI don't think I've ever given it a second thought.ADrum hitBAnd apparently the thing that was a problem was that it hit a sand bar and then went sideways so that they couldn't just back out.AWhere is the Suez Canal?BEgypt.AAll this time I've been thinking of the Panama Canal, Which is not the Suez Canal.BThose are really the two of greatest consequence.A‘Cause I was thinking, why would they need to send it around Africa?BWhat the hell does Panama care about Egypt and Israel? This is nonsense.AAlright It all makes more sense now.BThank you for that, English major.AWhatever. I was the star geography person on my high-school knowledge bowl team. Don't get me started on this again.BWhat does that say about your high-school knowledge bowl team? Hm.AWhat does it say about my memory of key canals in world history? Okay. So, yeah. What's next?BOkay, so the last success she highlighted was the Boston Marathon bombing. Three people died at the finish line, which is a tragedy. But hundreds were treated successfully because extensive triage planning was already in place. Why was this planning in place? Because marathon leaders had encountered near misses before and decided to have a plan to handle the possibilities that these instances made them aware of. So they were able to respond immediately and keep things from getting worse.AOkay. Yeah. I totally see what you're saying, is that instead of brushing these things off as out of the norm and therefore, highly unlikely to happen again, they learned lessons from them that they were then able to implement when needed?BYes. Exactly.AI'd like to hear an example of a success that was not motivated by a prior mini disaster.BWell, yes. But then it wouldn't have been in that chapter.AOh, fair enough. Yep.BSpeaking of learning from disasters, or learning from mini disasters, is her last chapter in the book which is titled listen to the dead.AListen to the dead, but not the undead. As we learned about in our zombie discussion.BThe undead don't have anything very intelligent to say either. It's mostly grrrr. So listen to the dead focuses most on noticing how and why people die in a disaster. Hurricane Laura in 2020 didn't kill anyone from the storm surge, or the weather. Because the National Hurricane Center used great language in their messaging campaign, calling the 17-foot projected surge “unsurvivable.”AThey didn’t hold back.BPeople got the hell out of there, man. But most of the 28 people who died from the storm were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from poorly run generators.AOh no.BYeah. Carbon monoxide also killed 72 people who were caught in their cars in the 1978 New England blizzard. In 1978, they didn't have as good forecasting ability. So the storm kind of caught people by surprise. And people were in their cars and there was so much snow that like it would freeze over their tailpipes and carbon monoxide killed them in their car. It's a real, real upper of a chapter. But one of the reasons that Kayyem says we need to pay attention to the way people die, ties directly back to avoiding stupid deaths.AStupid deaths, meaning not deaths because of individual stupid decisions, but deaths that were fully preventable.BYes. She then brings up the first disaster that I was aware of as a current event, Columbine. What do you remember?AOh. This is gonna be hard.BYeah.AWell, I did listen to a You're wrong About episode about it.BShe's probably on the same page as those folks.Athe whole point of that podcast is to kind of debunk popular cultural understandings of people or events. That was very interesting. Things were certainly different than I I remember hearing about them in the news at the time. It's very hard to engage with this topic. Having been alive during the first,Bthe first school shooting.AAnd now fearing for my children growing up in the United States.BRight. When they started to walk the hallways shooting, students were told to hide in the library. And there was no way out.AOh.BThe world changed a lot. Especially terrorism around this time. The previous concept was that people who brought a gun into a public place were robbers, or were going to take hostages to try to get what they wanted. Columbine was absolutely a paradigm shift. Sometimes the bad guys Just wanted to burn it all down indiscriminately. “Some men just want to see the world burn.” I did want to quote the book here too, because it's infuriating. Quote, “with decades of mass shootings, we've now learned that there is no benefit for first responders to delay entry into a facility.” Apparently Uvalde didn't get the memo.AI was watching some media appearances that she made recently talking about school shootings and how we need to change our messaging around it because hiding has not resulted in better outcomes.BYes.AIt's fighting that results in the better outcomes. For instance, the shooting in Colorado Springs.BMm-hmm. What she described about the paradigm was before Columbine the only strategy was just run. Afterwards it became run, hide, fight. It seems like now the best strategy is just fucking throw down.AYeah.BShe also talked about tsunamis. She said, specifically in the hills above Fukushima, there's a, you know, an engraved stone that says, learn the lessons of the dead. Do not build below this point.AWow.BYeah. it was like it was probably like 100 years old at that point, the disaster that the engraving was based on. But they didn't learn and they built lower.AReally.BYou know, nature isn't static. It's dynamic. And so your planning has to be just as dynamic. It can't be static. So I guess that's the takeaway is that if your plans are based on physics, you're in good shape because they're static. Laws of physics, static. Conditions, human, environmental, not.A Yeah, anytime you operationalize physics, it's in an imperfect world with imperfect people.BMm-hmm. So I guess that's a bit of a somber way to end my, my streak of three here. ButAYeah, I see value in this book, especially for big-picture thinking about the nature of disaster, responding to disasters, understanding how humans interact with disaster. And communication plays a role all through that.BYeah. To sort of reiterate and recap what she had said at the beginning of her book, if I'm remembering correctly, even if you don’t, if you don't expect you're going to get your city council or your state or your country to recognize the importance that being ready for disasters is going to have, you being ready and having your resources prepared, even your mental resources prepared, is going to make it that much easier for your community because you won't be in need.AYeah. I'm glad she didn't start by saying and the takeaway here is that you as an individual, need to…Bbe ready for everything,Astock up on canned whatever.BI'm not sure which aisle they keep the canned whatever in, butAI mean, I think to some extent that's important, if only to feel a sense of agency in the midst of something chaotic and out of your control. LikeBYes.A thinking back toBMarch 2020,AYep, the start of COVID, thinking back to how for you at least in the Fargo flood, you needed to be in motion, you needed to be helping. That is how you personally made it through.BI honestly feel like I thrived through it.AWell no need to rub it in.BI was energized by civic engagement there.A Yeah. But I think we need to be careful about not therefore letting those above us off the hook.BOh, absolutely not.AAnd and I don't get the sense that that's her point at all.BShe is very leadership focused. But she does make an effort too, to not go too far the other way and make it seem like you don't have any power. She said that this is valuable for if you're not a leader valuable because anyone can step up and be a first responder in a disaster.AOkay. I have a question.BWhat's that?AWhen you set fire to your cake and I got the fire extinguisher out,BGrrr. Is this going in the podcast?AYou did not react well. Perhaps you can reframe my actions as me simply being prepared for the possibility of disaster.BSure. I guess that I could have looked at it in a different way. Are you putting this in the podcast?AYeah.BOkay. So I screwed up on a recipe for a cake and there was too much oil in it, which as the cake baked, it came out and started dripping into the bottom of the oven. AndAThat's what lit on fire. I didn't know. All I saw was literal flames in the oven.BWhich honestly, if there's going to be flames in your home, the oven is the safest place for them to be.AI agree, butBIt was made to handle the temperature.AI just wanted to be on the safe side.BYes. However, when you pulled out the dry chemical fire extinguisher, my mind was like, Oh my God, that thing is going to destroy our house with like powder everywhere for months and months.ABut that’s what you do with an oil fire. You don't throw water on an oil fired that was literally oil on fire.BIt was literally oil on fire. It's true. I was just worried that you were going to prematurely powder our home.AThat's fair. That's fair. By the way, I saw this thing on Instagram.BOh, boy.AIt's called a fire blanket.BYes.ACan we get one?BYeah. Sure.ABecause it will put out a fire of any type and will not leave a chemical mess in your home. Let's bring some resolution to the story. How did you ultimately put out the fire?BOh, right. So I ultimately put out the fire by turning off the heating element.AThat's a good start.BI turned off the heating element to stop adding heat into the triangle of fire, which is heat, fuel, oxygen.ATriangle of fire? I've never heard of this.BSo you need to have all three of those things andAtake one out and you kill your fire.BTake one out and you can kill the fire.ASo say again, heat, oxygen, fuel.BYep, heat, oxygen and fuel. My strategy was I'll turn the heat off and I will leave the oven door shut for awhile. So that oxygen that's in there will burn up and after it's cooled down a bit, I'll open it up. Get the nasty smoke out.ANow, before I forget, our smoke detectors did not go off. They should have.BWe ought to test them.AWe should consider this our near miss.BOoh. You're bringing it back. Look at you.Aand check those out.BIt sounds like a plan.AAnd the best part of this story is that because the cake itself was not on fire, which I did not realize at first. It was actually edible and delicious.BIt was. I had to.Aalbeit it had a slight smoke flavor tinge to it.BIt did? I didn't notice that.AI mean, that was all we were breathing for like a day after that, so. That’s an exaggeration.BI managed to remove some of the excess oil from it and finished cooking the cake. Cooking, baking the cake.AAnd I should add, we had guests.BYes, we had guests,ABut you know, it didn't hurt that my mom showed up high.BYou gonna publish that part too?AI don’t think I can.BYou’ll have to get permission.AWell I don't know. If she's not listening, she’ll never know.BYou think there's a chance she's not listening? She is definitely one of one of our number oneAYes.Bsupporters in Spotify.AThat’s quite possible. Yeah, thanks Anchor Wrapped for telling us that we have listeners for whom TC Talk is their number one podcast.BWe love you all.AMy heart goes out to you.BAnd even if we're not your number one, thank you for inviting us into your heads.AIndeed. Now go test your fire alarms. Get yourself a fire blanket. You can get them for a discount if you buy them in bulk, give them to your family and friends.BYou can get a discount for buying them in bulk?AYou know, more than one, 4-pack or whatever.BOkay.AThis is not a sponsored episode.BRight. That's why we're not telling you to get a particular brand of them. But I will say download the FEMA App. You know, FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Administration. Whenever there's a weather alert or like it's unsafe to burn outside, anything of that sort for your area, it will let you know.AAlright. We have some action items.BMm-hmm.AThanks everyone.BAnd to all a good night.

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This is the last of our 3-part series in which we discuss The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disaster, by Juliette Kayyem. In this episode, we talk about the importance of continually examining your systems, and learning from mini disasters instead of brushing them off.  Finally, we put our newfound knowledge to the test when a baking attempt goes awry. Content warning: Gun violence.

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This is part 2 of our 3-part series on disaster communication, where we are discussing the book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disaster, by Juliette Kayyem. Last time, we talked about the barriers that make comprehending and communicating about crisis challenging. This time, using cases such as Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon explosion, we address how to overcome those barriers and get quality info to the people who need it. The first step is listening downward, or gathering info from people who are closest to disaster.

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Many organizations focus on preventing disaster from happening, but don't have plans in place for when disaster inevitably does happen. And as climate change worsens, we need to buckle up for living in an age of disaster. What does this mean for communicating about risk, crisis, and disaster? To answer this question, Benton shares insights from the book The Devil Never Sleeps by Juliette Kayyem. Benton and Abi also discuss their own very different reactions to disaster in their own lives, as well as their favorite zombie media.

Sources and further reading

• Alexis Nikole, Blackforager TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexisnikole
• Cheek, R. (2020). Zombie ent (r) ailments in risk communication: A rhetorical analysis of the CDC’s Zombie apocalypse preparedness campaign. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 50(4), 401–422.
• Fleischer, R. (Director). (2009, October 2). Zombieland [Action, Comedy, Horror]. Columbia Pictures, Relativity Media, Pariah.
• Forster, M. (Director). (2013, June 21). World War Z [Action, Adventure, Horror]. Paramount Pictures, Skydance Media, Hemisphere Media Capital.
• Goffard, C. (2017, October 1). Dirty John [Podcast]. Www.Latimes.Com. http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-dirty-john/
• Kayyem, J. (2022). The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. PublicAffairs.
• Levine, J. (Director). (2013, February 1). Warm Bodies [Comedy, Horror, Romance]. Summit Entertainment, Make Movies, Mandeville Films.
• Meyer, R., & Kunreuther, H. (2017). The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters. University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Scrivner, C., Johnson, J. A., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Clasen, M. (2021). Pandemic practice: Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic. Personality and Individual Differences, 168, 110397.
• Snyder, Z. (Director). (2021, May 21). Army of the Dead [Action, Crime, Horror]. The Stone Quarry.
• Sparby, E. (2020). Syllabus: ENG 451 Technical Communication in the Zombie Apocalypse. Retrieved 24 Nov. 2022 from https://www.emsparb.com/courses.html

Transcript

BHi, I'm Benton.AI'm Abi.BWelcome to TC talk,Aa tech comm podcast.BI am a non-technical communicator and a non-academic.AI'm a professor of technical communication.BYeah. So I'm a little bit nervous. I'm driving the boat today.ABe careful.BYeah,Alest we have a disaster.BOh, Nice segue? Cheers. What are we drinking tonight?AA themed beverage called a dark and stormy. It's a variation on a Moscow mule because it is made with ginger beer and black Rum.BBlack as the night.AI think you need to say something in a piratey voice at this point.BYargh! Avast, welcome to TC Talk, me mateys. We’ll be lootin and plundering about this here book I found. And I'm going to stop that right now.AThat was adorable though.BThank you. So our episode today we are going to be talking about disaster. The reason that I wanted to do that is that I picked up this book just for my own reading. And having gone through it, I realized that, wow, this is, this is very communication-oriented. This is a lot about saying what's happening, saying what could happen, you know. And so I kind of used it as an opportunity to take the wheel on this one.AMm-hmm.BAnd the book is called The Devil Never Sleeps, Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters, by Julie Kayyem. I like to read post-apocalyptic type stuff, like what happens when shit goes down.AYou were weirdly excited when COVID hit and we had the lockdown and you were like, yes, now I get to stock my basement pantry.BTrue.ACorrect me if I'm wrong, I'm not a psychoanalyst. But is it a way of feeling a sense of control?BAbsolutely, yeahAIn the midst of chaos, perhaps. And I meanwhile prefer to bury my head in the sand.BIs it nice and cozy.ANo.BAbrasive?AGets in my eyes and is all scratchy. It's not that I buried my head in the sand. It's that I fully immerse myself in the awful and then become paralyzed, if that makes sense. I think this is a good time to tell the story about the Fargo flood.BAh, the Fargo flood in the spring of 2009.AThat's, wow. I would not have been able to tell you the year. Yeah. We were both attending NDSU at that point. I just remember being a grad student, being really overwhelmed with that to begin with. Like they canceled class. Well, here's what I remember. Everybody went home for spring break. And then they came back. And like that Monday or Tuesday, they announced there will be no classes. And they did it strategically to make sure the college students came back so that they could volunteer to sand bag.BIt was that Sunday night that they called off a week of classes because they were they were watching the, the flood levels, like the river was coming up like a foot a day. A foot a day, a foot a day, which is a problem, you know, when you run out of feet.AYou were a hero.BI was mobilized by it. I was ready to help.AI was also working a separate job at that point too becauseBOh yeah,Awe served clients from all over the country andBoh, yes, that's right.AWe were open 24/7. We did work for lawyers,Bincluding the Lehman Brothers. It was a good time.Aright? Yeah. Yeah, we expanded to financial firms. And we had to say our work might be delayed because we're like in a literal flood here. But they still had us coming in. Some workplaces were paying their workers to go volunteer. Like that was actually was a…BThere was so much amazing stuff going on in Fargo. Like Buffalo Wild Wings would just bring trays and trays of wings to one of the sand bagging centers where, which, so they had, they had a few facilities not on the river where they would, where people would come just to fill, put sand into the sand bags, put them on a pallet so they're ready to move out. So there were a number of restaurants that would just bring like pans and pans of food to the volunteers to help fight the flood.AYep. We did both. We filled and tied up the sand bags. And then there was also, once those sand bags are filled, you create a wall, you use them to create a barrier. So a bunch of people would stand in a line and it would be like theBjust like the bucket brigade.AExactly thatBOf cartoon fame.AYes. To move the sand bags. Which is great. Unless you're me who is a wimp and you're stuck between like two football players who think it's fun to see how hard they can shove the sand bag at the next person. And I'm like, can we not?BFootball players are so insensitive. Those two football players,Athose two specifically. Anyway. So the point here is that you and I had very different reactions. I was living close to campus at that point, which was not at risk. But it's no good when your community goes underwater, likeBNo, it isn’t.ASo I remember getting all in my head about it and ultimately being not very helpful, which I'm embarrassed to say. You responded to it differently.BI honestly feel like it was one of the most inspirational things I have been through.AWow.BBecause of, well, spoiler alert. The flood was contained. There was certainly damage and loss, but it wasn't like,AOn the whole it worked.BOn the whole it worked.AAnd all the free wings didn't hurt.BAll the free wings were pretty nice. That experience like it gave me a hint of what it would be like supporting a war effort, like, like what World War II might have been like. Because the city was like all together. Businesses were figuring out ways to help. Like when I'm putting sand bags on the wall, putting it next to the river. A lot of times like the homeowners right there, they would just have food for anyone there.AI mean that’s the least they could do.BThe volunteering and the generosity and like the community coming together was amazing. And it truly kindled like a flame of solidarity in me.AAnd now you’re socialist.BI now I am a die-hard socialist, who wants to take back the means of production. I won't say anymore about that, butAI figured it out. I'm not an ostrich with its head in the sand. I'm a chicken running around with its head cut off. Well, all that to say. We have responded differently to the prospective disasters in our lifetimes. And I think as the book title suggests, this is the norm now with climate change and with the erosion of democracy.BClimate change and the effect that's going to have on migration. And the de-stabilizing things that come up in various societies whenADomestic terrorism.BDomestic terrorism. Are you, are you kinda getting to the chicken running around?AUh, yes.BOkay.AI’m flapping my wings ineffectually as we speak.BI'll get back to my script then.AThis is really weird for me.BIt is.AI don't have any paper in front of me.BIt's all mine. The paper is mine. My precious clipboard.AYeah. It’s a neon yellow clipboard at that. But I am along for the ride. I will say, I want to do some reading in tech comm to kind of supplement what you have to say about disaster communication. Because there is some good and interesting work that I've been wanting to explore. So tonight, you'll kinda introduce us to your book.BYes.AThen we'll take a break. I'll do my research. We will reconvene,BSo having read this book, it seems like no disaster has ever sneak by the author. She collected them all. Even the you remember the ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal, right?AOh yeah.BYeah. She had a picture of it and like talked about it in part of the book. Like minor disasters like that. I'll touch on that when we get there. She seriously brought up so many major and minor news events that it kind of felt like reliving most of my adulthood.AOuch.BYeah.AAnd is the case for anyone listening, I'm sure.BYeah.ALike 9/11. Is that?BOf course. It's one of the major disasters in our lifetimes. As any person who spent a lot of the last six years keeping up with the news would know, it seems like there has been a never ending cadence of disasters during this period. Also before we get too deep into talking about disasters, what do you think these terms mean?AOoh. Quiz.BScandal, disaster, crisis, and catastrophe.AWow, okay, Scandal. The first thing I think of isBthe last administration?AActually Bill Clinton came to mind and Monica Lewinsky because that is I mean,Bit was the first one that hit our radars, dating us.AYes. I think of pearl clutching.BOh, yeah.ASo maybe in that sense, scandal has to do with public reaction?BOkay.ADisaster and catastrophe. I don't see any meaningful difference between those terms. I would consider them synonymous. Crisis, I see that that term as distinguished by urgency in a way that the others maybe aren't?BOkay.AHow did I do?BSo the way that Kayyem lays it out, scandal is the only one that does not involve actively harming people in an unfolding kind of way,Aright? It's the aftermath of something that has happened.BAnd for the other three, she lays it out in a continuum. A crisis is a time-bound situation.ASo it is about time.BWhen you come to a point where things could go one way or another, they could get really bad. Like think of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a very touchy time. We came very close to ending civilization in nuclear war.AAs one does.BAs one does. We are in the debt of a Soviet sub captain who decided not to listen to the political officerAfor real?BYes. The political officer, officer said fire the missiles and he said no. And so did his X O. And so they did notAI did not know that.BIt was very close.AYikes.BThings move into a disaster when harm occurs. Like we'll say, a hostage situation is a crisis.AA shooting is a disaster.BWhen one of the hostage takers decides to shoot fatally or not, it becomes a disaster because there's been harm done. Things move into a catastrophe when the way that the authorities manage the situation makes it worse.AOh, interesting.BSo that would be like hostages are taken. They shoot a hostage. And then the police or FBI decide that. Alright, we're going to send people in. And then after they blow the doors in, the hostage takers execute 20 more people. That's a catastrophe.AOh jeez.BYeah, sorry, I just made that all up. Human mismanagement makes the situation worse.AOkay. Is that like a technical definition or is this just what this author has kind of,BI'm not sure if that's in the disaster industry, what they call it.ADisaster industry? That’s a thing?BThat's what she calls her line of work is the disaster industry.AThe disaster industrial complex.BThe more you know.AOkay. I have a question for you because I can't help it.BQuestion me.AHow would you distinguish risk and crisis?BRisk is something that happens before a crisis. So risk can be assessedAOr doesn’t happen as the case may be.BRight? Yes. You can assess and mitigate risk before a crisis. Risk is something that it's out there and it takes place, but you can think about it before any crisis happens. AndAUnderstanding it and managing it ideally avoids disasters. Here's why I ask that. There's sort of a scholarly thread in tech comm of risk communication and crisis communication. They're often talked about together, but they are distinct obviously. I'm not an expert in this because I haven't done my reading yet, but I see it as a matter of, you know, at what point in time are you intervening?BThat's very prescient. That would make a good transition too. But before I do that, I wanted to touch on the etymology of disaster and catastrophe. Fun fact, the aster in both of them comes from star.ANo way.BLike the thinking behind even the labels for this really bad situation is that it's in the stars, the stars aligned for a really bad thing to happen.AWoah, that's interesting because it’s very responsibility-shirking. It was fate. It couldn't have been prevented.BYeah.ABullshit.BLot of times, yeah. So what you were saying about risk communication and crisis communication fit very neatly into the frame that Kayyem puts in her book.ABut it sounds like we now need to add catastrophe communication and scandal communication, but I think that's just PR.BScandal communication is just PR, yes. So her frame is that you've got your timeline of left is past, right as future. And so every disaster is, she calls it boom. So mitigation or risk communication in your case, occurs left of boomABoom as in explosion?BBoom as a stand-in for whatever the disaster is.AOkay.BIt could be an explosion, the Boston Marathon.AWhat about something like COVID, where it's not like a single moment, it's like a buildup?BAn unfolding. Yeah.AOkay.BShe was actually teaching that semesterAand you're like, damn, I didn't want my material to be this relevant.BNo joke. So she lays out this framework of when you're trying to avoid disasters that, that's all left of boom work. And in this continuum, that's where the lion's share of energy seems to be focused, is like, don't let bad things happen.AAnd that's a good thing, right?BIt is definitely good to avoid having disasters happen. The argument she makes is that it is very often to the detriment of focusing on what to do when disasters do happen. And so the right of boom, crisis communication, or what she would call it, consequence minimization, so the goal is less bad.AYes,BLess deaths, less damage.AIt's a fundamental shift in how you're looking at disaster because you are, in a sense, preparing for it, which is different than preventing it.BYeah. Yeah.AI mean, you do both, but wow,Bthere is very little preventing you can do about hurricanes and most other natural disaster sorts of things.AI can see the temptation to focus on the left of boomBOh, yeah.AActivities, though, because it feels like it's a resignation to say this is going to happen. It's a form of denial in a way. I get that.BBingo.AI don't want to prepare for the worst because I don't want to acknowledge that the worst can happen.BWhen you prepare for the worst, you're actually preparing for the not as bad. Just looking at what the last six years have been like,Athe word unprecedented has way too many timesBsince a certain precedent has happened.AYeah. My point being there's a point at which you gotta say, Okay,Byeah, It's an age of disasters that we're living in. And so what she says, I'm sorry. Go ahead.AI was just gonna say I think Phoebe wrote the wordByes,Apoo on the wall.BShe was trying to write her name. I think I saw that. And I was just like,AYeah, she's learning how to spell and read and write. And her favorite word right now is poop. Understandably. She also wrote the word poop on the TVBand then crossed it out. I think that she was using pencil because it erased fairly well.AOh. I'm sorry. I just saw it out of the corner my eye and totally distracted you. But you were talking about how we're living in an age of disaster.BWe're living in an age of disasters. And so she was, what she's saying is that we need to just own it. A major theme of this book is essentially shit happens.ANot just on TV either. That was a callback. That was on purpose.BI see what you did there. I see that, yeah. Or maybe shit happens. So always have toilet paper.Aor an eraser.BKayyem starts by pushing for us to live in the real world and accept the disaster is coming. And we can't stop it. And I’ll quote her again here. “I feel that the fact we can't seem to get our heads around the potential for disaster and prepare for it in rational ways is a testament to the power of positive thinking.”AOuch.BYes. That is a, that is a solid stab in the eye of positive thinking right there. That quote, and I love it.AWe have talked before about, we were talkingBToxic positivity?AWhen we're talking about cults. I think there's value in framing things in positive ways. But not to the point that you are in denial,BRight. That being what toxic positivity is. So this kind of gets into the preparedness paradox, which is twofold. First, successful prevention measures can intuitively seem like a waste of time.AI have the perfect example, but is it when people stayed home at the start of COVIDBAnd then the curve flattened.AThe curve flattened and people were like, see, we never needed to stay home after all.BThe classic example is Y2K,ARight.BBecause there was all this like, oh my God, we are not ready for the millennium. We're not ready for zero-zero. And billions of dollars of effort were put into going over old code that was written by dinosaurs. Programmers worked their butts off. As you can see in the movie office space. That's what they were working on.AY2k? For real?BYeah. He explained it.AIt's been a long time since I’ve seen it.BThe second part of the paradox is that there is a superstition that preparing for a possibility makes it more likely to happen, which touches on like that feeling that you had of like ah, but don't want to prepare for managing a disaster because then it's like giving up.AYes.BBut it's, it's like a built-in superstition that like, if you get ready for it, it's going to happen.AIt seems like certainly an individual cognitive bias or whatever. But it happens at an organizational level, I'm guessing.BProbably more at an organizational level, which leads right into this next topic. She then refers to the six leadership biases that were mentioned in the book The Ostrich Paradox, which was written by Kunreuther and Meyer. Myopia, amnesia, optimism, inertia, simplification and herding. Myopia is, I'm not going to think about anything beyond my next election.AShortsightedness.BShortsightedness, amnesia is when you forget the bad stuff.AWhat kind of leadership bias is preventing our nation from taking any action on gun control? Is it the asshole bias?BI think there's probably a lot of all of these.AYeah, that's fair.BBecause there's the myopia, like not wanting to look far enough ahead to make a real plan. Amnesia, like forgetting the five mass shootings that happened yesterday. Optimism. “You know, I think that incremental change is going to get us where we want to be.”A“Mental health is the problem.”BMental health, except they don't pay for that either.AExactly.BJerks. Inertia like “it’s the way it's always been.” Simplification. Oh, yeah, that's the NRA having very good messaging to its people saying, say no to any legislation about guns.AFear, stoking fear.BWell, that's that's herding.AOh, okay. H-E-R-D?BYes. “Alright. Come on. Let's get together and fight the gun grabbers.”AHerding sounds like leadership though. How is that negative?BI mean, it does sound like leadership unless you think of them as being like a shepherd where you're herding sheep into the slaughter house? Um,AOh.BHerding is not necessarily a good thing. It could be. It could be where you're like, alright, let's go over here because we don't want to be all spread out and get eaten by wolves. Anyway, that was kind of like a really quick run through of those leadership biases.ALike simplification. I mean, that's. See our episode on conspiracy rhetoric. I mean, the whole, the whole point of conspiracy thinking is the world is black and white.BOh yeah.ANo room for nuance, no room for contingency.BAnother thing that she mentioned in the book was that I found to be very interesting is that overreaction as a term and a concept used to be completely stigma free. It was just viewed as reflexive. Like just something that happens. Like, oh, well, that's natural,ARight, it doesn't necessarily have the value judgment placed on it.BIt didn't until, until in the 1960s, psychologists came along and made it a disorder,AOverreaction?BIt seems a little bit like an overreaction to me, doesn't it? Project much psychologists?AI'm going to take a wild guess that these psychologists were white men. Because I'm thinking of how so often women, people of color,B“Calm down.”AExactly. Who gets to say what is an acceptable amount of reaction and what's too much and what's not enough, right? It's the people who have the most power. But there is such a thing as overreaction in that you can create fear and anxiety around something that doesn't, that isn’t necessarily evidence-based. I don’t think that was the case with COVID. I thinkBUnder-reaction was the problem.AAnd I think that we need to be willing to hold our judgments in suspension when we have such a lack of information. You know, it's really, really hard for people, for human beings to do that. There's something about uncertainty that, I don't know what the right reaction would have been when the COVID news started coming out. I don't think, I don’t think there was such a thing as the right reaction. I mean the only the only wrong reaction would be to be insisting that it couldn't possibly be a problem despiteB“It was a hoax.”Adespite the evidence that it was in fact a problem.BShe knew.AYeah?BJulie Kayyem.AShe saw it coming?BOh, yeah. There was some company, it was like a Fortune 500 company that like she was on a call consulting about COVID-19. And she didn't realize that everyone was on the call yet and she was using gallows humor with her colleagues and said, “So is it going to fall to me to tell him he's got to close everything?” And then the CEO of the company piped in and said, “That can't possibly be.” And then over the course of it, she kinda dragged him kicking and screaming from being incredulous to being like, “Shit, we gotta do this. We gotta have a plan for shutting all of our stores down.” It was something they had never planned for. I'm gonna put in a quote that she had from Jim Clapper, who, if you're not familiarA[Claps]BThank you. I think that he was the director of the FBI? Before Comey, before people knew who the director of the FBI was. He said to her that “it's very hard for people to get their heads around something that's never happened to them.” And you saw it with hurricane Ian, even. People who had never seen a hurricane or people who had seen hurricanes and they've come, they've gone, big deal. People who knew that a monster storm surge was coming and what that was like, when they saw water starting to come, they were like shaking their neighbors out of their funk and being like, “Get the fuck in your car and leave.”AHmm.BAnd people who packed said like in half an hour the water rose like a foot. Very limited amount of time to do something before you're screwed. But yeah, if you've never seen it happen, you just cannot process like 13 ft of storm surge, what does that even mean?AIs it almost like a normalcy bias?BOh, yeah, that's a great statement of it.AYou can't possibly comprehend something so out of the norm that you just kind of,BOut of your norm. It can be even something that you know happens and you've seen happen to other people. But it’s never happened to me.AOh sure, there are pandemics in other parts of the world.BIt’ll never happen here. So on that happy note, I'm going to finish off this dark and stormy. Her first chapter was kind of a little bit potpourri.AWe're not even through the first chapter yet?BLittle bit all over the place.ANow I know how you feel.BJust a fun note, was that researcher Coltan Scrivner et al, found that quote, “people who watched a lot of zombie movies and other apocalyptic type movies reported feeling more prepared for the pandemic.”AYou fall squarely into that category.BThat is my wheelhouse, that is my bread and butter entertainment is being prepared for shit to hit the fan. And I'm not a prepper. I'm really not.AYou want to be. If it weren't for me, you would be probably full-blown jugs of water ceiling high in our laundry room.BIf it wasn't for you, I would have no checks on that impulse.ASo zombie stuff is required reading for today's leaders. Is that what you're saying?BIt's a useful preparation strategy.AOkay. You know,AI think if I remember right, there was someone on Twitter who was planning a zombie apocalypse themed tech comm course. I'll have to double-check shout-out to Erika Sparby. They were the one who tweeted about that.BThat sounds interesting,Ayes. Because I remember being like, I can't wait to see your syllabus.BYeah,Abut I mean, it seems too fun to be useful, but the research apparently shows that that would be super valuable.BZombies make an excellent stand-in for a lot of different types of disaster.AAlso, I want to say that there was, that the CDC actually made guidelines for surviving in the zombie apocalypse.BThey did.AI think somebody wrote a tech comm article about it. I can't remember now, but if I find it, I will put it in the show notes. This is Abi from the future. I found the article that I was alluding to. It’s by Ryan Cheek. The title is “zombie entrailments in risk communication.” With the R in parentheses. Entailments and entrailments? A parenthetical pun, built into the titleBVery cute.ANothing cuter than entrails. Subtitle, “A rhetorical analysis of the CDC’s Zombie Apocalypse preparedness campaign.” I read it and I thought it raised important enough points that I needed to raise them. So it’s largely a critique of this CDC campaign from 2011 and at the time, when the CDC put this out it got huge engagement and they got thousands more followers.BClever stunt.ARight. And if all you’re looking at is numbers of followers, you can deem it a success, right.BWell I know a certain former president who would.ASo Ryan Cheek says we need to look at this rhetorical and not just technocratically or likes equals. Specifically he does an apocalyptic rhetorical analysis.BContinue.AThat was creepy.BContinue fair traveler.AWhat are you doing ASMR now?BThe background noise.A[taps microphone]BDon’t do that.AThat’s what ASMR is.BI’m not doing ASMR.AWhat are you doing?BI’m trying to be more hearable than the laptop that’s trying to take off over here.AOkay but I can’t move the laptop because I’m looking at it for my notes.BGo ahead.AWhich for him meant looking at the materials for this zombie preparedness campaign and looking for apocalyptic patterns like mass suffering, good vs. evil, and triumph. I don’t think of apocalypse in religious terms, but many people in our country do.BIt’s true.AIn fact some fundamentalist Christians are gleefully trying to hasten the end of the world. And we need to be careful anytime we use the end of the world as a persuasive tactic. Not to mention using zombies as a metaphor for a diseased body. That is a recipe for discrimination. If the zombies are a metaphor for you know any pandemic then it’s essentially training us toBMurder the infected.ARight. And there is certainly precedent for vilifying people with disease.BOh yeahALike entire groups of people. I’m thinking of the AIDS epidemic. Even with coronavirus, calling it the Chinese virus.BOh yeah.ASo you would hope that people would be able to see oh this is a metaphor. We don’t want to take it literally and murder people for being sick. However and Cheeck brings this up. There was a study done that tested students’ actual learning from the campaign. There was a real objective behind it. Teach kids how to be prepared for disaster.BLike bug-out bags?AYeah, something like that. So one of the test questions was, what is an item you would bring in case of emergency. How would you answer that?BProbably a knife.AAh, that’s what the kids said. Most of them said a weapon.BThat’s not what I meant.AOkay.BA knife can be made tow ork as a weapon of course, but what I would want to have a knife for is utility.ANice save. But yeahBAnd if you’re going ot get a weapon, get a weapon that doesn’t run out of ammo like a knife or a blunt object.AThis is the opposite of the direction we want to go. So here’s the thing. With this kin of overlay of zombie apocalypse it’s too hard to dismember that from pop culture zombie apocalypse references.BI don’t think that I have seen any zombie movies where the solution was something other than kill them all.ANow there certainly is a subset of zombie literature that gets a little more nuanced, and begins to explore the zombies’ humanity, etc.BI take it back. Warm Bodies.AYes. And the book I’m thinking of is the Girl with the Gifts. All that to say, I’m not 100% ready to let go of the utility of the zombie metaphor for disaster preparedness but I will no longer do so uncritically, thanks to this article.BI don’t think I made much in the way of notes on what Kayyem had to say about zombie studies. It is a real thing, not that zombies are a real thing, but,AThank you for that clarification.BI have no idea what kind of people are listening to this podcast. SO just in case we’ve got an Alex Jones out there, zombies are not real. That was weird.AWe heard a mysterious thump outside the door just now.BMaybe I’m wrong? She does talk about zombie studies and how they are actually very useful for diastser management simulation, that sort of what she calls right of boom scenarios because disasters can take on so many different shapes that zombies take on a convenient stand in.AWhat is your favorite zombie movie?BMy favorite zombie movie. Okay.ASo because I'm in your place this time, I get to ask all the questions that derail us.BI see.AActually, I do plenty of that on my own when I'm running the show. World War Z,BI think that one was really good.AWe need to read the book.BI liked the movie and it didn't have anything to do with it being Brad Pitt.ADidn't hurt.BTrue. But what I liked is that his character in that movie was trying to figure out how it worked. I mean, it's, it's kinda the back-end of tech comm is getting the technical knowledge about the zombies.AWhat was the zombie heist movie?BYou are thinking of Army of the Dead.AComedic?BIt's not comedic in the same sense that say Zombieland was comedic orAYeah, there was the zombie rom com we watched for Halloween years ago, Warm bodies.BWarm bodies.AYou've seen more zombie movies than I, so clearly you're more mentally prepared for the apocalypse than I am. So I'm gonna put a plug-in for a podcast series.BOkay,ATrue Crime.BTrue crime,Abut the mention of zombies reminded me of this. Dirty John. Do you remember the connection? I don't want to give it away.BI don't right here.AThis is gonna be like a five-part series by the time we're done.BOh, yeah, it will.AYou know what time it is now, right? Time forBFun with fungus.AIt's been awhile since we've had fun with fungus.BIt's true. And if I'm being honest, the topic is in fact not fun, although it is fungus.AIs this because we're on a disaster episode?BYes.AAlright. Tell me about it.BAlexis Nicole is also known as the Black forager on all of the socials. She put a reaction video out to someone who had thought she was getting chicken of the woods mushroom, which she was not right about. They were actually jack-o-lanterns, which is a poisonous mushroom. They’re fun because they glow in the dark, but they are not fun if you try to eat them. Anyway. Are we going to play the audio of that video?ASure. “I accidentally poisoned my family. Thought we were eating chicken of the woods mushroom and no, turns out there's a lookalike, jack-o-lantern.” “Let’s have a chat about foraging safely. Just in case this needs to be said, don't go be mean to them. Projectile vomiting his punishment enough. Now as fun and as exciting as foraging is, foraging is also dangerous, okay? There are a lot of things we can eat, there are a lot of things we can’t. That family was, I mean not lucky, but lucky that they were jack-o-lanterns which are just bad for your gastrointestinal tract and not something like a destroying angel that could kill you. I need you all to pinky promise me that when you are out there foraging, if you choose to forage, that you are going to use more than one form of ID to confirm what you have, especially with mushrooms. Pretty obvious that, that TikToker thought that jack-o-lanterns were chicken of the woods because they're both orange. If you do a little bit more research, orange is literally where the similarities stop.”BHow does this connect to disaster communication? I would say that one connection is, get it right. Don't be hasty in saying you've figured out what's going on. Get it right.ADon't rely on one form of identification.BExactly. Yep. Redundancy. Let me say it again. Redundancy. So yeah. Verify, verify, verifyAAnd I don't know if she addresses this, but if that family posted about the chicken of the woods lookalike before they discovered it was poisonous, they’ve potentially endangered many people.BRight. I suspect that isn't the case because I imagine if she posted before cooking it,Asomeone would have caught it.BHer TikTok would have exploded with oh my gosh, don't do that.AI mean, would it have been so hard to be like, Hey folks, what is this? Right? That's what happens in Mushrooms of Minnesota Facebook.BYeah, that's true. Great community.AI have to say though that I'm glad she posted it because, you know, assuming she didn't post incorrect information beforehand. But it is a wake-up call. It makes the risk real.BYeah.AIn a way that people might brush off if they, you know, think they know a thing or two about mushrooms and then go to forage them.BYeah. And I had an instance myself where I saw a mushroom that looked to me like it was an elm cap. I grabbed it, I brought it home. I had cut it up and had it kinda just waiting to be cooked in the fridge. And the next day I was thinking about it more. And my confidence was like, just kind of eroded enough that I was like,ABy the way, I didn't know any of this.BYou didn't know any of this. We never cooked it.AWell it sounds like we very well could have. Sorry. Continue.BSo I was like, jeez, was it? Before I threw it out, I had decided that like, I'm not confident enough. But it, it goes back to the first rule of foraging. If you wouldn't bet your life on it, then don't bet your life on it.AOh, okay. This, this has a much better ending than I thought. I thought you were gonna say, “And then I looked it up and discovered it was an angel of death” or whatever that thing was called.BDestroying angel. That's the amanita.ABut no, no. I appreciate that. Better safe than sorry. AlrightBHave fun.

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We spoke with Dr. Joseph Robertshaw about his show, The Podcast of Podcasts, and the potential that podcasting holds for everyday technical communicators: students, professionals, educators, and even homesteading enthusiasts.

Sources and further reading

• The Podcast of Podcasts S1E8, “Bakke and Bakke of TC Talk”
• The Podcast of Podcasts submission for The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2022 (supercut of podcasting advice)
• Joseph’s Multimodal Composition course
• Joseph’s Gardening Homesteader Map
• Joseph’s presentations on Homesteading and Digital Activism
• Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms
• Justin Rhodes’ Abundant Permaculture
• Sow the Land podcast
• Mike Dickson’s Fit Farmer YouTube channel
• Art & Bri YouTube channel
• Hollar Homestead YouTube channel

Transcript

J=Joseph A=Abi B=Benton

JWe can do that almost teleporting with podcasts. And that's the other thing that podcasts are, and I don't know if we're gonna be able to find a way to preserve them long enough. But just like writing, it's time travel for thoughts.ABenton.BYes.ADo you remember last spring when we talked with Joseph?BOh, yeah. Joseph!AYeah. So we're going to release that interview now. And I want to give a little bit of context. TC Talk is mostly you and me, you know.BYes.AI think that is as it is meant to be, yet.BYet.AI like to mix things up every now and then.BWas that a cocktail joke?AYes. Yes, it was.BNow it is.AIt was on purpose. While we’re at it. [clinks glasses] Our last episode, we interviewed a couple of folks about vaccine trials. We also spoke with another podcaster in the rhetoric and writing studies technical communication area, Joseph Robertshaw, who does The Podcast of Podcasts, where he talks to podcasters. So we were featured on his show. He asked us questions about the origin of our podcast. And when he invited us, I thought, you know, we could do kind of a double interview where we asked him about his podcast. And the angle that I wanted to take is looking at podcasting as a form of technical communication.BMm-hmm.ASo we talked to him about that. We also talked to him about gardening.BYes.AAnd this was back in the spring. So he was just starting, he was talking about well, you know,BListen to the interview.ABut I will say I asked him for an update and he sent me lovely photos of his bounty.BAww.AAnd he did in fact make his grandpa's pepper relish.BWell, that's just swell.AAnd your garden. We, I shouldn't say we because I had nothing to do with it. You grew tomatoes for the first time successfully.BYes. Cherry tomatoes I have found to be harder to screw up.AAnyway. You were awash in tomatoes,BCherry tomatoes, kind of, they don't hit you all at once. They just keep coming and coming and coming and coming until it freezes,AYou know what was my favorite?BWhat?AThat they came in different colors.BYes.AYellow, orange, red, purple, it was gorgeous.BIt was.AIt was like a rainbow.BAnd that was exactly what the vendor at the farmers market was thinking would be fun. Also, earlier in the season, I was able to make some tomato chutney. And I threw in goji berries for good measure. AndAOh, that's right.BBecause we've got a goji berry plant. And they’re sort of on that line between, they’re sort of similar to tomato, kind of between sweet andAIt was almost a little spicy.BSpicy. Yeah, they're a little bit spicy.ABitter, maybe? I don't know how you’d describe it, but it isBIt is peculiar for sure.AYeah.BAnd I thought a chutney would be the right kind of peculiar to stick it in.AIt was. No, it totally blended in. I don't know what else you’d do with goji berries. Weren’t they super few, a superfood a while back?BThey are in fact still are a super food. They're just less trendy now. Fun fact, also known as wolf berry.AOoh.BPossibly because they’ve got a little bite.ASo next month we will be back to our regularly scheduled programming of you and me chatting about our respective reading. Doing the interviews has, has bought me some time as I've started the new fall semester and I've got a lot going on, but I definitely want to keep this up because it forces me out of focusing on just the thing that's right in front of my face. You know, like the fires I have to put out in my email or the student assignments that need to be graded, that kind of thing. To that end, we're going to continue TC Talk on a monthly basis rather than a bi-weekly basis. Or would it be bi-monthly?BYes. Bi is twice rather than semi-weekly, maybe? I don’t know.AOh, right. We used to do it once a fortnight.BYeah.AWe'll aim to publish on the fourth Thursday of the month going forward, barring any disasters. Which is a nod to our next episode.BGetting ahead of ourselves, aren't we? Not that it would be the end of the world or anything.AAnd with that, on to the interview.AWe are trying to something a little different, talking with people, not for their academic expertise, but because we want to know how tech comm operates in daily life, how do people do technical communication? And I define technical communication as communicating specialized information to a variety of audiences in a way that they can use and understand. Given that definition, I see podcasting as a form of technical communication. Do you agree?J1,000%.AAlright, I figured you would. So I’d like to ask you a few questions about your podcast.BAre you gonna, I’m sorry. Were you going to ask him his name?AThat’s exactly where I was going with this! We're, we're new to interviewing as well. You can ask him who he is.BHi, please state your name.JMy name is Joseph Robertshaw. I teach technical writing and business writing and technical editing at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.AAnd you are also a podcaster.JI am.AThinking of podcasts as technical communication, with the Podcast of Podcasts, what specialized information are you trying to communicate?JWell, with the Podcast of Podcasts, I'm trying to communicate to a couple of different audiences, actually, the first one being myself, because I learn from every guest that I meet about something new that I can do to make my podcast better. I have kind of like this plan to go into several seasons. The first season is all about rhetoric and tech comm and people who do that sort of podcasting, because I thought who better to learn podcasting from than people who are professional communicators and educators, right? So eventually I plan to go into other zones and that'll change the nature of the information. Right now, I'm trying to maybe inspire, maybe just tell other beginning podcasters or people who are about to begin podcasting or thinking about podcasting some of the information that they need to gather before they begin. It seems to work really well when my guests tell them all the information, I just ask the question. Unlike now.AI know that I was absolutely in your target audience. I saw your podcast come out right around the time that we were starting TC Talk. And I thought, oh, I want to hear the behind the scenes of the different ways that people do this. So I have personally appreciated that. But it sounds like it emerged out of just a personal interest, is that right?JYeah. I wanted to know what it was like to do podcasting so that I could teach podcasting. And with that in mind, I thought I should find some experts to learn from and they're already out there and they're all doing the thing, but then we're just seeing the final product. So I decided that the only way I was going to be able to get that behind the scenes information was to go ask somebody. So that's what I did.AAnd that final product makes it seem so easy.JIt does. And it's not.AWhat choices do you make to communicate your message to your audience? And that might include things like choosing the mode of podcast in the first place. The types of questions you ask, the tone you aim to strike, anything like that.JWell, being a early to mid Gen-Xer, I grew up watching shows that were like James Lipton. He used to do Inside the Actor's Studio, right. And there was all these late night talk shows and stuff I liked as well. But James Lipton always stuck out because he kinda stuck to the same set of questions. And I thought if I did that, that would make the answers that my guests give highlight the many ways that we can do this. So it wouldn't be the same answer every time, but it'd be the same question every time. And then the various answers give people a lot of different directions they can go. At least that was the hope. So that was a choice that I made was to kind of stick with that model of asking very similar questions to every guest.AThat makes sense. You want to show that variety, keeping those questions consistent.JMm-hmm.AAs you have done more episodes, how has your approach changed, if at all?JWell, obviously, I have adopted the things that I've learned from my guests from show one until now. I've learned a lot of things. I'm probably going to put together like a bonus episode for this season, sharing some of the best of that, putting it together in a shorter version instead of our normal like half-hour, 45-minute version. But yeah, I've, I've adopted a lot of the things that my guests have shared as secrets for recording, secrets for editing. A lot of that behind the curtain knowledge. So hopefully those choices are coming across in the final product as the podcast matures.AWhat's the best advice that you have heard and applied so far?JAudio markers for when we have some sort of a snafu in the recording or in the interview, some people will bang on a desk so people will clap. Some people will leave a long silence and looks, look for the trough in the wave form. But some sort of a visual marker to make editing easier.AWe don't do that.BWe don’t.AWe just say we have to edit that out.JWhich is also a marker.AThere you go, okay.BIt's just less visual.JRight. And the other one was a bit of advice that you guys actually gave me, but I was already doing it. I'm trying to do all of my episodes kinda bunched together, before doing one at a time and then releasing it one at a time and then releasing it because that is almost a full-time job. So taking the time that I have available to me, just recording a bunch of episodes is what I think I'm gonna be doing for next season as well.AAnd giving yourself some breathing room then when it comes time to release those.JI teach four classes per term and they're all writing intensive classes. So time is at a premium.BOoh.AMore general question. Now, what potential do you think podcasting holds for everyday technical communicators? So that could be scientists, teachers, medical professionals, students, even hobbyists. It doesn't need to be you know a traditionally technical area. So what potential to podcasting hold for those people to convey their messages to a variety of audiences?JThat’s a really good question. Something that I'm looking at right now. I'm writing a paper or two about it. I really like to follow this group of folks on YouTube called homesteaders. They're really interesting. Everything that they do, I'm sort of hanging on every word. They do a lot of vlogging and they started out, in fact, blogging. But now there's some doing podcasts as well. So this is one example where a community has formed around the communication, the electronic communication with really wide dissemination possibilities. And I think that the place is sharing things that some of the things that they talk about on that show were almost lost knowledge. And they're bringing some of that stuff back. And then even some of it is new tweaks on an old a bit of knowledge. So they're bringing these things back and they’re augmenting them and they're carrying them into the future so that we don't lose who we are, where we came from. So there's kind of an eye to the future there. But there's also a line into the past so we can kinda center ourselves and form an entire community around these modes of communication, both the video vlogging and the, they have different, just like in fact, that's probably going to be my next season if I can talk enough of them into doing episodes with me, is to talk about the activism of homesteading. And so recruiting as a potential thing that podcasts can do, forming the community and also anchoring us to our past. And those are just, just, just off the top of my head.AAnd you must know Benton is in his element right now as you're talking.JI had no idea.BYou said homesteading and I was like, ah.ASo what was the channel again or is it just a general?JKind of a general. I first started watching them when I ran into oh, now I'm going to geek out here for a moment, if you don't mind.APlease.JSo Joel Salatin, I ran into him on a movie, Food Inc. And then there were other movies. So they did documentaries and put them in video forms, put them out on different like Netflix and Amazon and things like that. So that's where I first saw them. And then around that community, they, they organically started using podcasting and vlogging and other things. So then Justin Rhodes is where I went for the next solid one I could hold onto because he was there all the time and kept coming back week after week with new episodes. And then there are probably a dozen more. The Fit Farmer being one, Mike Dickson. Sow the Land is also one of my favorites. Art and Bri, and who else is there in there? There's so many. I can't name them all now and I would leave someone out and then they would be like, really upset and not do interviews with me.AAnd what is it about the podcasting? What does, in that space, what does a podcast do that say a blog post could not?JWell, this I actually learned from my son. I can walk around the block and listen to a podcast where I couldn't do that with my television. I could ride a bike, I could ride a bus. I could go out in my garden and turn over some compost and I could do that with some headphones on, still listen to the podcast. So I can occupy my intellect while my body's doing other things.AMakes washing dishes so much more enjoyable.JI don't really think of it like a download though. I mean, I don't commit to memory everything that they say. But I kinda get support, I think from that particular group.AAnd there's something about the voice too, hearing people talk that gives you a window into who they are which you might not otherwise get.JThis is something I just recently learned from a music professor that hearing the sound of another person's voice is as close as you can possibly be because the sound of their voice and the actual thing that they're producing is going inside your body and vibrating your eardrum, right? So it's actually, without actually physically touching skin to skin it's the closest you can be to another person. And now we can, we can do that almost teleporting now with, with podcasts. And that's the other thing that podcasts are, and I don't know if we're gonna be able to find a way to preserve them long enough. But just like writing, it's time travel for thoughts. Which I really enjoy that idea that I can, I can speak into a page or into a microphone. And then like months and years later, somebody else could dig that up and my ideas come out. Or somebody's ideas have come out again.BYou could be like, Oh man, that was back before this catastrophe. Huh. Those times.AAnd I didn't realize that you did so much teaching around podcasts. So thinking of students doing podcasting as technical communication, how have you approached that? What kinds of work have they produced?JI think they use it as social communication more than technical communication because of the particular class, I think the way it was structured. It was a lot of creative writing majors and things like that. So they're using that techne for the purpose of communicating emotion and communicating social awareness and things like that. so that might not be the answer you're looking for because I don't think I've had any do strictly technical subjects, although I'm always open to that. Let them do that if they want to.AEither way, there's, there needs to be that careful consideration of audience. Whether it's more creative or more scientific.JThat as a teacher, I think is the very first thing I tried to impress on all of my students in all my classes because it's the hardest thing to get them to shake. That I'm not the audience for the thing that they're making, whatever they're making. It's actually someone else and they have to find out who that is so that they can best communicate to them.ABefore we get to the fun, you know, the funnest question, is there anything you want to let us know about the work you do in podcasting to technically communicate? What have we missed?JGood question. I don't really consider it work. I consider it almost historiography the way that I've undertaken this particular podcast, because I'm hoping to get folks interested in producing instead of just being consumers. And I think that probably goes beyond podcasting, but definitely with podcasting as well.AI like that. I realized when I started podcasting, Hey, I'm a creator. It’s a, you shift into a different mode. You're putting things out into the world versus just consuming and analyzing, and pushing students to do that as well.BI personally have had waxing and waning of creator versus consumer. I'll get to a point where I'm like, ugh, I'm just watching so many shows and I'm not creating anything and it's what am I doing here? And then I'll have a push of like trying to come up with a board game or this or that that I want to create and then I’ll peter out a few weeks into it.AYour building projects.BMy building projects. Although that last oneAThat closet is amazing. The shelving impeccable.BIf we took all of the stuff that we've put in there out of it now, it'd be almost to Instagram worthy.AYeah, we forgot to do the before and after. We are off topic, Benton.BThat's what I'm here for, haha.AIt's true.BI am here to make sure that your plans do not go linear.AThat is exactly what happens. I come in with my nice neat outline and then we're talking about shelving.BOkay, so. The fun question, we'd like you to teach us as non-experts, a fun fact, definition or process you find interesting about a hobby of yours. Assuming you have hobbies which, you know, I think is fair to assume.JYeah, it would be fair to assume because I have every hobby. I really am, I enjoy all the things, everything that there is to do, I've probably been passionate about it at one time or another. I guess two of my favorite things that are like not work stuff are probably gardening and cooking. So which of the two would you rather hear?BThey sound interrelated in fact.JYeah, everything is related. We really do like to try to grow what we can here. We've got a little less than an acre, but we like to try to grow whatever we can here and bring it in as it's quantitatively different food than you find in the supermarket. It tastes different, it acts different, it looks different. It's a lot, a lot more satisfying, I think, to grow your own stuff, bring it in and cook it up and serve it to the family.BDo you plant seeds yourself? Like plant them indoors? Or gosh Alabama, I suppose maybe you don't have to worry about frost.JYeah, actually, we do. We are in the very north of Alabama where about 15 miles or so from, maybe 20 miles from the Tennessee border. So we do get a little bit, we got a couple of inches of snow the other day when y’all were buried. So we have a little greenhouse. It's not heated or anything, it’s just a little plastic and metal frame greenhouse, so we use that to start seeds. We’re just about to do that now. Another way that we do this is to put seeds in the ground. And I have built raised beds. When we bought the house, they were three long rows. So we divided those into six long raised beds and then added six more raised beds. And now we have some more, a patch that we dug up in the middle of the yard. And the neighbors are looking at us like we're crazy, but we like it anyway. And then of course, we're planting trees and bushes and things all over the place too. Anything that will give us food. You couldn't tell by looking at me, but I do like to eat food as well. The thing that we do with those raised beds though, is we'll take seeds, put them in the ground, even just before the last frost. And then we'll put plastic over top of that, staple it down to the wood. And then when we staple that to the wood, it creates a mini little greenhouse effect. And then by the time we get past the last frost, we can pull that off and then we've got little sprouts going on in there. So most of the root vegetables need a little while to grow. So we do that with those. Currently I have 2, 3 kinds of radishes going on. Then some lettuce and some turnips and some carrots and some peas, and it's early in the season, but we're working on it. That's what I'm supposed to be doing during the spring break.AYeah. That kind of reminds me of the stuff you got to start setting up.BAh, yes. I was always very ambitious and starting things indoors last year and I had innumerable cut apart milk jugs that were, with holes drilled in them for drainage. And I don’t know, I'd say maybe like 60% of this stuff sprouted up and then it died before I could get it in the ground because I’d started a little too early.ASo much trial and error.BYep.JAnd adaptation. When something goes wrong, then you go find somebody who's got some starts, either buy some or borrow some from them. But yeah, that's, that's gardening. That's what happens. You can never tell what's going to happen. So you just adapt when something does.AWhat's a favorite dish that you cook from vegetables that you've harvested yourself.BI know it's hard to get them all out of the ground at the same time.JIt is. I do have one that I want to make, that my grandpa's recipe of red pepper relish, he made a pepper relish that has three kinds of bell peppers and some onions. And let's see what else was in there, 1 jalapeno pepper in the whole batch. So that is something I'm aiming for this year. For some reason it's very hard for me to grow peppers. Okay, it's very hard for me to grow bell peppers. I can grow as many hot peppers as you want.BPeppers are finicky, I’ve heard.AWe have not been able to get any successful peppers. But that pepper relish rather sounds delicious. I hope you get a chance to make it.JSo do I. I've been out for a couple of years now.AWell, it was lovely to talk to you, Joseph, and thank you so much for sharing about your podcasting and your gardening and how you communicate about those.JThanks, it’s been a joy.

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We sat down with our friends Lindsey and David to talk about medical misinformation and its effects on relationships, the challenge of choosing what to trust in the swirl of constantly changing pandemic info, and the role that communication can play in increasing access to vaccines and clinical trials. Lindsey and David also tell the story of their family's participation in clinical trials for the COVID vaccines, and the surprising ways it changed their views on social media and the medical research process.

Sources and further reading

• Gerrard, M. and R. Nevil (2006). We're all in this together. [Recorded by V. Hudgens, A. Tisdale, L. Grabeel, and D. Seeley]. In High School Musical [Videorecording]. Disney Channel.
• Holmes, R. (1979). Escape (The Piña Colada song). On Partners in Crime [Album]. Infinity Records.
• Osterholm, M. (2020-2022). The Osterholm Update. [Podcast]. University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars

Transcript

AHi, I’m Abigail Bakke and this is TC Talk. I teach and research on the topics of technical communication and health writing, and I do this podcast with my non-academic partner, Benton. This episode is a little different because it’s our first interview-based one. One of our goals with TC Talk is to help show that tech comm is not just a topic for academics, but that it makes a difference in people’s everyday lives. And so when I heard that our friends Lindsey and David had enrolled their child in a COVID vaccine trial, and subsequently enrolled themselves in a trial, I wanted to hear about their experience. They were kind enough to talk to us about how they researched the vaccine, what it was like participating in a clinical trial, and why they would do it again.AWe can start with not official questions yet. Just kinda warm up. Sometimes helps to start with something that's a little not like. Tell me about yourself and what skills you bring to this company.DWhat would you say you do here?AOkay. So I asked Ben if he had any questions and he had one, but it might be way too personal, soDLet's start with a personal one and then there'll be downhill from there.BWhat is the most off the wall or bizarre thing that any of your parents have said about vaccines?DCan I go first? I know right off the top my head.LYeah, go for it.DIn the summer after the first wave. And so we were visiting my brother for my birthday actually. And our [Offspring #1] had gotten sick with a cold or something. We'd had him COVID tested. We hadn't had the results back at the time, but I remember going down and I made it, cooked all this food. I drop it off. I say, well [Offspring #1]’s sick. So out of an abundance of caution you won't see us today. And my mom said, “Oh good, maybe he got COVID, so he will get antibodies that way.”LWhich was the safer way to get them in her mind.DWhich is so insane. That's not what antibodies are for, mom. Like. You don't get them to have them. They're not like Pokémon where you just collect antibodies. It was it was so bizarre. Yeah. And it's just one of those mm-hmm? kind of moments.LYeah. And my story, I mean, all of the cliche fears that people have who are anti-vaxxers like it somehow connects you to 5G or et cetera, et cetera. Like my family would believe those. But I don't know how to make this not the biggest downer in the world, but this is the most bizarre, unfortunate thing was when my dad was really ill with COVID. He asked my mom as he was laying in bed with really low oxygen, I was begging my mom to take him to the hospital. And he said, “Can you please get me the vaccine?” Like in that moment was when he finally thought, Crap, I need this. And my mom had to say, that's not how they work. Up until then they had, their argument with me was we are smart people too. Just because we didn't go to college doesn't mean that we don't also read up on these things. And then in that moment, I'm kind of surprised my mom even told me that story because it revealed so much to me. Like yes, they were reading a lot. But they had no understanding at all. My dad at least had no even basic understanding of how a vaccine would work. He thought it was like a treatment.BWell, I guess one kudo to your mom for knowing that that's not how vaccines work and being right?AAnd two kudos for your dad, for being willing to get it even if at the wrong time.DI mean he’s since changed his mind again and now it doesn't…LOh yeah. They still, you know, they don't need a vaccine now because “they already got it and they proved that it's not deadly and they have their immunity now.”AOh right, the antibodies.BIt’s not deadly, so how bad it was didn't matter.LYeah, not anymore because he survived it. So whew, got lucky.AYeah.LWhich is true, but also, you could follow that up with a vaccine.AThat must have been so scary.LIt was. And frustrating.AAnd before we chat about the vaccine trials that you guys participated in, tell us a little about yourself. And like I said before, you can go totally secret agent and come up with your own pseudonyms. Or you can use your full name, whatever you're comfortable with.LI'm Lindsey. I was a public school music teacher for 11 years. Then I had my kids and I decided to be a stay-at-home parent. And my background is a bachelor's degree in music education and a master's degree in education and curriculum instruction. I love cats.BOut of curiosity, when did you decide to stay at home?LWhen I was on maternity leave, I started dreading going back to work. And then I got lucky enough that the teacher who had been subbing for me, I asked him, I said, “Would you be willing to go part-time and keep half of my job” and he said, “Yeah, that works for me.” So then I worked half-time for a whole school year. And that gave me the opportunity to test out what does it feel like to drop my kid off at daycare and go to work. And what does it feel like to be at home with him? And at the end of it, I just knew I wanted to be home with him more than I wanted to be teaching.AIt's such a nice way to kind of experiment with, these are the different options. This is what it would be like.LYeah.DAnd then COVID did move your timeline up quite a bit.LYeah. As I was teaching half-time, COVID happened in March and then I was teaching remote at home half time.DYeah. And then our daycare just, our daycare completely shut down.AI remember that actually because Lindsey, you were like, I have to keep my windows open at school even though it's March and cold in Minnesota. And I was like, does that actually do anything? And it turns out that ventilation actually super matters. But that was at the stage where we were all like we need to wash hands.LYes.ADidn't know much about it. David, how about you?DHi, I'm David. I am a full-time software developer. And I have an undergrad degree in Management Information Systems.LI want to emphasize that we're both like middle-class, boring white people who have undergrad degrees and had to work really hard to research and find information about COVID in general and vaccines. That's why I kind of wanted to state our levels of education because the whole process of going through clinical trials was fascinating to me. Like what kind of abilities you need for technical reading, your social connections, the kind of job you have, all of those affect whether or not you can even participate in a trial.AYeah, absolutely. So you're obviously privileged in ways that lower some barriers. Yeah.AAnd yet, like you said, it was a challenge.LYeah, and I guess now that you say that I also want to say, we always say this phrase like “we've done the research.” And my parents say that too. And the fact is we have not researched. We are simply reading other people's research or what they are presenting as research.WMeow.LHe came back. Sorry.AThanks Woolly Bear. I agree.LHe emphasizes. Yeah. So a big part of our journey with clinical trials was that we had parents who completely ignored all of the scientific evidence and public health information that was available to them. And we had to decide how much we were going to continue engaging with them and seeing them knowing that the kind of risks that they took were not what we would take with our lives. And then especially with our boys like do we let them see our children if they're not taking any COVID precautions? And we knew that that would essentially break our relationship with our parents. And because that is such a significant decision to make, we did, I did like a genuinely crazy amount of reading. Like I had to talk about it with my therapist because I would spend hours each night looking at research articles, finding people on social media like epidemiologists and public health scientists trying to make sure, like are we making the right decision? And in that process of course, stumbling over tons of misinformation.AWow.LWe were thankfully seeing social media accounts of epidemiologists who would say, “Hey, I see this totally inaccurate, false information floating around. Here's why it's not correct.” And then they would debunk it. When I say we did our own research, it was really just,DI mean it's the same thing. We consumed social media is what we did.LYeah.DBut it was like the good stuff. Like, I don't know, being able to vet the people a little bit, look at their background, understand, oh, here's your credentials.LHere's where you got your education, here’s who's funding your research, where you work. Are other people in a science community in agreement with you? Is there any kind of consensus? Does it align with like public health messaging that we're hearing from the CDC? We just did tons and tons of reading because for me, I needed that affirmation that I was making the right decision. And I think if we hadn't been dealing with that relationship situation, there's no way I would've done that much reading. I would have just been saying like, well, what does the CDC say? And then let's go with that.AYeah.LWe went above and beyond what they tell you to do.AAnd that process you're describing, that does not come naturally, you know, so when someone says, “Oh, I did my research,” like you said, that can mean a lot of different things.BI looked at Wikipedia.AI typed something into Google, or more frequently, I looked something up and cherry-picked the information that supports my preconceived idea.BI checked it out on Brightbart and here's the real truth that they don't want you to know.LYes.AAnd knowing that you're educated and you value public health. Were you kind of going in with an awareness of, Hey, these are my biases and, you know, what does it take to break past that and really approach this with an open mind?DYeah. I would say constantly. We were so concerned about being right. And maybe that's like really type-A firstborn stuff, but that like we had to dig in and understand and really vet who we were listening to and what our sources were. Just because our parents were constantly coming at us with this stuff. And so half the job was debunking the garbage they were throwing at us. But then being super paranoid that the stuff that we weren't consuming was in turn garbage. Because we were basically following Instagram influencers, right? Like highly credentialed influencers. But in the back of your mind, you know, there's always potentially economic incentives for getting views and everything and so just being really paranoid about being right I think drove us to, I don't know, Just look into the backgrounds of these people and make sure that they were trustworthy.AIt sucks that you have to approach it with that level of fear. But you understand the stakes and you understand the information out there, it's just not clear cut because even the most credible sources that we could consult, the CDC, for instance, they've changed recommendations. They have walked back certain recommendations. And this is not me saying the CDC is not credible, but it's just acknowledging, I can get why people get skeptical.BIt is not a common thing outside of the circle of scientists to understand the scientific process.AWhich requires changing and adapting as you get more information.BExactly, it's the opposite of politics where you take information and you fit it to your understanding. Science is new information comes up, you reassess your understanding to fit the information. With something that's completely new like Coronavirus was, new information was coming out faster than we could really get a handle on it. Every nation in the world had different approaches. Most of them were wrong at the beginning. About like, should we panic about what's happening in China? Boy, I'm glad it's there and not here. Yeah.AGuilty.LAnd I am thinking about when you’re talking about the CDC having to shift its guidance based on its new information that it's getting. Not only do the general population have to understand that, they also have to understand that they're balancing like individual health versus truly public health. And I was listening to a podcast by Dr. Osterholm and he was one of the advisors to the Biden team. And he said that he was a part of the team that was talking and giving input on well, how long should we say you have to isolate after you have a positive test? And he said, he just point blank said, we chose five days because our hospitals would have collapsed if we had chosen less than that. I misspoke. It would collapse if we chose more than that.BAnd probably the other too because it’s gonna spread.DYeah, more cases then.LYeah. That's not at all based on how long you're contagious or anything like that. So not only are you having to give grace to the CDC for the fact that it's changing its guidelines according to the changing data that it's getting, but you also then have to look at their guidelines and somehow as an individual parse out, Okay, well, that's what that means for the hospital system in the US. What does it mean for my individual family?DWhich just brings to light the impossible task, right? How do you pick the right one? They picked they picked five. Who knows if that was right?AYep. I do want to ask too about where this originated for you because if I understand correctly, you got the initial COVID vaccine, but you were in the trial for this booster that's just come out, Is that right?DThe booster prior to this one. So not the bivalent COVID one, the one that Europe got.LWhich is BA.1. So the original Omicron variant, that's the trial that we entered into.BWhole family?LJust David and I were in the Omicron booster study and our youngest son, who is 20 months right now, he was in the trials for the original vaccine for children. And he was the first one in it. So we knew we wanted to vaccinate our kids. We were desperately waiting for any kind of data and they kept on pushing the timelines, if you remember, they would say, well, it's coming out in September and then Pfizer would make an announcement and oh, it's not until November.DWe actually turned down an opportunity to join the studies earlier.LOh yeah, that’s right.DI forget the exact timelines, but we were under the assumption of vaccines would be here for our kids in two or three months. And at that time we were like, okay, the blood draws are gonna be traumatic. Our kids like the doctor so far, like, let's not give them a reason not to. Which in hindsight seems ridiculous. So ridiculous. And of course, those dates, it was nine months more, after thatLWe were getting increasingly frustrated that we were having to wait so long and kicking ourselves like why didn't we take the chance to get them in the trials? Because round one of the trials is where they figure out dosing, so for sure your kid gets the real vaccine. But they're testing out what doses they’re at, which was also part of our hesitation because we were like, Oh what if they get a really high fever from too high of a dose?DThat was before we had done really any research at that point.LYeah.DI don't think we had a good understanding of the vaccines at that point. And so that, that first decision was kind of made in ignorance.LIt was and then we realized that as time went on, like the side effects from vaccines are only temporary. There's nothing lasting about them when you're looking at a dosing, a dosage, phase one trial. So then we reached out to the trial. What do I want to call it?DCoordinator.LCoordinator and said, Hey, we really regret this. Can we, any chance you still have openings? And at that time, the age group for our older son had closed. But they still had spots for the six-month to two-year-olds. And so we were like, Yes. Okay. We want a spot. Let's get in. And by that time, they had determined what dosage level was most effective and had the least amount of side effects. And so then it was just a matter of you're either gonna get a 25, what is it, microgram dose of the Moderna vaccine, or you'll get a placebo, and you'll have to do two blood draws. So we said like yes, let's jump at the chance. And it was a 70% chance of getting the real thing, 30% chance of getting placebo. And we didn't know what we had. He had a teeny tiny rash on his leg like one day afterwards after one of the doses. Otherwise we couldn't tell at all. And then when the data from the trials finally came in and the FDA approved it, then you get unblinded and we found out he had been placebo.AOh, bummer.LYeah. But during that time when I brought him in for one of the appointments to get I think his second dose. We didn't know if it was a dose of placebo or not. They said, Oh, by the way, we're doing trials for adults for the Omicron booster, do you want to be in it? And as they're, as you have your baby laying there, like getting blood draws. Of course you're like, Well I can't sign my kid up for this and not sign us up. We immediately said yes. So that's how we got into the study.BClever move.APlay on your parental guilt.LYeah. And that was part of round one of why we said, Oh, no, we're not ready to join a phase one trial. Part of it also was like, would we have signed ourselves up for a trial?DWe absolutely would now.LBut at the time we were like, I don't know. I don't think I would have signed up for a trial. So is it like moral or ethical to sign your child up for something that you wouldn't be willing to do? Now, having gone through it, I would absolutely do a trial again.DThe part I'm kinda curious about is over the months and as the vaccines for kids kept getting more delayed and more delayed. I don't know how much of our growth in understanding was anything we did, or if it was just lots of other people became frustrated in the same way that we were and so more information about, it was just produced and the great algorithm gave it to us, right?AYeah. It's totally fair though, that at first you didn't have enough information to make a decision, and then you did have enough information. And that speaks to the informed consent process too. When you were initially approached with this trial opportunity, how was it framed for you? Did you feel like you had a good sense of the pros and cons, risks?LI want to back up just a little bit and say that the only reason we found out about the children's trial was through a friend whose wife works at the trial site. And he said like, Hey, I know you guys are COVID cautious. My wife is running a trial for kids. You could see if you can get into it. So right off the bat, there's like the first barrier about like whether or not you participate in trials. We knew that man, we knew his wife. We felt comfortable with them. We know their education levels, we know them on a personal level. We know that they would never participate in something that was nefarious or negligent. But then after that they send you a, so we say Sure, we'll talk to her, please send us the information and you get a big packet of information that is veryBIt's like a small book, right?LYeah. I want to say it was like 25ish pages long, double-sided, size 12 font. And it's from the actual research company, so like ours was, it was clear that Moderna had written the document and it was very technical language. You had to read it several times to wrap your head around, like okay. So if your kid is in cohort one, they have this many blood draws and they draw this amount and here's their chance of placebo versus non placebo. And all of it is in really technical language.ANo pictures?LNo. No, not a single picture.DLogos.AI mean at least make a video, right? I have to ask, did you read it?LYes.DOh, yeah.AOkay. Okay. Because I wouldn't blame you if you didn't. Like I can see how information coming to you in that format automatically is going to create a barrier for some people. Like I said, you both are very well-educated and yet, it sounds like you found it if dense andBI'm sure it was written for the courtroom.DYep. They’re definitely covering their butts a little bit in it.LYeah. The paperwork that we read is the same paperwork they turn in to the FDA.DWhich is not bad, like yes, please tell me, you know, exhaustively all of the potential outcomes of this trial. But it was hard to put in perspective like, you know, outcome is fever. Well, what does that actually mean? High fever. Okay, well, what are the odds of that? Well, you don't know yet because it's a trial so there's a little unknown in there and a lot of scary medical terms too.ASo was it for potential participants or was it just like, oh, here's a, here's a legal document that has to do with this trial. Take a look at it if you want. Was there any communication that was directly for people like you trying to decide, do I do this?LThat was it. Like we said, Hey, we're interested. What is the information that you can give us? And that was the document we were given. But there wasn't any, like you said, like pictures or a little tutorial video that the research program that we went through put together. It was, here's this giant packet. Read through it. Let me know if you have questions, I will answer your questions and then you tell me yes or no if you want into this trial. So we were able to ask questions and they were always able to answer them thoroughly and in layperson terms.DYeah. Just sort of the logistics of it though. The office here where we live is not like the scientist branch of the whole thing that, that was Moderna doing it there. So it was more of we were asking the administrative people questions, which was super helpful for a certain class of questions. But for another class of questions, you know, they aren't the researchers. So they, they couldn't really speak to that.ANot to mention you have to know what questions to ask in the first place.DYeah.BSo this is a little bit of a sidetrack, but definitely related. Did either of you ever do a PRACS study?DNo.LNo. But you did, didn't you?BI did like 12 or 15 of them.LMoney in college, right? How did you approach that as like as a very young adult in, because it was in undergrad, right?BYeah.AAnd for our listeners who don't get the regional reference, PRACS is?BThey do I believe it's phase two clinical trials, which isLEfficacy essentially, right?BEfficacy. Technically bioavailability. So I think that they did a number of comparing brand name to generic. They did clinical trials for FDA approval of new medications coming on the market. I asked because I’ve got a lot of familiarity with all of the informed consent like this is what they ask you. This is what they need to know. This is what you gotta sign and initial and date the bottom of every damn page because that's what the FDA needs to see.ATo be fair. You had a bit of it invincibility complex when you were in college.BOh boy, did I.DI think the institute knows that and that's why they set up in a college town.AThat's why they are in a college town. 100%. But did you, but what about you? Did you read through the stuff or was it mostly a Q&A with a real live human? What was that typically like for you?BSo on the intake for PRACs studies, a human walks through it and you have, you can't say yeah. You can't say uh-huh. You have to say yes or no.AWow.BIt's super regimented in that way. The paperwork for what you are consenting to has sections that are completely not of interest to you. And then you’ll get to like side effects. Ooh, let's see what we got here. We got diarrhea. Okay, that's nice.AYou did get to do like a morphine thing once though. You kind of dug that, didn’t you?BUh, no. it was actually probably like naloxone, something like that. It's a opioid blocker. And that was in the less pleasant of my studies becauseAYou've never been able to look at beef stew the same again.BOh boy, yeah. I had the actual drug instead of placebo and they fed you beef stew. I was just like, that's great, that's great. I think that, I could be wrong. I think that part of it was that they had to give you morphine and then they gave you naloxone or whatever. And there wasn't really a happy time from morphine. But like the naloxone like I remember laying down and like my head was doing this and my stomach was doing this and I was just like, oooooh, earning my money this time.ABenton is gesturing by making a spiral motion with his hands.BSwirly move with my hands. Right.LOkay, but I'm curious, we joined a trial because we wanted protection for our children and for ourselves then, you know, with the Omicron booster like it was so motivating, the health of our children. Why did you join a trial?BMoney.LYeah.BThat's the whole thing. They were looking for healthy subjects. They were looking for healthy participants to do these studies. And the benefit you get isn't like a vaccine trial where you actually get a health benefit.LBenefit, yeah.ALab rats.BYou rent your body out and sure. They'll feed you and house you, and then they'll pay you at the end.AWhich is, it's good that they pay you. But I can also see how inequitable that could be.BOh yeah.ABecause people who need that money are maybe going to disregard some legitimate risks. Were you guys paid?DNot yet, but yeah. You do get paid.LYou do get paid, which to be honest to me, feels kind of icky, especially like for our son. Ew, this is not at all why I'm doing it. And yeah, we can put it into a savings account and he can have access to it.DRight? But the thought of like spending it on pizza delivery is like what, that feels so twisted.BThanks, son.LAnd looking at for you Ben, you could say, I'm a college student, I can give a weekend of my time, earn some money, and it doesn't interfere with my classes. Maybe like the majority of the time. Right?BLargely, yeah.LYeah. And for us, like going to a clinical trial, I don't understand who can participate in this besides people who are essentially like upper middle-class with jobs that are so flexible because I'm a stay-at-home mom. I could make an appointment anytime, drive my child in and David works from home, and so we take turns flip-flopping. Okay. You go to the trial site first. When you get back, you watch the kids and I’ll go. The amount of flexibility and privilege we had even to participate, that immediately takes away a giant pool of the population who is never going to participate in a trial.DOr could, or just, yeah. Like in the case of the COVID studies and the medical upside, like there's a benefit that just isn't available toLto a whole bunch of people. Yeah. And Abi, you were saying that for a certain population of people, they might really need the money and be willing to overlook some significant side effects or associated risks. And there's also the flip side, you know.AYes, yes.LYou would think it would be more profound to have a vaster range of socioeconomic populations, racial populations, right? The barriers to getting into a trial, you would think have to then affect results in some way. And in my mind, I'm like, I think the vaccine trials would've been even better, right? Because people in lower socioeconomic settings were often the essential workers who were out there getting COVID.AGood point.BWorking class.LWe like, in a way, feel guilty. Oh, we got these vaccines and we just stayed home in our bubble. So like our data didn't even really measure to the extent it could have had that spot been given to someone else whose child was in a daycare setting or who cleaned hospital rooms. Does that make sense?ATotally. And it comes back to how do you design a trial to be equitable? And that conflicting with the speed of we gotta get this done. We gotta get this available. Yeah, I, I'm glad I don't do research in that particular realm.BAnd I think that there's an awful lot of institutional inertia on that because I mean, what was it? It can't be more than a couple of decades that the pharmaceutical industry was like, Oh, maybe medicines affect men and women differently. It was initially designed to be very practical for the researchers. Like, at a university. You can rope in students for a study for extra credit. It costs you nothing and you get a lot out of it.AThis is why IRBs were created.BYou get people of a certain age. You don't get people who are not at the same college in that way.ARepresentative of the population. Do you have any thoughts about how it could have been done differently to get that wider participation?LMy first thought is their only, their hours are seven to three or something, right? So like evening and weekend hours to have the research site open.DAnd transportation too. But you did get reimbursed with like a gas station gift card, which presumably would pay, that's the transport they're paying for.AIf you have a car.DYeah. Right. If you have a car and you have a Super America by you. You know, like if they would call the Uber to your house, that takes you there, that would have been way more helpful.LGive a public transportation voucher instead of a gas card, a gas gift card.DOr just bring the study to your house, like have the worker, the NP or whatever come to your house.LYou can do blood draws and give vaccines in home, yeah. It blows my mind that the only reason we really heard about it was through a friend and it's on their website. Who is going around googling for research institutions, trying to find studies to participate in? I don't know what the ethics are of spending money to advertise, or put up little flyers with tearaway numbers or something like, but how can you get even the information out?DFacebook ads.LYeah. Laughing just because Facebook destroyed your parents.AOh no.LHow would they, yeah.DOne of the things they could also change is you don't get paid until the very end, which there’s probably reasons for that, but that's not helpful for someone who needs to make rent.BGraduated payment.AI like how you're describing both logistical things that could make it more accessible and also acknowledging the human side of it, right? In terms of, you learned about it through someone you knew and trusted. And I think for a lot of communities, essentially a stranger coming in with the white coat clipboard kind of setup, that is not conducive to trusting that situation and thereby missing out on a potentially very real benefit. So in terms of the communication around the trial, it seems like one point of intervention could be getting the word out about it in the first place. And like being creative about the venues for getting that message out. But also like we were talking about with the informed consent piece, say you learned about the trial, but how are you going to feel informed enough to make the decision that's right for you. And on that side, I'm curious too what could have helped in your case. I mean, yeah, maybe you want the dense booklet for transparency purposes, but for practical purposes, is there something else that could have helped you feel more confident in your decision?DI think having somebody not paid by Moderna explain it to us went a long ways. Well, actually several people, Here's how the studies work, Here's what the real risks are. And then just the vaccine in general, where the economic incentives were more clear and seemed more in our favor. I think that helped a lot.LAnd I'm thinking too, the first opportunity we had was for our child. And as a mom, I was thinking about like, wondering like how traumatizing is it? And to have known another parent who was also in the trial or had gone through something like that, or even seeing a video, maybe of a child getting a blood draw. I had never seen a baby get a blood draw before. He was really young. And even just that reassurance of seeing a child around my kid’s age go through an appointment would have been so comforting to think, Okay, that's what it looks like. We go to these rooms, That's how you hold the baby when the baby gets its blood drawn. Because otherwise your anxious mind starts swirling and projecting and picturing like when they do the blood draw, they probably have to strap a Velcro strap around every limb and around their head. And the child is screaming and they won't let you be in the room. That's where my brain was going and in reality, he sat and his torso was against my torso and I hugged him. And there were two nurses and one had like stickers and a little Daniel Tiger video was playing and the other nurse did the blood draw. And she was the one who her previous job was drawing blood from mice in labs. And I'm like, well, if you can hit a mouse vein, you can hit my baby’s vein. And she did. It was, it was quick. Did he like it? No. He cried and his body, he stiffened his body, like aaaagh. He obviously didn't like it, but it was so much less scary for both him and me than I pictured it being. Yeah. So how could I have gotten past that? Seeing another family go through it even if it was in a video. Now, if it was like a gross, old, cheap looking promotional video from Moderna, would I have believed it?DYeah. It would have to come from the right source. It would have to come from, like you said, another mom being like, Okay, come with me. Here's what it looks like.LThis is why I love talking about our experience and why I'm happy to be on this podcast. I tell everyone that we were in these trials and we would do it again. And I think I will. I get invites now, like in my email,DThe second there’s an RSV vaccine, yeah.LThere’s an RSV vaccine trial right now, but it's only for age 65 and older I believe. But yeah. So we would totally do it again, but I just needed to know someone who had been through it.DWell, and some of the Twitterverse was helpful there too, because there was like moms giving their experience with it and describing in whatever it is, 142 characters or less, what their experience was.LI told Abi I joined Twitter specifically for an account from an anonymous woman, but it was all about parents who had kids in the trials. And so you could ask questions of them. How did it go for your kid? What should I expect? How long did the appointments take? And it was so informational and comforting.AOh, that’s brilliant. And that seems like such a productive use of social media for health information.LYeah, it really was.ABecause that is the kind of perspective that only another patient or only another participant can give.BActually social media.DYeah. I mean, my understanding and opinion of social media has changed so much through this experience, like I was super critical when Lindsey first came to me and was like, here's this lady on Instagram talking to me, I'm like, Oh, Instagram influencer is giving you medical tips. Right? But like I mean, it's good to be skeptical. But we found it like an actually useful tool, which is not necessarily a narrative you hear where social media can be good and useful. Especially when traditional media is so garbage and not useful these days, to be able to find a source of hopefully good information that was very relatable and humanized was, I don’t know. It’s not something you, you don't expect Instagram to be that.AIt's a different kind of credibility.LHaving put my child in a trial and put myself and my spouse in a trial. It has made me actually so much more trusting of pharmacological interventions and medicine, vaccines. And I’m surprised by that, but I just like, knowing the rigor of the trials, the amount of information I have to submit to them every week is way more than I thought they ever collected. If my youngest son has a day where he seems off and I have to give him a dose of ibuprofen. I have to record that with them. I have to say he had an off day and I gave him a dose of this medicine on this date at this time. And they have this giant file of information that they can then look at and put together in a dataset to find correlation or causation of side-effects or long-term issues. And knowing now all of the information that they do collect, it makes me trust all of the, what do I say? Like medical products that are on the marketAYeah.LFar more. Truly.AKinda reminds me of like, if you think that there is widespread voter fraud, go work an election.LYes.BYou know, get trained as an Election Judge, and then you'll know.AAnd it also suggests that initially, like you are far from being a science denier, right? And yet there is, there was that sense of distrust. Which again, that's saying something, that there are reasons, there are historical reasons to be suspicious. And yet those don't negate the very real benefits and protocols in place to make trials trustworthy nowadays. So I guess I'm just trying to say it's complicated. Yeah.BYeah. It kind of sounded to me like the corporate and financial things were what clouded sources with distrust for you guys.DI mean, that was a big one. Who's paying you to say this, if anybody, right? A lot of the people that we ended up trusting aren't getting paid at all for it and are doing it in their free time.AOkay. So you would do it again. Is any of your interest in clinical trials linked to that kind of bigger picture of this is how we contribute to society in general, or was it largely individual?LIt was, for me, it was like the individual benefit. And in hindsight, I'm very proud now to be participating. I'm super proud of it.DIt started entirely being individual benefit.LWhich to me would be like the motivating factor for most people to want to participate in trials. If you or a loved one is affected by something.DRight, yeah. And if there hadn't been a pandemic, I would never have enrolled our kid in a in a clinical trial.LYeah. And now knowing what we know, I would do it, yeah, for the benefit of society at large. And a little part of me is like, I acknowledge that, how do I say this. I want to rebel against my parents essentially. They're part of a group of people that I would really like to move away from. And the only way we can move away from the way they think and the choices they make is to push in the other direction as hard as I can and participating in the exact thing they don’t believe in.AI mean at least you saved the rebellion for adulthood, cause if you’d gotten it all out of your system as a teenager, who knows?DThere’s a little left in the tank.AI’ve known Lindsey and David since high school. So I can attest to the fact that you were not rebellious. Not that I know, that I know of.LNo, not at all.BDo you feel like you are more civically minded now as a result of, I suppose there's the participating in the trial, but there's also the pandemic kind of had a very “we're all in this together” [music: “We’re all in this together”]LYes. Yeah. He, David, I'm just volunteering information about you now, never got the flu shot before this.DWell it’s not that I never did, it was real spotty.LIt's like if it was convenient, if they were like at work, I would get out of my cubicle and go get it, but he wouldn't go out of his way to go get it. And now he's like What was I thinking? I have a responsibility to children and elderly people and immune compromised.DYes, I was an idiot. Yeah.AI haven't gotten my flu shot yet for this year. And I also think I'm eligible for the new booster.LAre you three months out from your positive test?ANot quite, actually.LThen you are not yet. You might as well wait.AYou would be though.BI probably would be.AGo get boosted.BMy shot schedule started months before yours anyway because I was an essential worker at that time.ANow you’re inessential. Who needs you?BYeah. Who needs power? That's not important.AElectricity, just to clarify.BElectricity, yeah.AOkay. Is there anything you would want to say to someone who's on the fence about getting vaccinated or getting boosted. Now that you've done all this reading, processed all this information.LThis is where I hit a huge roadblock because I know those people. Well, I don't know people who are on the fence. Who are they? Where are they? I don't think they exist, Abi. That's where my mind goes. That's how cynical I am about it now.DNo, I think you run into ambivalence like me with the flu shot previously, you're going to find people who it's inconvenient to take the time out of your day. It can knock you out for an entire day afterwards. Like if you have to work a shift on Friday, you probably can't get it on Thursday. So where it is inconvenient.LYou know, David has a jam band that he has been trying to participate in in socially distanced ways, which has been incredibly difficult where we live.DPlayed bass in the back of a minivan. And we ran like a 100 foot cord out of this guy's basement. So I could sit in the back of our minivan in January in Minnesota to play with them.AWow.LAnd they had like headphones and a video going.DIt was pretty ridiculous.LBut you did it for a reason. They didn't want to get boosted was it? Or they got the J&J and then they didn't want to go out and get an mRNA vaccine after that?DNo, it wasn't that, it wasLYou told them I cannot come to jam band unless you get that dose man. And he was like, ugh, okay, and went and got it.AHey! Social pressure for the win.LYeah, you put into action was you had someone who is on the fence like, it's not convenient for me and you're like, I'm not going to hang out with you until you do it.DYeah. That’s not a great position to be in. No part of me liked that.LHe could have said no.ANo, but you have every reason to set that boundary because you've got young kids at home.LYeah. Who at the time weren't vaccinated andDYeah. Which I mean, he totally understood and there was no resistance at all to the idea of doing it. And he even went out of his way. He's like, Well, which one do you want me to get? I was like, Okay, definitely go get this one.AOh my gosh.DAnd so he had to drive to the airport.LSo social pressure is your answer?DI don't know. Even a, even a recommendation as you think would be so straightforward as like yes, go get boosted. It sucks that it's so complicated, right? Because like for some people that's just not feasible.BThey’re not in every pharmacy.LYou have to schedule ahead of time.BI was bringing our oldest to get, we were gonna go get a flu shot and her booster. We got there and the pharmacist was like, Oh, yeah, we don't have the one for kids here. And you probably will need to go to this store and you'll need to make a reservation, andAWhich we did. But again, that's an inconvenience and I think that's a great point is to isolate where is the resistance coming from? Is it purely logistical? If that's the case what can you do to support people? If it's more ideological, that's I think what you're getting at Lindsey.LYeah.AWhich is much harder to break through. Darn it. I thought you would have the answer.DSorry.LWhen I saw on your agenda that you are going to ask that question. I was like Pffft, let me know when someone comes up with that answer.DYeah. I mean, yeah. If you have the means to go get vaccinated. Go do it. Like, it's like Ben was saying, It's your civic duty to do so. Go do it. It's mostly for you because of, well, how the vaccines work but it's for, it's for vulnerable populations. It's like you get it so that the guy who can't miss the shift of work, if he's not gonna get it like you are giving him some of that protection. So that's why you should do it. It's a 1000% civic mindedness.AYeah. Is there anything else you want to share? Or you?BI do, since I, since I've got you guys here. Now being home more, is there anything that you guys have done hobby wise or personal interest wise that isAThat you get nerdy about.BThat you, yes.LI mean, I shared mine before, which was researching COVID and vaccines and things like that. Like I actually had to talk to my therapist about like this can't be your hobby, Lindsey, you can’t spend two to three nights hours a night, reading research papers and beyond that, what do I do? I play in a symphony, and I'm starting that in the end of October again.ACan you two somehow figure out how to meld bass guitar and viola, and like create a jam band of your own?LI keep on telling him that his jam band needs to learn 70s, golden 70 songs and I would be their singer, I would do that.Music: “If you love piña coladas”DOh, vocalist.LYeah, I’d be a vocalist. Sure. I'm such a boring, classically trained musician that I'm like, I don't, I have to have music in front of me on the page to play my viola. But I would be your singer. What about you, David?DI've been trying to finish our detached garage into a wood shop. I'm going to try and build guitars.LSo he wired it for all the electricity, all the outlets.DYep. Passed my city inspection. County inspection.BVery cool.DPutting up sheetrock now, I did all the insulation and everything. So it's been a lot of YouTubing to figure out, I'm not a very handy person. So to figure all that out,ATactical technical communication.BMm-hmm.AAlright. Well, thank you so much, again, it was great to chat with you.LYeah, thank you for having us. This was great.

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TC Talk opens its 2nd season with a special episode for the Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2022. We took our own (very literal) spin on the Carnival theme "Rhetoric: Spaces and Places in and Beyond the Academy" and discuss the epic communication challenge of alien-to-human contact, as portrayed in film. From Arrival to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, sci-fi movies have a lot to teach us about technical communication, audiences, and empathy. Don't forget your towel!

Sources and further reading

• Adams, D. (1995). The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1st edition). Del Rey.
• Arecibo Message. (23 Apr. 2018). SETI Institute. https://www.seti.org/arecibo-message
• Blomkamp, N. (Director). (2009, August 14). District 9 [Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller]. TriStar Pictures, Block / Hanson, WingNut Films.
• Columbus, C. (Director). (2015, July 24). Pixels [Action, Comedy, Fantasy]. Columbia Pictures, LStar Capital, China Film Group Corporation (CFGC).
• Comrie, B. (n.d.). Language and Thought. Linguistic Society of America. https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/language-and-thought
• Drake equation. (2022). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Drake_equation&oldid=1101709374
• Garland, A. (Director). (2018, February 23). Annihilation [Adventure, Drama, Horror]. Paramount Pictures, Skydance Media, Scott Rudin Productions.
• Hill, T. (Director). (1999, July 14). Muppets from Space [Adventure, Comedy, Family]. Jim Henson Pictures.
• Hood, G. (Director). (2013, November 1). Ender’s Game [Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi]. Summit Entertainment, MWM Studios, Chartoff Productions.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/
• Jean, P. (Director). (2010, April 8). Pixels [Animation, Short, Action]. One More Production.
• Mission to Zyxx. (n.d.). [Podcast]. Maximum Fun. https://www.missiontozyxx.space
• Sagan, C. Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. (1980). PBS.
• Sagan, C. (1997). Contact. Simon and Schuster.
• Spielberg, S. (Director). (1977, December 14). Close Encounters of the Third Kind [Drama, Sci-Fi]. Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips Productions, EMI Films.
• Villeneuve, D. (Director). (2016, November 11). Arrival [Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi]. Lava Bear Films, FilmNation Entertainment, 21 Laps Entertainment.
• Vuorensola, T. (Director). (2012, April 4). Iron Sky [Action, Adventure, Comedy]. Blind Spot Pictures Oy, 27 Films Production, New Holland Pictures.
• Zemeckis, R. (Director). (1997, July 11). Contact [Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi]. Warner Bros., South Side Amusement Company.
• Zimmerman, J. (2015, October 21). The Cocktail at the End of the Universe. Eater. https://www.eater.com/2015/10/21/9522151/pan-galactic-gargle-blaster-recipes-geek-bars

Transcript

B[Carl Sagan voice] "There are in fact 100 billion galaxies, each of which contain something like a hundred billion stars. Think of how many stars, and planets, and kinds of life there may be in this vast and awesome universe."AWelcome to the season premiere of TC talk, a tech comm podcast. My name is Abi.BI'm Benton.AI am a professor of rhetoric and technical communication,Band I'm not.AAnd because we have different backgrounds, we aim to talk about the scholarship of technical communication in an accessible way.BAnd ideally in a humorous way.AThat was an epic pucker.BAlright, so what just made our faces implode?AWe're drinking Pan Galactic gargle blasters.BAh, the effect of which is having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.AAt least according to Douglas Adams. Was that an accurate description of the effect?BMaybe a large gold coin, I don't know. A large, a large gold brick would be substantial. Gold is freaking dense, man.ASo it's not having the intended effect, which is probably a good thing. ButBYes.ABut I wasn't able to follow the recipe exactly. I had to make some substitutions. For instance, we lack the tooth of an Algolian suntiger.BYeah. They're hard to come by this time of year.AEssentially, it's Long Island iced tea-esque with some mint liqueur and lemon juice.BAnd no tea.AI don't think there is tea in a Long Island iced tea.BWhat? You've never had one?AI have. But apparently the effect of the Long Island iced tea was such that I forgot its components. Anyway, I'll fact check that later. Benton, why are we drinking Pan Galactic gargle blasters as our toast to first episode of season two?BIt's because we are talking about aliens.AThat's right. Tech comm from Outer Space. And this episode is special because it's part of the Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival for 2022. And that is sponsored by the Big Rhetorical Podcast. And the idea is, get a bunch of rhetoric, composition, tech comm podcasters together to prepare an episode around a similar theme. They all get released around the same time. I think this is going to be, ah, August 22 to 25. I took notes. And the theme for this year is Rhetoric: Spaces and Places In and Beyond the Academy.BAnd what could be further beyond the academy than outer space, right?ARight. Not to mention, it's got the word space in the theme, and we decided to interpret that quite literally. And here's why we went this direction. We figured there might be some first-time TC Talk listeners out there. And so we wanted to plan an episode that was quintessentially TC Talk and build on what has been our most popular episode to date. Episode 2, from last September: “What can aliens teach us about technical communication?” So today we're going to discuss some more lessons from alien movies.BI normally,AI'm sorry, this is disgusting.BIs it blasting your gargle?AGalactically.BSo for this episode, I honestly have done more research than for any other episode.AYes. We may have been on a break this summer, but we have been doing research all along,Bwatching alien moviesAeverything from Arrival to Muppets From Space.BYes.ABasically any major alien movie we could think of, except ET. I didn't want to revisit that childhood trauma. What else did we watch?BWe kind of split it up a little bit. I watched a few you didn't.AI think you just watched one that I didn't, District 9 because I've seen it already and it was a little gritty for me.BVery juicy.AUgh. But we watched Contact,Bprobably watched a few that were kind of non-starters. we watched pixelsAstarring Adam Sandler. I cannot believe I sat through that movie. That's dedication. I would only do it for the purposes of research.BYes. Enders game. Oh, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.AAnd I have opinions about these movies, but I should note, I am not a movie critic. I am not sophisticated. I mean, I thought Drumline was a masterpiece. Still do for the record. I cried at Air Bud. So if you disagree with my opinions about Adam Sandler, for instance, don't be mad at me. Maybe I just have bad taste and Adam Sandler is in fact a comedic genius, so. But to debate my taste in movies is not the point of this episode. It's to talk about what does this teach us about technical communication. So all that to say. Why aliens and tech comm, Benton?BFirst of all, science fiction is the best genre out there. Hands down. No holds barred.AThat is an opinion, not a fact.BThat is an opinion, not a fact.ANot a bad opinion, but proceed.BBut it is because science fiction has so much room. Like science fiction is kind of a shell of a genre. It's a context really. You can take any other genre and put it in the context of science fiction, like a romantic comedy in space.AWhat's the romantic comedy in space?BI don't know if it's a comedy. It's the Space Between Us.AOh, okay. What comes to mind for me is space Western.BYes.AA la Joss Whedon’s Firefly. Although Joss Whedon has turned out to be problematic.BHe’s let his creep flag fly.AIndeed. So you'd mentioned there's like the action-based sci-fi or the military sci-fi?BYes, that's kind of where the science is not real, but it doesn't matter because we're blasting aliens.AAnd we ruled out several of those from our very sophisticated analysis here today. I'm also thinking ofBWe should have done Independence Day.AReally?BIt edges over into that military sci-fi, but it's actually got like technical communication going on in the movie.AAh. So not necessarily the communication between humans and aliens, but perhaps by humans to humans about aliens.BRight. You know, the one that we kind of watched and then probably threw out of our analysis was Annihilation,Awhich I don't know that I would well, it's not a perfect fit, but I have a lot of opinions about it that I want to talk about.BOkay.ABecause what the fuck? Anyway, in case we don't find a way to fit it with our theme. Let's just give a little synopsis now. Natalie Portman et al, go into a giant soap bubble where alligators and bears can imitate people. And it's a bad drug trip and there's no plot.BYeah, so inside this bubble, there's an alien artifact that has created the bubble where mutations and evolution are off the chain.AAnd I will say that aspect of it was cool. And in fact, you picked up on the fact that Natalie Portman’s character at one point was reading the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.BYes.ASo there was some scientific basis for what was going on. It's a movie I wanted to like. But I, again, I'm, I'm boring. I like to have my loose ends tied up. But you know your point about Independence Day having good examples of tech comm. I think that one other reason that aliens is an interesting subject for tech comm, is that SETI, the search for Extra Terrestrial IntelligenceBYes.AIs a real thing.BYes, it is.ABenton, do you believe in aliens?BI believe that there are almost certainly extraterrestrial intelligent civilizationsAJust because of the sheer magnitude of the universe,Bbecause of the magnitude of the universe. What we know of the Drake equation, it's a famous equation that represents all of the variables in what is the probability that there is alien life out there that is intelligent enough that we could communicate with. You start with the number of stars orASo there is a likelihood.BThere is a likelihood. And because of the just mind-boggling number of stars and therefore planets that exist in only our galaxy. It's almost gotta be the case that there is somewhere.AYes. And I have heard arguments that earth represents this Goldilocks of like, perfect temperature, perfect water content, oxygen content, what, what have you to support life, but might there be other forms of life that evolved in their distinct contexts and what would that look like?BYes.AI think it's fascinating and frankly, I hope they are out there.BOne of the fun things that planetary radio, the host, Matt Kaplan talks about regularly with some of his xenobiology or astrobiology guests, is looking for life as we don't know it. For example, life that could be in the oceans, the sub-ice oceans of Europa, or any of the other icy moons. Europa is a moon of Jupiter. It is one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter. Galileo could see those four with his puny little telescope.AThinking of this as a legitimate enterprise, that raises an epic technical communication problem, which is, if we're going to seek to contact aliens, what message would we send? Would humanity send? And we kind of have an answer to that with the Arecibo message of 1974.BSo this is from SETI.org about the Arecibo.AIs it Arecibo or Arecibo?BI mean, I know I've pronounced it Arcibo in the past, but that is wrong. They say that “it consists, among other things, of the Arecibo telescope, our solar system, DNA, a stick figure of a human, and some of the biochemicals of earthly life. Although it's unlikely that this sort of inquiry will ever prompt a reply, the experiment was useful in getting us to think a bit about the difficulties of communicating across space, time, and a presumably wide culture gap.”AYeah, that sums up kind of why I wanted to theme the episode around this. It also has lists of prime numbers. Is that right?BI have no idea.AI think it did.BYou are thinking about Contact.AI might be. I mean, it might have been both because Carl Sagan consulted on that message.BThat’s true. He is the connection.ABut what's interesting to me about that is just the contrast between the hard mathematical side of it, and then a stick figure of a human representing the extent of the humanness about the message. That kind of speaks to two differing, sometimes competing approaches to communicating with aliens in these fictional scenarios is do we go with a more personal approach or do we go with a more “these are the facts” kind of approach? So why don't you jump in here with Contact because we watched the movie. You are now reading the book.BThe book was written by Carl Sagan.AAnd Carl Sagan is known for the Cosmos.BCosmos is his most well-known public communication.AWe could've been drinking a Cosmo right now.BWe could have. Book was published in 1985, which is still Soviet Union era. I know that that is one way the movie is different. The movie was done in 1997, 12 years later. Starring Jodie Foster,Aand Matthew McConaughey, in the worst role ever. Like one of the reasons I'm glad you're reading the book is because I want you to tell me that the Michael McConnell, hey, wait, is that his name? Matthew McConaughey character is not in the book. He's a priest in the movie. And he's like this smarmy know at all.BSo Joss Palmer. That's McConaughey’s character, right?AYep. Can you believe we've discussed two people named Joss on this podcast so far. What are the odds?BWow, it's Joss mind-boggling. Put a drum hit in there for me. He definitely has a more multi-dimensional character in the book.AOkay, because let me tell you listeners what happens in the movie. Jodie Foster wants to go to space and she is blocked from doing so in part because this Joss Palmer guy fell in love with her and didn't want her to go away. Which, that's maddening. Like. That is not love.BIt’s control.Aits control. Thank you. And I don't like the way that the movie presented it as like this romantic moment where we're supposed to go. He's so sweet. No, he dashed her dreams. I mean, ultimately, she does get to go to space. So it works out. End rant.BEnd rant. So the Arecibo message went out in 1974, which is by my calculations 38 years after what was identified by the aliens in Contact as the first message we sent out, which was Hitler welcoming everyone to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.ADid they actually send that out into space?BThey explain this in the book that you don't send things out into space. When you broadcast them, they're out. They’re going.AGot it, got it.BThey're leaving this earth at the speed of light.ASo it's kind of happenstance what might get picked up by intelligent life, right?BRight.AAnd the Hitler message would be sadly, a pretty accurate portrayal of humanity.BI wouldn't disagree. Although it was relatively benign because it was just a three-minute clip welcoming andAOkay. That's fair.BIf anybody is listening to all this shit we put out and if they're listening hard enough, Hitler is gonna be the first thing they hear.AWhy would Hitler be the first thing they hear? Because it was the first thing ever broadcast that way?BThat was the first thing that was ever broadcast at enough intensity to get beyond our Van Allen radiation belts, which we didn't know about at the time. But the Van Allen radiation belts make it possible for us to get transmissions that bounce off of the atmosphere.ASo what did the intelligent life in Contact do in response?BSo they recorded it. And then they, the aliens broadcast prime numbers super loud at us. Basically like amplitude pulses that made for tally marks. So there would be like two pulses, three pulses, five, and so on and so forth. It was their way of being like, Hey yo, listen, because the sequence of prime numbers doesn't happen in nature. It's a very, very hard to miss indicator of artificialness.AThat this is not random, yeah.BThis is not random. Pay attention. In the book carl Sagan explains that this broadcast was a multilayered thing. So we could see, we could see very easily the amplitude rise and fall. So we can see that without any confusion. Interlaced into that was another level of information which he described as a palimpsest.APalimpsest, a manuscript that has been overlaid with another manuscript. English major coming through here. The point being it was a message layered upon a message.BWhen they figured out the specifics of how that was encoded, they saw, Oh, that's Hitler. What the fuck is Hitler doing in space? What's going on here? And then they finally figured out that, oh, this is the first thing they heard, Oh, they must be saying hi. Let's say hi back.AWhich is a thoughtful interpretation that they came to versus hmm, sending us a message of someone who is universally, should be universally reviled among humans. I can see people interpreting that as a threat. Like why are you sending this genocidal dictator back to us? Which I mean, I think we can move away from Contact at this point. But that matter of interpretation is really essential here because the humans on Earth in Contact avoided what could have been a cosmic misunderstanding. That points to the precariousness of communication oftentimes, and the importance of being slow and thoughtful. Okay, and I can't believe I'm trying to make this relevant. But in Pixels starring Adam Sandler, the gist of it is that they broadcast video of like a 1982 arcade game championship out into space. AndBThis actually went on a satellite that was apparently discovered by these aliens.AAnd how did the aliens interpret it?BThey interpreted it as a declaration of war.AAnd that's where we get people needing to defeat Pac-Man in real life, etc.BWith Cooper minis, of course.AMini Coopers. Cooper Minis. That's cute. Long story short. It's a movie where creepy nerdy guys get to be the hero and women are literally objectified.BYep. Was it like ten years old or?AI want to say 2011? It was based on a short film that's like two minutes long. And everything that was cool about the movie you can experience in that two minutes. Go check it out on YouTube.BNo need to watch the feature film.ARight. So be intentional about your messages and your interpretation. And I think the movie Arrival explores this a little more in-depth. Can you give me like a 20-second synopsis before we talk about Arrival?BOkay.AI'm asking you to do live technical communication because you have to summarize something complex, alright? In a way that highlights only the information that's relevant for the analysis that we're going to give. Go for it.BOkay, so in Arrival, without announcement, 12 alien ships descend over various points on the earth and just sit there waiting. We discover that there are ways to get up in there. They have a way to communicate to us through like, okay, I tried.AAmy Adams, plays a linguist, Louise Banks, who is tapped to translate the aliens’ messages. The part that's of use to our discussion here, so there are folks trying to translate around the world. And one of the translations they get is an answer to the question, What is your purpose here? And the aliens supposedly responded, Offer weapon.BOffer weapon. Like are you offering me a weapon by pointing it in my face? Are you offering me a weapon with which to destroy my geopolitical adversaries? Are you asking me to offer a weapon to you? Are you saying come at me, bro?A Right. And the way that most governments, I guess interpreted it, was as a threat. So they were gearing up to attack. And this linguist is seemingly the only one who's like, Let's wait a second here. Do we know that weapon is an accurate interpretation in the first place? Could it not mean tool or technology?BYes. So I've got a quote here from the movie Arrival. Louise Banks: “Let's say that I taught them chess instead of English. Every conversation would be a game. Every idea expressed through opposition, victory, defeat. You see the problem. If all I ever gave you was a hammer…” Colonel Weber: “Everything is a nail.” Speaking of the affordances of the medium. The Chinese group was playing mahjong with the aliens.ABasically she's saying, the kind of framework you bring to a communication situation really constrains your interpretations.BYeah, you know, if you look at certain places in the world, they have they have multiple words for something that in other places they only have one word for. InAAre you getting at the Sapir Whorf hypothesis? Because she does talk about it in the movie, but I think she treats it as maybe more accepted than it actually is.BLike in Scandinavian countries, there are multiple words for snow, multiple words for different kinds of like hills and mountains. In English we have hills and mountains. So, based on the geography of where you're from, what you experience, you want to be able to distinguish it. If you're from an alien species that's collectivist. They have never experienced war. How would they know what the difference between weapon and tool is?AExactly. The idea here is that, I should say the question behind the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is, to what extent does language determine thought? So does it shape how you think or is it more thought shapes your language? Not a settled question, butBI mean, it sounds very chicken and egg. But in this case, there's certainly room for both to be happening at the same time where language forms your thoughts and thoughts from your language.AMm-hmm. The lesson we can take from this, I think, is that words are not just words. Language is not just ideas, but it has real material effects in the world. Like are we going to go to war or not? This hinges on a, on a word, an interpretation of a word. And that's of course an extreme example. But I do think it is still easy for people to brush off language as just language or just on the Internet or it just, sticks and stones can't hurt me. Or how does that go?BSticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.AWhich is BS. And we've talked about this in past episodes to about conspiracy theory and weaponized rhetoric and such. But is there anything else? Oh, I also think that Arrival does display that kind of tension between the humanistic side and the mathematical side because she's brought in with this physicist. They have very different ideas about how to initially approach the aliens. So he says, “priority one, what do they want and where are they from? And beyond that, how did they get here? Are they capable of faster than light travel? I've prepared a list of questions to go over, starting with a series of handshake binary sequences.” And Louise Banks says How about we just talk to them before we start throwing math problems at them. So again, emphasizing that not everything can be effectively boiled down to prime numbers or binary sequences, right?BOr a game of mahjong.AYep. And in fact, what she does shocks the other scientists when they're in the spaceship or the giant floating seed, what have you, she takes off what do you call it, bio?BShe's wearing what you would wear when you're going into like a level four hot zone because you never know what kind of germs the aliens might have. But she's like, Ah, the hell with it.AAnd she says they need to see me. In fact, when the military initially proposes the idea of her coming to help translate, they bring her an audio recording of the alien speech and she says, Sorry, this is an alien language. I have absolutely nothing to go off of. I can't translate from a recording. I need to interact with them. I think that's a, a great picture of the importance of interacting with your audience to learn about them versus making assumptions about them from limited data. It's also a picture of the importance of gaining trust with an audience and how that requires vulnerability. Am I digging a little bit too deep here for the connections?BI don't think so.AHere's why I see the topic of aliens a relevant subject for technical communication. I see tech comm as communicating complex technical information to audiences that need it in the way that they need it. And one central facet of tech comm and rhetoric is that it's audience-centered. It's not about the writer and proving you know something or showing off or expressing yourself, not that those are bad things. Ultimately, it's about how your audience understands that communication in order to accomplish some task or solve some problem. And it can often be hard for students or any writer to imagine audiences that aren't just like them.BYes.ATech comm instructors listening might be familiar with a common exercise used in tech comm classrooms, which is to write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for an alien who has just landed on Earth. A graduate teaching intern introduced this to me, actually and employed it in class to great effect. And I think that's a great exercise for thinking through the audience knowledge you take for granted. The fun part is imagining all the ways it can go wrong, right? And I've even heard of some instructors taking it the extra step and usability testing instructions and like deliberately misinterpreting them to show the lack of clarity.BGive it the Amelia Bedelia treatment.APrecisely. Like if you say put this piece of bread on top of the other piece of bread. Well, did you specify that the jelly should be facing in and not out? Or are you supposed to stack it vertically on top of the other piece of bread or what?BLike dominoes.AYeah. Like I said, that's a good intro activity just to make that point, that often you have to spell out more than you think you have to. However, I think there's a definite limitation to this exercise in that in real technical communication situations, you don't want to assume zero knowledge on the part of your audience because that's not true, and it’s insulting to them. So I think it's possible to go too far in the other direction as well. Assuming others are like you is one thing. But it's also problematic to assume others are fully unlike you. Treating your audience as foreign or other in ways that are alienating. That’s a telling word choice.BHow about that. I mean, know your audience is really the thing. And my experience navigating or attempting to navigate military specifications for design things is. It's very hard to write for a wide range. So I was a mechanical engineer designing generators, electrical generators, in part for the US military. The military has a specification for materials, the metallurgy of materials. They have a specification for which way and what strength, you know, a bolt needs to have to be mil spec of this. And so you end up having references that end up being meaningless because there's so many of them that are tangentially possibly relevant that you don't know in which way your audience will be uninformed.A And you also have to imagine the user experience of poring through pages of references or a glossary or something.BOh yeah. It's definitely not Wikipedia. It isn't hyperlinks from one mil spec to the one it's referring to. You gotta go through a clunky system to try and download them, to look at them, you gotta scroll through and know how to read the damn things.AThe genre of military specifications, you're saying is one that both assumes too much and too little knowledge on the part of its readers in its efforts to be universal?BYes. There were times when I was looking at a mil spec for a conductive wire and its insulation that like being a mechanical engineer looking for that sort of thing, I felt like there were some bits of knowledge that I didn't have that were assumed. An electrician looking at the same document would be like, this is so overexplanatory, it's ridiculous. But that is the tension of over and under explaining things.AWhat can technical communicators do about that tension?BIt's kind of tricky. If you're making something that will last in perpetuity. The odds are that it will be seen by someone who weren't expecting to see it. If you're creating a presentation or discussion, you will know your audience and it will not exist after you deliver it. With something that's permanent, something that someone putsASomething that has to cross space and time. Like, like the aliens getting hold of the Hitler tape.BSomething that you have no control of after it is out.ALike the aliens getting hold of the Hitler tape which didn't really happen. I'm not advocating a conspiracy theory here.BFor more on Nazis in space though. Iron Sky, it's an awesome farce.AThat's not pro-Nazi. Am I right?BIt is not pro-Nazi. But you did Not-see it. Whereas I did. Another drum hit, please. Thanks. Nice try.AI don’t have my crash cymbal conveniently positioned in front of me. Sorry.BThat's true. So yeah, creating permanent technical communication rather than ephemeral communication.AIt's going to live beyond the immediate context and you need to account for that. And that's where the idea of secondary, tertiary audiences can come into play. And The thing about giving a presentation is the people are in the room. You know who they are. They can ask questions if they really don't know something. Actually we have a whole episode on audience where we talk more about that. But I think the solution is aiming for something that's in-between this communication is only for the people in this room and this communication is for everyone, right?BRight.AAnd that's where putting out multiple versions of essentially the same message can be useful. And how do you know what kind of level of background knowledge to aim for in these different versions?BTrue.AThat's not a rhetorical question.BOh. I think that NASA does this sort of thing fairly well,Awhich we talked about in our episode on the movie, Don’t Look Up.B Yeah. And it's because as part of their institution, they have a focus on outreach. They're not just no offense, they're not just academics. They’re public outreach and public education oriented. Like it is part of the culture of NASA. And so they have press releases that they put out about missions. They do, they do that multilevel, or even the IPCC reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They have a short version that is for lawmakers because they want to have an effect. And then there's the long version that gets into the details of how they calculated what they did.Afor people who want to know that the science is real.BMm-hmm. Side-note, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is intergovernmental. That means all of the governments agree to this. They had to all sign off on it.AI had a student write a paper about it.BCool. And so as a result, what Sweden wants to say about climate change has to be in agreement with what Saudi Arabia wants to say about climate change. And so it is inherently conservative, not in a political sense, but it is deeply baked in that they are not alarmist.AInteresting. But even so, their message is pretty alarming, which is saying something.BYeah. Just thought I'd put that in there as a PSA.AOkay. My answer to this tension is to get as close to the specific audience as possible. Well, that'd be a little creepy. As is required for the communication task. And I think what that amounts to is largely empathy. And I don't want to say empathy is like the be-all, end-all of good technical communication. It's certainly, it's certainly been manipulated in ways that I want to explore in a future podcast. But for purposes of our talk today, empathy is really an important key for relating with these literally alien audiences. Empathy is best fostered through listening.BI'm sorry, what was that?ANot funny.BI had to try anyway.AThrough interacting, through engaging and that's how you learn who it is you're communicating with. I think a couple of the movies exhibit this well. One of them is Enders Game, 2013 movie based on the 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card. And I haven't read that book since college. And my memory is very bad for details.BIn typical Abi fashion.ASo I don't know how closely the movie matched the book, but what is sort of unexpected about it is that you initially think it's gonna be one of these military sci-fi films. Because I mean it is literally that. They are training kids to go to war against these Formics, which are an alien species that tried to annihilate Earth?BYeah.ABut you see quickly that it's more a critique of that conquest culture, if you will, more so than a glorification of it. As in a movie like, what would you say is another quintessential military sci-fi? Independence Day?BIt kind of is.AEdge of Tomorrow?BYes.AI did really like it though.BIt was funAbecause of the Groundhog Day dynamic, which ironically, I never get tired of.BYou get the drum hit this time.AAnd so it presents like the propaganda around this war against the Formics and sort of this search for a singular savior and Ender this child, this boy, gets slotted into that position. What do you remember about empathy coming into play here? And spoiler alert. But what ultimately ends up happening with ender?BEnder has an older brother and an older sister, both of whom were put through the screening for this program. His brother washed out because he was too violent, he was too cruel. His sister washed out because she was too empathetic. It is kind of presented as different ends of a spectrum, butA And that Ender represents the happy medium or something?BSo in the end, after all of this training, the trainer presents them as their last training mission what is, in actuality, the final battle in the real world. They didn't realize that it was actually happening, they thought was a simulation. Over the course of his training, Ender’s empathy, they say, has given him some insight into the Formics because there's a queen that secretly was hidden near his training base. And it was communicating to him through like this. This app, through his dreams.ALike a mind game thing, yeah.BYes. So he develops some empathy through that. He’s infuriated when he finds out he was tricked into committing genocide on these Formics.AHate when that happens.BYou know they say the first genocide is the hardest.AYikes.BThat's a line from that mission to ZYXX podcast that I listened to for awhile. It's like a sci-fi improv. Pretty, pretty zany podcast.AWe’ll link to it. So I'm going to interject here with a quote I took down from the film. Ender is emphasizing throughout this training that we don't really understand our enemy. Ender says, I know the Formics better than any living soul. I stole their future from them. Now I must make amends. What that suggests to me is that his deep knowledge of these aliens is in part what allowed him to destroy them successfully, but also what is leading him to aim to protect the queen, right?BRight.ANow, that's not a lesson that we want to take into technical communication. Develop empathy so that you can destroy your enemy. And this is, I mean, this is a situation where the humans are the bad guys.BAren’t we usually?AYeah. But that's a different dynamic than in like the movie Alien, where the aliens are so thoroughly awfulBParasiticAyou're not meant to empathize with them. You're meant to empathize with the humans, namely Sigourney Weaver. And what was the name of her, her little pal in Aliens plural?BJonesy?ANot the cat. It's a little girl.BOh the girl they find? Yeah. I don't remember. Do not remember.ARight. So you root for them. Not like you're rooting for the Formics in this movie. But you can see that there's more going on than the message that the government is putting out. It's very polarized. Us versus them. The movie District Nine, I think it really literalizes the need for empathy.BDefinitely the context of it is apartheid.AIt takes place in South Africa.BYes so it's like an obvious, this is talking about apartheid.AAllegory.BInstead of Arrival’s 12 alien ships, this is just one, shows up and comes to a stop over Johannesburg and nothing happens for monthsAThey’re essentially refugees.Bbecause they, for whatever reason they can't get their ship to go home. They can't figure out who the leadership is. They’re living in squalor aboard the shipAAnd initially the, the humans that find them have a humanitarian impulse towards them.BThey have empathy towards them. They want to help these aliens out.AI wouldn't even call it empathy though. I would call it white saviorism isn't quite the right word in this context.BIt kind of works though. Human supremacist.ASort of a patronizing relationship.BYeah, how egocentric of us. We’re just sitting here on our planet. We don't have spaceships that can go anywhere impressive. They show up, sure they can't run their ships anymore, but they fucking got here from who knows whereASo to presume they are somehow less intelligence is very telling.BJust because they don't have the infrastructure that they had when they left home. Initially, it was like a humanitarian We're doing this out of the goodness or because it's the right thing to do. Providing a no-cost, a place to be and food.AUntil they start to inconvenience us. And withhold technology that we want in order to be a stronger military power.BMm-hmm. District Nine is where the aliens live. And so the idea was to create a district ten, which is in the middle of nowhere. That isn't ripe for abuse.AIt amounts to a concentration camp.Bit amounts to a concentration camp which eventually is admitted by Wikus, this government person who's been put in charge of the process of issuing eviction notices to these aliens and getting them to agree to it.AJust the, just the different universes they're operating on. Like the human universe with its bureaucracy and capitalism and xenophobia.Bwe exploit them as much as we can. And then Wikus discovers their technology liquid, they just call it the liquid, whatever. And unwittingly, like the bumbling government bureaucrat that I'm sure he was meant to portray, exposes himself to it. And it begins toASpoiler alert.BIt begins to change him into one of them. That creates like such, such a ripe field for character development in Wikus.ATurning point.BAnd so literally being put into their shoes. Fun bit of body horror as he has the transition from human to prawn physiology. And Christopher Johnson, which is the comically English name that was given to this very intelligent prawn sees what's happening and to him and he says, I know what's happening to you. I can help you. The character dynamics between Wikus and Christopher Johnson are, they start out at odds completely and they kind of, they work their way into being on the same side,AFriends.Bagainst the same system that just wants to chew them both up.AWhat does it say though, that he needs to literally turn into this other species to gain any compassion for them?BIt's kind of a commentary on the mindset of the powerful.AYeah, if this is an allegory for racism, is there not enough actual racism in the world? What do you think is the point of like creating a new kind of racism?BOne of the great things about science fiction is that it disarms us. You aren't expecting a movie about aliens to be a movie about racism. It stealth modes in there. You get emotionally involved in the characters before they spring the point on you. And you have to agree. That's the idea. It keeps you from labeling immediately and then just being like, oh, I know which side of the label I'm on. They put you in the situation so you can feel the situation and reevaluate.ASo it's almost shocking you out of your understanding of the status of the status quo. So you can kind of see the ridiculousness that you’ve become blind to in the real world.BAbsolutelyA Alright, what movies have we not talked about yet?BClose encounters.AThat was hard for me to get through. We had to watch it in like five separate chunks because it was made in the seventies and movies were very long. No, I shouldn't put it that way. My attention span is very short.BThe pacing of movies back then was not what it is now.AYeah. Okay. I honestly, when I picked up this movie, I thought it was a comedy. I thought it was supposed to be a comedy. And when we started it, I kept waiting for it to get funny. So I think it was also an expectation problem. But what can we learn from that movie about technical communication?BDid you write any notes down?AThat the mode of communication matters. Yeah, it's about this everyday dude who comes into close contact with a flying saucer. And then he becomes obsessed with these aliens. And it turns out that the aliens are communicating through like a shared vision, right? Devil's Tower, Wyoming, which is where their landing place is gonna be. And so these people are like creating artwork and sculptures of Devil's Tower out of anything they can find. Like Richard Dreyfuss’ character creates a giant mound in the middle of his kitchen.BYep.AI mean, it was an interesting movie. I'm, I'm glad I watched it. Honestly seeing the actual aliens at the end of the movie made it worse.BIt tends to.AI mean, there's something about the unknown thatBExactly.AI don't know. Like you don't need to answer every question in a movie. Sometimes things can just be a mystery. Here I am saying this right after I was like, I wish annihilation had a point. Okay, so I'm contradicting myself. I guess the other interesting piece from that movie is, I mean, again, these aliens are much more intelligent than humans. And so they have to find a way to get through to the humans that humans will understand. And that might come in the form of like a mashed potato mound orBSpace musicAa dollop of shaving cream or, yes.BSpace tubas.ASpace tubas. Yeah, like they were all about the brass in this one, but it was really cute actually. The aliens played this like five-note ditty by John Williams.BDoo doo doo doo doo.AThank you. At Devil's Tower, the military has set up camp in preparation for this arrival and I mean, it was notable that they were not prepared to blow the aliens out of the sky, right? Which I was expecting because there was this whole kind of subplot of like military cover up and. But they mostly just had like scientific equipment around and I thought this was adorable, a dude at a synthesizer. And all he could do was play the five notes. It’s like you don't even, I mean, how do you know your grammar is right?BNo joke. It’s like meowing back to my cat.ASo I guess the idea there is moving beyond language to communicate, that in this case, it happened through music.BWhich in fact, brings me to the last movie Muppets in Space.AI didn't intend that we would seriously discuss that one, but go on.BThey could talk to us through our alphabet cereral.AOr a sandwich.BYes, or a talking sandwich. Go ahead and eat me. You'll need the energy later.ANo, but in all seriousness, what am I missing from Close Encounters of the Third Kind? By the way, what is a close encounter of the first kind or second kind? I don't understand the title.BIt isn't clear to me either.AThe movie does do a good job of portraying that sense of wonder at something new and different from you. Which is not a reaction that everyone has to something different.BCarl Sagan in Contact the book described, there's wonder in a religious sense and then there's wonder in a secular sense and in the brain it looks the same. So marveling at the size and vastness of our universe, it looks the same on your brain as having like a mountain top religious experience. He uses the word numinous. That awe, wonder, excitement, kind of emotion. You want to have a word for it when it's something like aliens contacting us and it isn't to say what's the best way to prepare you for dinner. A way to express what Bill Nye calls the PB and J of space exploration. The passion, beauty, and joy.AAnd this is the second reference to PB and J in this podcast, what are the odds?BOh my goodness.AThat seems like a nice note to end on. Just to kind of sum up, I think with alien movies serving as almost case examples of communication challenges, it reminds us not to universalize our experience to the point that we think everyone is like us, nor do we want to alienate others to the point that we insult them or condescend to them, or discriminate against them. And those are things that don't always happen on purpose. Technical communicators don't need to be deliberately villainous to do harm with their work and the assumptions they make about the communities they're writing for. Where possible, engage, interact, empathize.BAgreed.AIf you've gotten this far, listener, thanks for sticking around. And if you want more, our website is faculty.mnsu.edu/TCTalk. That's where you can find transcripts and show notes for all of our episodes. And we're also on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, etc.BSo long and thanks for all the fish.

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In this final part of the UX series, we share some ways instructors can help students to see user experience and usability as the rhetorical, human, and messy processes that they are. We also celebrate the season finale of TC Talk with a game show, Wheel of Exigencies, during which you will meet the new celebrity spokesperson for Course Hero!

Sources and further reading

• Chong, F. (2016). The pedagogy of usability: An analysis of technical communication textbooks, anthologies, and course syllabi and descriptions. Technical Communication Quarterly, 25(1), 12–28.
• Cooke, L., & Mings, S. (2005). Connecting usability education and research with industry needs and practices. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 48(3), 296–312.
• Getto, G., & Beecher, F. (2016). Toward a Model of UX Education: Training UX Designers Within the Academy. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 59(2), 153–164. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2016.2561139
• Meloncon, L., & Henschel, S. (2013). Current State of U.S. Undergraduate Degree Programs in Technical and Professional Communication. Technical Communication, 60(1).
• Orr, E. (2022, March 12). Ramps: How to Forage & Eat Wild Leeks. Foraging for Wild Edibles. https://www.wildedible.com/blog/foraging-ramps
• Rose, E., & Tenenberg, J. (2017). Making practice-level struggles visible: Researching UX practice to inform pedagogy. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 5(1), 89–97.
• Scott, J. B. (2008). The practice of usability: Teaching user engagement through service-learning. Technical Communication Quarterly, 17(4), 381–412. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572250802324929
• St.Amant, K. (2018). Contextualizing Cyber Compositions for Cultures: A Usability-Based Approach to Composing Online for International Audiences. Computers and Composition, 49, 82–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2018.05.007
• Zhou, Q. (2014). “ That usability course”: What technical communication programs get wrong about usability and how to fix it. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 2(3), 25–27.

Transcript

PHi this is Phoebe and today we’re gonna talk about TC Talk. What’s TC Talk? Well, I’m glad you asked. TC stands for…. What? Technical Communication. Got it.BI'm Benton,AI'm Abi.BAnd Fern is at the door.ALike clockwork our cat is wanting to join us.BCome on. In or out. There you go.AI'm a professor of technical communication and rhetoric.BAnd technically I'm a communicator. I am not from the world of the academy, nor am I personally a technical communicator.AAnd therefore,BI'm here to be the non-expert with some information and opinions of my own.A Indeed. Let’s toast.BOh toast. Get the toaster here.ANot that kind of toast, okay.ABHave you ever put butter on a poptart? It’s so freaking good. [sings]ASorry. It's a thing now. it must be done.BYep. Ooh.AThis is an old fashioned, but I made it more interesting by muddling cherries and an orange wheel.BSo would that make it a new fashioned?AI suppose. And the most exciting part is that I now have an official muddler.BAn official muddler?AWould you pronounce it muddler or muddler?BWe could get the pronouncing dictionary,AWhich you do in fact have, and have consulted to prove me wrong on things in the past.BIt's true. It is always nice to have authoritative texts on your side.AAnd by authoritative you mean prescriptive and limiting. Did it even have the word…?BDescriptive. It’s descriptive. It tells you what is accepted as the right pronunciation when this book is written.AThat’s by definition prescriptive.BRight. Okay. What is generally accepted as the proper pronunciation.ASo society might change its mind along the way and say, we're not going to pronounce it bagel anymore. We're going to pronounce it bah-gel.BYou’re mocking me.AMm-hmm. Bag-el.BLe bagle.AYes. There is something satisfying about having the right tool for the job.BOh yeah.AThe muddler and/or muddler. Also, let's kick it off with fun with fungus, because you have already had your fun with fungus for the day.BIt's true.AAlthough before you get into it, we should explain to people who may be wondering what is fun with fungus.BYes, for those of you just joining us. Fun with fungus is a, it's a segment of our podcast where I get to talk about something that I have technical expertise in.AAnd I do not.BAnd you do not. And that area is mushrooms. And more broadly, fungus.AThe world of fungus is more fascinating than you could imagine.BIt is. My fun with fungus today was eating mushrooms that I foraged myself.ANot only were they mushrooms, they were morels.BThey were morals. And I found five of them that are about as big as the last two segments of my little finger.AThat's oddly specific.BOkay. The other fingers are bigger.ABut we learned that there's no such thing as an average pinkie finger length.BThere is no such thing as an average this or that part of the human body,AWhich you can learn more about by listening to UX part three. Yes. And you cooked it with ramps, is that right?BYes. So the same day that I found these five morels I was looking around and I also found a fair abundance of ramps.AWhich are not a fungus, but what are they?BThey are also known as wild leeks. They are in the allium genus. I don't know if it's a genius, genus,ACategory, nonetheless.BIt is not a genius, it is only a plant, but the genius of it. So ramps have a flavor that is somewhere between onion and garlic. Onion and garlic are in the allium family. If you want to use that word non taxonomically.AGroup.BGroup, which is also a taxonomic designation, isn't it?ABut not a technical part of the taxonomy. If you’re going like Kingdom Phylum, Genus, Species.BThat’s right. Genus was the G.AThanks high school biology.BRamps grow wild in a lot of forests in North America. They pop up really early in the season. If you are going to forage this, please be responsible. Don't decimate any populations of ramps by overharvesting. It's hard on them if you do that. And ramps have been hard hit by overharvesting. My foraging group is very, very adamant about be responsible.AThat's a very good lesson. And so you had this as a side to your main dish for lunch, which was a taco sandwich.BYes. A taco sandwich.AYeah. I saw you putting the taco filling between two slices of bread and I was like, there's tortillas right there. You said, Oh, I didn't think of that. I probably wouldn't recommend that meal pairing. But you do you.BI do. I certainly do me.ADon't read into that too much. This is our last episode of our first season of tech comm talk. Episode 20. Seemed like a nice even number to, to end on.BThis is it?ASummer is starting. So we can take a break from it. I absolutely want to continue because this has been so good for me, for motivating me to read and seriously engage with other people's work.BEngage! Number one.AAnd I hate to say it, but sometimes higher education rewards production of writing and research. But the work of engaging others’ writing and research is much more invisible and not easily like documented if that makes sense.BSpeaking is valued but listening is not.AOoh, yeah, that's actually a good metaphor. And you know, in the quest for tenure, people are trying to turn out articles.BIs that a video game, the quest for tenure?ANo, It's Book 8 in the Harry Potter series.BOooh, okay, Who?AHarry Potter and the quest for a permanent academic appointment.BIt could be though, couldn't it? It could be a board game, the quest for tenure,AA board game.BBORED.AOh. I would enjoy a board game called The Quest for tenure, because you could have like one deck of cards that's committee assignments and another that's okay, that wouldn't be very exciting.BPersonal life. Nah, we don't need to play with that one.ANo joke. There could be like disasters mixed into the deck likeBMonkeypox.AI was thinking more along the lines of provost wants to cut all liberal arts programs orBElon Musk appointed president.AOh shit.BOf all academia. Well, there goes the neighborhood.ABut sure, monkeypox, why not?BIt's in the news right now.AIs it really?BYes.ADon’t we have enough pandemics?BNo.AI hope to continue it in the fall, but it will be on a much less frequent publishing schedule because I will be back to my regular pace of work. After coming off of sabbatical. We'll see what ends up happening with that. But other than that, we might put out some episodes in the summer, not like in the usual format, but I would like to put out a little series of interview based episodes where we talk with people not about their research per se, but about what's a form of tech comm that you do in your everyday life. So hey, if you want to talk to us, by all means, reach out. Because I want to emphasize the everydayness of tech comm, that you don't have to be an academic or a professional in it to encounter it or do it in your life.BMm-hmm.AWe are concluding our series on usability and UX by talking about teaching.BOkay.APart 1. What is UX? Part 2. How do you do it? Part 3. How do you do it in a socially just way? Part 4, how do you teach it? The earliest articles I could find about usability and pedagogy were from the early 2000s. And that kind of paralleled the argument that hey, UX is something that has a natural overlap with tech comm. And correspondingly, people started to argue that technical communication programs should start to teach this.BOh, okay.ASo one study of programs in tech comm found that why are you looking at me like that? Is there's something on my face? Is there something on top of my head?BNo.AYes.BOkay. So I just want to rewind a little bit. Argue in the sense that it was debated or…?ANo. Just argue in the academic sense where somebody says something that's ultimately not all that controversial, but it's supposedly a newish idea. I can see that there would potentially be actual debate with programs that are perhaps resistant toBCurmudgeonly?AFollowing the new fad. Although it's proven to not be a fad over the last couple of decades. And the other thing is that to incorporate something that certainly in 2005, for instance, was probably quite new to these programs, that can require an investment in professional development for instructors. Usability lab, that's not inexpensive,B Right.AAnd at the time that was thought to be the way to do usability. Like I've said before, not that that's not a valuable way to do usability for some purposes, in some contexts, but I don't think you need one to teach it.BThat's been my experience, at least.AHow so?BWell, I've never needed to use a usability lab for teaching.AListeners, I hope you could hear the eye roll through the microphone. Okay. One study of tech comm programs showed that from 2005 to 2011, there was an increase to 11% of programs requiring a usability course. So this article was published in 2013. The word user experience didn't even show up at that point. And I don't know that we have more recent data, but I would put money on the fact that more than 11 percent of programs are requiring some kind of coursework in usability at this point. More recent articles, I would say, are starting to say, all right, enough with arguing that usability matters in teaching. Let's write about how to actually teach usability.BHm.AAnd the big theme here is quite literally the importance of going beyond textbook usability. In 2016, Felicia Chong published an article wherein she did a content analysis of tech comm tech textbooks. Tech comm textbooks. There. Got it out. And found that the textbooks don't necessarily treat usability as rhetorical in the way that we have come to see it as a field more recently. What I mean by that is the textbooks kind of present it as, here's a step-by-step how you do a think-aloud protocol, how you do heuristic analysis, whatever. But it doesn't necessarily get into when would you want to use these? Why would you want to use them? What, In what ways can you adapt them to respond to the reality of usability testing, which is certainly not a textbook experience because you're dealing with human beings. And that means dealing with scheduling and negotiating, and compiling sometimes contradictory feedback. And all of these kind of interpersonal skills are a huge part of doing UX, but aren’t necessarily covered in teaching about it.BSo in all of these cases, you're dealing with human beings, at least until our next episode.AOh, okay. I don't know if we're going to give out the secret yet.BForeshadowing.AAnd the answer is not robots either.BThe answer is never robots.ABenton is alluding to an episode that we have planned for later this summer that's going to be part of the, the Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival.BYes.APlaces and spaces in and beyond the academy. So stay tuned for that. Around the same time Quan Zhou did a presentation with the title that usability course. So acknowledging that there is a usability course in many of these programs and people might think of it in terms of what do we do with this. He says, “usability is about people. Usability requires sophisticated communication and listening skills, and the ability to work flexibly with various kinds of people.” So those are the skills that we need to help students practice. Not just the textbook, how to do this.BJust, just as a refresher for me, usability and user experience, which did we decide was the more enlightened? Which is newer?AOkay. So user experience is de rigeur. Did I say that right?BYou're asking the wrong guy.ARight.BDe rigeur.AThank you. The conclusion is that not that one is more enlightened than the other, but one is more encompassing than the other.BThat’s it, yes.AUsability is part of UX. It's kind of a stage of the process. It's less good when you think of usability as the only point at which you engage users. Or if you think of it as only taking place at the end of a design project. Another strand of research on UX and usability pedagogy has focused on bridging the gap between industry and the classroom. So I have a couple studies here where the researchers talked to UX practitioners. Cooke and Mings boiled down their results into 1) Students need knowledge of the different methods and the skills to apply the methods. 2) the ability to critically assess test results and to make sound recommendations. So the ability to make those trade-offs, sometimes that we were talking about in part 2, where maybe you need to give up some rigor here in order to meet a deadline. But, you know, making those choices in an informed way. Critical assessment of the data that you get, right? How do you analyze it and frame it in a way that's actionable? And then 3) skill in communicating in both writing and speech. So again, we're seeing that thread of communication skills coming through.BMm-hmm.AA more recent study, Rose and Tenenberg, they note, “without understanding the depth of the rhetorical work that takes place in UX, students may perceive methods as a collection of neutral tools which when applied systematically achieve a desired result.” They talked to these practitioners about the importance of researching and segmenting audiences, prototyping and fidelity and kind of making context-specific decisions. And what I like about their article is that they explain that there is a place for textbook methods and concepts. But you don't want to stop there.BHm.AThey write “when first introducing these concepts, we must momentarily tame the complexity. Not to obscure, but to give students the ability to try out, practice, and gain competencies.” They continue “during application. We then trouble these practices by highlighting their rhetorical nature.” They give students structured practice, but then they complicate it as they go on and push students to critically reflect on the choices they're making and why. And that seems to be a really essential piece, highlighting how usability is rhetorical. So by now, we've established that we need to teach usability beyond a textbook approach. Next, let's talk about some of the ways to teach this rhetorical approach to usability. Number one is doing a client-based project or service learning project. So get students out there working with actual participants. And there's this article by Blake Scott. It's basically a case study of a class and how their conceptions of usability evolved from the beginning to the end in a service learning project. Yet, he emphasizes that these kinds of setups can be very messy. In fact, there, I think you should assume that they will be messy by default. So he says there is definitely value in service learning, but it needs to be carefully structured.BOh, yeah, I can see that. I could definitely see people missing the point.ARight. Like I did when I was an undergraduate. I think what it comes down to is, don't expect an ideal situation.BRightAExpect it to be messy. And that means you budget more time, you budget more preparation, more practice. And that can include things like my client won’t email me back. Or we can't find a mutual time to meet. Like all these very every day kinds of problems that, you know, early undergraduates should probably not be expected to know how to handle.BRight.AHe comments on how, once students realized how complicated these arrangements can actually be, they defaulted to simplifying. And often simple can be better, right?BMm-hmm.ABut I think in this case, that simplifying amounted to engaging less with participants or doing things like trying to do e-mail interviews because that was more comfortable for the student and not necessarily accounting for what do my participants need?BOr what do I actually hope to get out of this?AAnd you know, I've been on the receiving end of that type of email before, where students need to interview someone for a project. And I remember one time somebody emailed me, like Wednesday night before Thanksgiving and asked me to respond in like two days and I'm like, let me have a freaking holiday. And so it's things like that that maybe scaffold your assignments so that they have enough buffer time to work through those kinds of issues and enough buffer time to set up a plan B if you can't get what you need by a certain deadline. Those are skills that students should be aware of. Getto and Beecher, they also recommended service learning, but they also talk about doing role-plays, simulations, and play. They write “Although practice allows learners to get a handle on the basics of a method, playing with that method in a safe environment allows them to make the method their own. Play is the final stage because it means that learners are ready to put their own spin on the method.”BHmm, interesting that they use the word play when I would use the word experiment.AI think that describes what's going on. But yes, maybe that kind of thing can be a precursor to client-based work. They also recommend advisory boards and industry partnerships. This can provide those opportunities for client-based projects, apprenticeships, internships, potentially professional development for the instructor. Because again, a lot of tech comm teachers haven't necessarily been trained in UX.BAnd some of that is, of course, the time lag in when UX came onto the scene.AOne more idea here, and this would be great for international tech comm and international audiences. Kirk St.Amant recommends setting up international partnerships so that students can interview people in a different country and get their perspectives on what they need in a piece of technical communication versus making assumptions about what they need. Like we were talking about last episode.BMm.AOkay. What does this mean for me and my teaching? Because that's kinda where this interest all began. So Quan Zhou, again, his solution to that usability course is to broaden it to UX and then have a three-course series. One on the UX process more generally, one on specific methods for usability testing and one for methods on user research.BRather than it being just like this one-off class. Have it be a prerequisite chain.AYeah.BSomething that you study for like a year and a half in your college experience as opposed to it was a topics course and I kludged my way through it, butAYeah, so that sends a message about really valuing that skill.BYou have time for it to really sink in.AYeah. In more humanistic disciplines like tech comm, I think the prerequisite thing is not quite as essential,BTrue.ABut I do think having students get exposure to these ideas across more than one course is certainly valuable. And I don't know that for every program it's going to be feasible to expand UX out into, into three courses. But what is feasible is expanding it within the context of a Gen Ed Technical Communication courseBMm-hmm.Athat is already on the books at most universities. And in fact, I have some ideas for how I want to change the way that I teach usability in my Gen Ed course. So the first thing I would do is I would incorporate a user research step. One of the core assignments of my course is creating instructions. And that can, that's pretty open-ended. It can be various modes, various topics, individual or collaborative. You know, there's lots of ways to do that, but I haven't always thought of topic selection as a point at which you can incorporate user perspectives. I like the idea of having students shape their topics around What does your audience actually need, right? Instead of going in there and saying, college students need to know how to tie a tie so they can go on professional interviews. And, you know, that may very well be the case.BIt may be useful for some.AAnd that's fine. But to get them to talk to each other about what are the kinds of things that you look up on YouTube in terms of how do I do x? Oh I should note, I have them write their instructions for other college students so that they can get more authentic results when they usability test each other. But really taking into account how people authentically search for instructions. It's usually not going to be a manual or a paper document, unless it's like cribbage instructions that are tucked inside a board game box or something,BMm-hmm.AAlso, people's purposes and learning how to do something. Is it a troubleshooting of a process they need to do? Like How do I submit this assignment on the course management system? Or is it they want to learn how to play ukulele? And so really getting a feel for what do you need to know how to do as a college student and kind of balancing that with students’ own expertise in what they can teach. Because I don't want students to have to learn a new process out of thin air for purposes of an assignment. I want them to take what do they already know? How can they adapt that in a way that meets a need for this audience? The other thing I want to change about how I teach that is more iterating, more phases of user feedback and revision versus one.BYeah, I can see why a student, especially from a writing class, would say, okay, revision is a one-step process. You turn in your rough draft, the instructor identifies what you need to work on. You correct it. It's over, which is not accurate. But boy, is it tidy and convenient to think so.AFor sure.BI could easily see them taking that wrong learning into this environment and thinking, oh, okay, well, n equals 1. Revise, I'm done.AOne usability test. Now the product is perfect. Yeah. Okay. You can introduce UX ideas elsewhere in the curriculum in courses like I teach a writing about health and medicine class, I can incorporate a UX design process within that context. There's a course in international tech comm that could have a place there as well. Okay? Do you want to take a usability course now?BNo.ANo. Do you want a teach usability course now?BHeavens, no.AThat's all I wanted to cover for that.BOkay. Well, should we have any season wrap kind of remarks?AI think our season wrap is going to consist of fun, not with fungus, mind you. Fun with the rhetorical situation. I want to celebrate the conclusion of season 1 of TC talk with a game.BWe love games precious.AI'd like to call this game wheel of exigencies.BDoo Doo, Doo, Doo, Doo, Doo, Doo.AIsn't that the price is right song?BOh, you're right.AWhat is the wheel of fortune song?B[sings]AOkay. I was not ever a big wheel of fortune watcher.BI couldn't think of it until you just askedAJust pulled it out of the recesses of your brain. That was impressive.BThanks, mom, for watching it all the time.AHere's how this game works. First of all, exigency. We have talked about this on the pod in the past. It is a component of the rhetorical situation. According to Lloyd Bitzer an exigence is an imperfection marked by urgency. It's the thing that prompts the rhetoric, something happens, and a rhetor needs to speak or write. Now, over the years there's been some debate. Do rhetors create the rhetorical situation or do they merely respond to it? And so when I have you respond to these exigencies, I urge you to express your creativity. So a rhetorical situation generally consists of the exigence, a text or speech, a rhetor, the person doing the communication and an audience who receives the communication and a larger context. So I have two wheels here. One wheel is for the rhetor, and each slice of the wheel corresponds to an impression that you do. And the second wheel consists of a series of exigencies that I invented to which you need to respond in character. Are you ready?BAs ready as I can be the first time live. This is courtesy of PickerWheel.com. Wow.AWhat have we got?BWe have Kermit. Kermit the Frog.AI actually chose two different wheel apps because I couldn't decide. Now your exigency.BThis is on WheelOfNames.com. Kermit in jeopardy.AKermit.BHello. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me on your show.AYou're actually on Celebrity Jeopardy right now.BI am?AAnd you're in last place.BWhat?AYou hit the daily double, and you have a chance to take the lead. The category is colors that are red. Make your wager.BHmm. Carry the three. Oh, okay. I wagered 500 flies.AI'll write. This color is traditionally the color of apples, tomatoes and red peppers.B Oh boy. What is green?AI'm sorry, the correct answer is red.BWhat? Well, I'll tell you what, it is not easy being green. Maybe I need to introduce you to something called the Rainbow Connection. And I know I had it here somewhere. Someday, we'll find it, I guess.AAll right. Would you like to do the honors this time of spinning our impression wheelBSpin, spins, spin, plink. It seems that we have selected Gandalf. This click in the middle, do our.AGandalfBYes?AYou are lost in the IKEA and you need to find a bathroom.BI have no memory of this place. I believe I smell pancakes. Oh Meriadoc Brandybuck, when you don't know which way to go, always follow your nose. Who on earth has put so much furniture in one giant room. Here we are. The little wizards room. Let's see here. Oh, there appears to be some sort of an ancient enchantment on this door. Speak friend, and enter. [speaks fake Elvish] Perhaps I have to magic the doors open.AExcuse me, sir. You can push.BWonderful. Thank you. Good, Sir.ANext up. Okay. This time we're going to start with the exigence and then we'll tell you who they, who your character is. Okay? So I need to give you a little background on this. You are auditioning for the role of celebrity spokesperson for Course Hero. Course Hero, to those unawares is an ed tech company that is predatory in the sense that it asks students to upload papers, assignment sheets, materials from any course they've taken. And then they have to pay or continue uploading content in order to access those materials, which are often out-of-date, decontextualized from the classroom experience and violates instructors’ intellectual property. It's been called a quote, unquote cheating site. And they are attempting to legitimize themselves by trying to get in the good graces of educators.B Okay.APeople on the academic side.BOkay. How do they think they can manage that?AMoney.BThat easy, huh?ABut apparently now they are seeking out celebrity endorsements, so let’s figure outBWhich celebrity they're going to get endorsed. I don't know, this is going to be too hard.AThat's what will make it funny. Who are you?BOkay. Let's see. Is this thing on? Oh, okay. Yes, sir. All right. I am Bernie Sanders. Once again, I am asking you to consider my proposal. We are living in unprecedented times of academic crisis. You may be asking yourself, how on earth am I going to get a decent grade in this class? Well, I have some news for you. Course Hero is a platform that can help you get the information that you need to succeed on each and every class that you are taking. So I know what you may be thinking is why is Bernie Sanders spokesman for a so-called cheating company? Let me tell you. This is not about me. It is about us and is about millions and millions of Americans being denied employment opportunities because they do not get good enough grades in a college system that is rigged against them. This is about striking back against the academic elite and taking the power back to the people.AOh no, that was pretty persuasive.BSo join me in coming against the millionaires and billionaires in charge of the higher education institutions in this nation. And once again, I am asking you to join me on Course Hero.A I do think you're on the wrong side of this. To be fair, Bernie, academics are hardly millionaires and billionaires.BI'm talking about the presidents of these institutions. And the football coaches.AYou know, could we not just change the system where we don't use grades, which are certainly biased. They're not necessarily good indicators of actual learning.BHow long do you think I have been trying to change the goddamn system in this country?AFair enough.BThank you. Let’s see who I get to be now. Well, Lassie, it seems that you've decided to invite me back. I am of course, glad to be here. You’ll have to explain this to me.AOkay. First of all, who are you?BI am Sean Connery.AMr. Connery.BYes.AThe gyro restaurant on campus accidentally made the tzatziki sauce with vanilla yogurt. And you're complaining to the manager.BI am a complaint to the manager.ATrue story, by the way.BTrue story.AExcept I didn't complain because it was like the student worker’s first day back at work.BSay there, sonny, would you be so kind as to find your manager for me? You’re the manager? Good lord. Okay, manager. I'd like to ask you, to refund me for this terrible sandwich.AI'm sorry, sir. No refunds. It’s policy.BI will not pay this fine I’ve incurred. It’s unjust! I cannot be held responsible for the results of this 800 dollar gyro. You think you’re so smart with the open top hat on and an apron. Think you’re so smart serving gyros.AI'm sorry, Mr. Connery. We'll try again next time.BYou damn well better.ALast one. We have Vladimir Putin here in the studio with us today.BPrivet. Thank you for having me.AYou have just been elected president of the puppeteers of America club and are giving your acceptance speech.BThe puppeteers of America will be strong. I will ensure that every puppeteer will be able to have puppet. We will all also have clubs. Is important. You have puppet, you need to club it.AAre there certain types of puppets, that you prefer to club over others, Mr. Putin?BYes, stupid American puppet.AI'm not the puppet. You’re the puppet.BWell, that depends upon perspective. Whose hand is up other’s bottom.AWe can't keep this in the recording, can we?BMaybe not that last bit.

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What if User Experience professionals, instead of designing for a "universal" user, put their most marginalized audiences first? In this episode, we share how you can invite audiences into classic UX processes including personas, localization, visual methods, and usability. We also discuss the challenges that come with participatory design, and how technical communicators must step into their advocacy role in order to support more socially just UX.

Sources and further reading

• Acharya, K. R. (2019). Usability for social justice: Exploring the implementation of localization usability in Global North technology in the context of a Global South’s country. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 49(1), 6–32.
• Acharya, K. R. (2022). Promoting Social Justice Through Usability in Technical Communication: An Integrative Literature Review. Technical Communication, 69(1), 6–26.
• Agboka, G. (2012). Liberating intercultural technical communication from “large culture” ideologies: Constructing culture discursively. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 42(2), 159–181.
• Agboka, G. (2013). Participatory localization: A social justice approach to navigating unenfranchised/disenfranchised cultural sites. Technical Communication Quarterly, 22(1), 28–49.
• Bakke, A. (2019). Writing for Patients on the Participatory Web: Heuristics for Purpose-Driven Personas. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 62(4), 318–333. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2019.2946999
• Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. John Wiley & Sons.
• Buchanan, R. (2001). Human Dignity and Human Rights: Thoughts on the Principles of Human-Centered Design. Design Issues, 17(3), 35–39.
• Bregman, R. (2018). Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Reprint edition). Back Bay Books.
• Carlson, E. B. (2021). Visual participatory action research methods: Presenting nuanced, co-created accounts of public problems. In R. Walton & G. Agboka (Eds.), Equipping technical communicators for social justice work: Theories, methodologies, and pedagogies (pp. 98–115).
• The Future Has Arrived—It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet. William Gibson? Anonymous? Apocryphal? (2012, January 24). [Quotation Investigator]. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/
• Jones, N. N. (2016a). Narrative inquiry in human-centered design: Examining silence and voice to promote social justice in design scenarios. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 46(4), 471–492.
• Jones, N. N. (2016b). The technical communicator as advocate: Integrating a social justice approach in technical communication. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 46(3), 342–361.
• Mirel, B. (2004). Interaction design for complex problem solving: Developing useful and usable software. Morgan Kaufmann.
• Munroe, R. (n.d.). How it Works [Xkcd]. Retrieved May 10, 2022, from https://xkcd.com/385/
• Opel, D. S., & Rhodes, J. (2018). Beyond Student as User: Rhetoric, Multimodality, and User-Centered Design. Computers and Composition, 49, 71–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2018.05.008
• Ramler, M. E. (2021). Queer Usability. Technical Communication Quarterly, 30(4), 345–358. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2020.1831614
• Rose, E. J. (2016). Design as advocacy: Using a human-centered approach to investigate the needs of vulnerable populations. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 46(4), 427–445.
• Rose, E., & Cardinal, A. (2018). Participatory video methods in UX: Sharing power with users to gain insights into everyday life. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 6(2), 9–20.
• Rose, E. J., & Cardinal, A. (2021). Purpose and Participation: Heuristics for Planning, Implementing, and Reflecting on Social Justice Work. In R. Walton & G. Agboka (Eds.), Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work (pp. 75–97).
• Rose, E. J., Edenfield, A., Walton, R., Gonzales, L., McNair, A. S., Zhvotovska, T., Jones, N., de Mueller, G. I. G., & Moore, K. (2018). Social Justice in UX: Centering Marginalized Users. Proceedings of the 36th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1145/3233756.3233931
• Sano-Franchini, J. (2017). What can Asian eyelids teach us about user experience design? A culturally reflexive framework for UX/I design. Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization, 10(1), 3.
• Simmons, W. M., & Zoetewey, M. W. (2012). Productive usability: Fostering civic engagement and creating more useful online spaces for public deliberation. Technical Communication Quarterly, 21(3), 251–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2012.673953
• Sims, M. (2022). Tools for Overcoming Oppression: Plain Language and Human-Centered Design for Social Justice. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 65(1), 11–33. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2022.3150236
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Transcript

AWelcome to TC talk. That's tech comm talk.BI am not your host.AYou kind of are? We co-host, but I am the hostier host.BI'm Benton.AI'm Abi. What are we doing here?BOoh, getting real philosophical right off the bat aren’t we?AAt least you didn't say the backstroke. A toast to your empty glass.BYeah.AWe're having champagne tonight because we're celebrating your birthday. You know you're committed when you will spend your birthday evening recording a podcast with me.BYeah. The most heartwarming happening today was my daughters bringing me second breakfast in bed, brought me a parfait and a mandarin orange.AThat’s so adorable.BAnd Phoebe even peeled the mandarin orange herself. And she served me the parfait in a Garfield mug, which is very high status in her book.ABefore we get into the content of the podcast, I have a big favor to ask of you, dear listener.BOh, not me, okay.AI'm not asking for money. I am not asking for ratings and reviews, but I am asking to hear from you. And here's why. Two reasons actually. Number one, Benton and I are going to be presenting at the Applied Rhetoric Collaborative in June, which will be held in Provo, Utah. And we'll be talking about TC talkBIndeed.A And I'm pretty proud of my title. I'm not very good with titles. So this one felt inspired: out of the ivory tower and into your earbuds.BThat's right.AThe purpose of the applied rhetoric collaborative from what I understand is to talk about ways people have used rhetoric in practical ways in their life, whether it professionally or or not. Or it's about bringing rhetoric to non-academic audiences. And in part, that's what TC talk does. Which means I need to hear from you if you are not an academic or if you are an academic, but don't specialize in technical communication. Even if you are just tech comm adjacent. I would love to hear it if you've learned something new about tech comm or rhetoric from this podcast. Because I want to talk about that in the presentation. It can be anonymous. I will welcome your comments on Twitter ar_bakke. Or you can email me at Abigail.bakke@mnsu.edu. Doesn't need to be anything long or complicated. I just want to know how has it helped you connect with rhetoric if that's not your primary area. But if rhetoric and tech comm is your primary area, I still want to hear from you and here's why. Those of you who do podcasting in an academic fashion have probably bumped up against the challenge of tenure and promotion requirements that don't necessarily know how to handle non-traditional formats for scholarship. This is not a peer reviewed manuscript. So I'm going to have to report on my work. And, you know, there's not the traditional metrics to share with upper administration. I can share some quantitative metrics. But I think what will be most powerful isBReviews,Aactual comments from listeners. And if you're a grad student as well, please, please reach out because it would warm my heart to know that what we've been working on has helped you in any way in your studies. Phew. Got through that. And it's hard for me to ask for things, soBIt's kinda funny how that is never true of kids. It is easy for them to ask for things.AYeah. And in fact, our oldest daughter is a girl scout. I am the worst Girl Scout parent because I'm like What? Talking to strangers? Meanwhile, she's going up and down the street, chatting everyone up, making jokes. How did this person come from you and me, Benton?BHm.AAt one point she was like, I want to beat the Guinness World Record for number of Girl Scout cookies sold. And I'm like, Not on my watch.BNot happening. I think that a lot of kids, at least I personally went through a phase when the Guinness Book of World Records was this holy grail.AYou know what’s interesting to think about?BWhat?Ayou probably have broken a world record. You just don't know what it's of.BThe world will never know.ANow on to content, we've been chatting about user experience and usability for the past couple of episodes. This is Part 3 on ways to do socially just user experience. Although it is one part of several, I don't mean to imply that it's this separate aspect of UX because I think, like I've mentioned before, it is a thread that runs through UX, whether or not you intend it to. UX involves human beings.BGenerally.AIt involves potential for advocating for certain audiences or excluding certain audiences. Those are social justice questions.BI would say that there is in all UX cases a greater potential for excluding.ACertainly it's easier to exclude than to include because there are infinite ways to include audiences. It's not feasible to include them all. And you may not want to or need to anyway, but what you don't want to do is put certain users on the sidelines because they're just not as convenient to write for or design for. And another way to see the potential for social justice in UX is to look at examples where social justice was not supported in a certain design choice. And there's tons of examples of this. But there's one I want to share. This came from an article by Jennifer Sano-Franchini and she was describing the Nextdoor app. Are you familiar with that?BNo.AIt's a social networking site that's based around geography. So your neighbors all sign up for it. And they might post things like lost cat or garage sale. But they can also report suspicious behavior.BWhat could go wrong? They wouldn't report suspiciously non-white people in their neighborhood, would they?AYeah, they did.BOh. People.ABut this is interesting and kind of unexpected. Next door actually changed their platform to make it harder to report. So They didn't eliminate it, but they added friction, you could say, enough friction to make people stop and think about what they're doing. In one sense, that's breaking a major rule of UX, which is make things easy and intuitive almost to the point that you don't have to think about them, right? And here they're making something harder. They're forcing you to think about it. But I think that's an example of bringing a social justice lens to UX work, is that it fills in the gaps where a strict focus on ease of use or even satisfaction are main goals, because someone might be very well satisfied that they've reported they're suspicious looking neighbor for getting their mail at 9 pm. I don't know. But that doesn't mean that that's creating a safe environment for those neighbors,BRight. It seems like making things easy and intuitive. Those are hammer descriptions. I know exactly what to do. I take this and I knock my neighbor on the head with it, right? No. So you make the hammer less easy and intuitive for head knocking.ANow, I'm wondering what an intuitively head knocking hammer would look like. I understand your point.BYeah. That metaphor doesn't exactly nail it if you know what I mean.ABut that pun just did.BThank you.ASometimes you need to make things easy and intuitive. Like you should not make it exceptionally prohibitive to apply for social services, for instance, like we were talking about in the What Could Go wrong episode.BYeah.Abut other times, you need to take a broader view of what could the consequences be, not just on the users, but on other people in general. So those neighbors who were just getting their mail at 9 pm andBgetting reported for itAand happened to not be white. They may not have opted into this Nextdoor app at all. They might not know it exists and yet they can be harmed.BIt seems like good UX is making it easy and intuitive to do something good and making it harder and more confusing or difficult to do something bad.AI think that's fair. What that means is that being a UX practitioner cannot be a neutral role. Just as being a technical communicator, you are not in a neutral role. This definition from Acharya’s lit review captures well this more expansive view of usability. He says. “It's not limited to assessing the functional characteristics of a product. It also implies how the product can meaningfully change or improve users’ lives. Especially, but not exclusively in underserved and underrepresented communities.”BChange or improve users’ lives. That phrasing, just like jumped out at me as like, that is the point of technical communication.AMake people's lives better?BYes.AI love that.BThat is the impetus of all technical communication, whether it’sADone right.Byes,Aa lot of it in reality does not do those things.BOkay, yeah. You know, communicating safety hazards. You are trying to improve someone's life by making sure it isn't ended prematurely.AYes, I like that. Ideally UX will center the user or human, right? We talked about the language of human-centered design. Let me give you this definition of human-centered design from Buchanan. “Human-centered design is fundamentally an affirmation of human dignity.”BI'll take that.AI want to also insert in here a comment from Jones, who writes that, yes, this focus on human dignity matches the field’s turn toward social justice. But quote, “although HCD, has the potential to be a site for more socially just design does not mean that HCD is inherently socially just. involving users is a great start. However, user involvement alone is not enough to ensure that design is more equitable. It is up to designers to deliberately make more just and equitable design an end goal.” which I think is an excellent reminder that if we're going into it to check off a box of we're involving users without actually going in with a goal to affirm the dignity of those humans. Then,BThen it's really just a bureaucratic kangaroo court. In a sense.AWhat do you mean?BI mean, in a lot of cases, environmental protections and, getting an environmental statement approved by the state through some process, I'll say it's generally made in a way that is not made to stop bad things from happening. It's just made to satisfy the requirement to check the box and get on with building the rubber dog shit factory. I went too far there. So human-centered design is definitely a step up fromASystem-centered design or designer centered design.BUser-centered to human centered. What if we're to take it a step further to? I'll take a step back so that this, my next step makes more sense. So a lot of the ways that people view their surroundings, their environment is self-centered. We look outside and we see say a songbird sitting in a tree. And so we think about this bird makes me happy to see. You can think even a little bit more about the deeper ecological value that this bird has. It helps to spread the seeds of trees and plants from one place to another. And this bird is just an example of all of nature that we, humanity, views in terms of what can it do for us. So if we were to go a step further and to look at ecologically-centered design, or at least ecologically-centered rhetoric. We could say that this bird has value to the ecosystem, whether we're here to experience it or not. And I realize that there aren't all that many products or services that are designed for the ecosystem.ABut there are products designed that harm the ecosystem.BYes.A That don't give any thought to it.BAbsolutely.AOkay. So let me see if I can pick up what you're putting down. We could move to even an environment centered design?BEnvironment or ecology. Ecology is more focused on the interplay of various forms of life in your environment.AOh. That's fair. That's a great question because, huh. Yeah. That is I mean, that is another stakeholder for sure. I mean, it's weird to call the environment a stakeholder, butBIt's because we're not used to thinking about it that way.ABut it is, it will be affected one way or another. And that's yet another consideration for design.BI've been thinking about this as I've been reading a lot about ecology in the excellent book, The Hidden Lives of Trees.Athat could be another episode at some point. Environmental rhetoric, environmental design. Yeah.BAnd he, he gets into the way that trees, plants, the vegetative world sees, smells, hears, feels, elements of what is going on around us that we are wholly unused to thinking about as humans.AYou mean to tell me trees have feelings.BThey have preferences in terms of which trees matter more to them. Like a tree cares more about its mother, than it cares about its neighbor. Even if it's the same species.AThat's wild. Let's try to get back on track.BYeah. Kind of fun with fungus but without the fungus involved, or being discussed.ARight, I thoughtBThe fungus is what helps it talk. There, there's your fun.AAh.BFungus is the information superhighway of the forest.AAnd that's your fun with fungus for today folks,BThe wood wide web.ADid you just come up with that?BI absolutely did not.AOh. If you had I don't know if I would have applauded you or rolled my eyes. That's that's honestly pretty good. Okay. I will add though, that, and this is something that I may not have been fully clear about in part 1, the UX-istential questions one. That human-centered design and user-centered design are distinct from participatory design, at least according to Rose and Cardinal. They explain that UCD or HCD is more representative in the sense that designers are getting information from them and then taking that information and bringing it to the design team. Kind of representing them. Make sense?B Okay.AWhereas participatory design is that active involvement of the user. Designing for users is one thing. Designing with them is the ideal we want to strive for. And not just any users, not just the easy users, the convenience sample, but going out of your way to center the most marginalized. There's a passage from this book. Have you read this one? It's Technically Wrong by Sarah Wachter Boettcher?B I don't think I've read that one. And by that I mean, I have not read that one.AI'm going to read an extended passage because it's such an excellent illustration. “Try to bring up all the people design teams are leaving out. And many in tech will reply, That's just an edge case. We can't cater to everyone. Edge case is a classic engineering term for scenarios that are considered extreme rather than typical. But when applied to people and their identities, rather than to a product's features, the term edge case is problematic, because it assumes there's such a thing as an average user in the first place. It turns out there isn't, we’re all edge cases. And I don't mean that metaphorically but scientifically. In his book, The End of Average, Rose tells the story of Lieutenant Gilbert Daniels, an Air Force researcher. The 1950s was tasked with figuring out whether fighter plane cockpits weren't sized right for the pilots using them.” Hey call back to part one when we were talking about cockpits as an originatory site for usability research.BYeah.A“Daniel studied more than 4 thousand pilots and calculated their averages for 10 physical dimensions like shoulders, chest, waist, hips. Then he took that profile of the quote, average pilot and compared each of his 4 thousand plus subjects to see how many of them were within the middle 30% of those averages for all 10 dimensions. The answer was 0,BWoah.ANot a single one fit the mold of average.BHuh. That's wild.AYeah. So what did the Air Force do? “Instead of designing for the middle? It demanded that airplane manufacturers design for the extremes instead, mandating planes that fit both those at the smallest and the largest sizes along each dimension. Pretty soon engineers found solutions to designing for these ranges, including adjustable seats, foot pedals and helmet straps, the kinds of inexpensive features we now take for granted.” She goes on to say that she prefers to call them stress cases rather than edge cases because it shows designers how strong their work is, right? Can it hold up under stress?BThat's genius.ACan it handle it?BIt can handle anything you throw at it, designed to be strong and manly.AOkay.BGetting a little gender essentialist.AYeah, asking the designer to rise to the challenge rather than attributing that to user error, say. This idea lines up with this idea of queer usability, which comes from Ramler, an article from Technical Communication Quarterly. She says that queer usability is not only about inclusion of queer audiences, but is an overall philosophy of centering the most marginalized users. And that includes anticipated future users.BWoah.AI'll give you an example. Have you ever heard of the blogging site Tumblr?BThink so, yeah.AIt was really popular for its ability for people to form groups and communities. And a sizable portion of its user base was queer individuals who found it really important for, like, especially young people who were learning about their sexuality, couldn't find access to sex ed anywhere else. Living in our country I mean, that's not a surprise. It wasn't just for queer people. And it was discovered that there was some like child pornography being shared in some of these private groups. And so what Tumblr did is they said blanket ban on anything sexual in nature.BOh.AWhat ended up happening was that these queer youth in particular lost what was a really important space. And so it ended up being dangerous in some cases because when people do not have access to accurate information or do not have access to support, that's not healthy. So the point here is that, yes, the exchange of child pornography is obviously a problem, like that, is one of the stakeholders you need to consider is children, right? Yet, in issuing this blanket ban, there was a complete disregard for the other communities that could be harmed by it. And it's, it's not an either or here. It's a matter of how do we find a nuanced solution that supports the things we want and doesn't support the things we don't want. And I think Tumblr eventually shut down becauseBI don't know that it's shut down but it might have just gone the way of MySpace. Did that shut down? Maybe it did.AI'm still friends with Pete, so. No, Tom!BTom.AMyspace Tom.BStupid Tom.ANo, just kidding.BYou know, at least he's not a creepy billionaire right now.AThat’s true.BHe didn't have a chance to turn into Mark Zuckerberg first because you know he would have been creepy.AI don't know. Zuckerberg kinda maxes out the the creepiness.BI think that Mark Zuckerberg maxes out the creepiness in, don't know,AUncanny valley?BYes.AYeah, whereas Elon Musk just wants to be liked. He just wants to be popular.BHe does.AHe's working out his issues in ways that are probably going to have disastrous global consequences. But, you know,BYeah.AThat’s 2022 for you.BRight, I mean, it's just kind of the classic give one person a lot of power. And then they just start performing large-scale social experiments on humanity and we'll never know what life would be like without them.AYeah. Anyway, the point here is that platform designers should think in terms of who could be most likely to be harmed here, whether or not they are users of that platform. I don't think Elon Musk is going to do that. If he's at the helm of Twitter, I don't think that's going to be what he cares about in the least. In fact, I have a feeling he's going to privilege the voices that are most likely to oppress others. So an example that Ramler gives of a platform that did focus on inclusion was dating site called thirst with a U. one of the design choices that was really inclusive was they didn't have a drop-down for gender, male, female, other, because that is literally othering non-binary people. And so it had, I think like an open,BA text field.AYeah. From a data surveillance standpoint, that's not as efficient for the company if they want to, like run stats on their user base. But that's not the point, right?BHm. People before profits? This is a thing unheard of!AWhat is that from?BThat wasn't really my best John Ryhs Davies. An elf go underground where a dwarf dare not? Oh. I'd never hear the end of it.AOkay.BIt's in the,AI believe you.B The third movie when they're going into theAMoria?BNo, not Moria. Not at all.AOh, no, no. The one with all the skulls.BTo see the ghosties.AYes. I remember. I think we've pretty well established that social justice is inherent to UX. What I want to talk about for the rest of the episode is who to center and how do we center those audiences? And then I'm going to raise some cautions and challenges.BOkay.AUsers to center, traditionally marginalized groups. Women, which is unfortunately extremely relevant as of right now. With the Supreme Court decision, women who need reproductive health care need to be considered as an audience, even for things like say, Google, like how are they going to protect user's search history Or location-based apps that could theoretically be used to track people. Queer communities like we talked about, people of color, people with disabilities, non-native speakers of English. Intercultural and international audiences and civic audiences. Methods for centering these populations. The big idea is participation, like we talked about before. Although that in and of itself is not enough if there's not the correct mindset behind it. Not a guarantee, but in general, that's the direction we want to move towards. This requires a rethinking of traditional roles. The researcher is not the sole authority or expert in the situation. It requires seeing users as having expertise in their own right and seeking to draw that out and honor that.BThat’s an interesting thought.AA few specific methods here. Personas, talked about them in part two on UX practice and how they're, they can be a great way to kind of humanize the design process. We know that at worst they're based on assumptions and stereotypes. The more closely based on actual research they are, the better they tend to be. And when I say research, I don't just mean like we studied the demographics of our user base. Like yes, that can give you some information, but it's not giving you people's reasoning for needing to do what they need to do.BWhich is kind of the point of personas, right? Getting into the reasoning.ARight. If all you have is a list of this is Jimmy. He's a Millennial. He's in a low income bracket. And he grew up in Iowa. Like, I don't know. That in and of itself. All that does is encourage you to stereotype because you're making that leap from, oh what does it mean to be from Iowa? You're filling in the blanks.BExactly. Yeah. You know, you have a few data points that give you just enough to make inferences of your own.ASo the more meaningful qualitative research you can get behind your personas, the better. We can take it a step further in our quest for more participation. User created personas. And this comes again from Rose and Cardinal. They talk about how they actually got their participants to craft their own personas. I think they had an image of like teenagers who were making collages even to represent their personas, which I thought was really cool to make it visual as well. And a good way to think about the quality of your personas if you don't have the luxury of having your users create them, is to ask yourself what I want to be represented in these terms?BHm.ABecause I have seen examples of personas that are like the overachiever or the grumbler, stuff like that. So reducing their identity to a way that they are in a certain context and you know, over achiever, that's only in relation to what the researchers define as an appropriate level of achievingBOr an important area of achievement. Yeah. Turning a person into one word. That's a one-dimensional person.ABut I mean, at its root, that's what personas do is they reduce. They reduce lots of data into smaller, more comprehensible, bite-size chunks for your design team.BTrue.AAnd like to some extent that's necessary. ButBWell, of course you're never going to take one person and be able to describe all facets of them. Know that at some point during your efforts, they’re going to change because time happens.AYeah. And here I want to introduce an idea from Natasha Jones on feminist narrative inquiry. She defines it as “a form of qualitative research that emphasizes the importance of lived experiences.” So for instance, ask users to tell a story about their experience with a technology. Narrative inquiry should be a dialogic process, it should be a reflective process. And it's a way to counteract that very reductiveness that I was just talking about. So instead of aiming to generalize with your personas, you keep users stories intact. And they are your persona, like an actual person, a story that they've told. In the spirit of reflection. I'm thinking back to a publication I did about patients who use eHealth to answer their questions about their conditions. And I kind of did that one word labeling thing.BHmm.AYeah. I had categories like the planner, the explorer, the pragmatist. And those were derived from interviews. I wasn't saying these should be the personas, that someone's identity can be summed up with this label. It's more saying this is an aspect of people's identities that you should include in your personas, which is what are their goals for searching for online health information. So the pragmatist, for instance, would be, I need to know if I need to go to the doctor. The explorer might be my chronically ill child has this condition and I want to know everything there is to know about it. And the, the tricky thing about using those labels I see now is that I should have instead labeled them, planning, exploring, right, to emphasize the action versus the identity.BYep.ABecause even for one person, they might shift in those activities or goals in the context of a single Internet search or over the course of a particular disease as their needs change.BIt could change based on what they find in their search too. If they're looking for information on planning and then something sparks that, oh wow, weird. Then then they might shift into, you know, there is a responsive element to searching, I imagine.AYeah, absolutely. So we've talked about personas, different ways to make those more potential for social justice. The next methods I want to talk about are kind of a group of approaches to the design of intercultural communication. These are things like participatory localization, cultural usability, culturally reflective UX.BOkay.AThese methods stand in contrast to more traditional, unhelpful, perhaps unjust ways of thinking about culture. And Agboka cause these large culture ideologies. So this would include things like Western people are more X and Eastern people are more Y. Already there are problems in generalizing like an entire hemisphere of people as more likely to have one personality trait over another.BBinarizing.AYeah.BA little bit problematic there.AAnd he makes a great point. Cultures don't communicate. Individuals within cultures do. All right? Yeah. Just like we were talking about with oh, this person's from Iowa. That means XYZ. When you know someone is of a particular culture that activates those stereotypes. Here's, I think, an even clear example of how this can play out with gender stereotypes. Do you remember the XKCD comic where there's two people, doing a math problem, they both get it wrong.BIf it's a male who gets the math problem wrong, you're so dumb.AYou suck at math.BYou suck at math. It's a female who gets the math problem wrong. Girls suck at math.AExactly. I struggle with gas pumps because I'm a woman.BYou struggle with gas pumps because you suck at gas pumps.AThank you. So some ways to move beyond that large culture thinking and get at more the individual needs. One method is participatory localization. This comes from Agboka. Have you heard of localization? In the context of tech comm, it means taking a product or a piece of communication from one culture into another. This happens a lot when you have like global multinational companies creating stuff that goes out across the world. Localization is the idea that things get customized for each of those different cultures or countries.BSo that would be like the Ford Nova that had appalling sales in Mexico because they didn't realize that in Spanish it means doesn't go. Yeah, that was a, a failure of localization.APrecisely. And translation is certainly a part of that process, but it's not the only aspect. Acharya says, “from a localized design perspective, a successful product is one that is developed by recognizing socio-cultural, legal, linguistic, and political systems in the target culture, all in light of multicultural users’ needs, preferences and expectations.” A big problem with localization is when it takes place at the developer site. So this company is headquartered in the US. That is where the decisions about localization are being made.BWhat could go wrong?AYeah. Participatory localization, quote, is more intuitive and user sensitive. An approach that will be undertaken from the ground up. So do it locally and do it with user participation. And in fact, users are already doing their own localization, whether or not the developer expects it. So Sun gives an example in the context of text messaging in China. And another facet to consider with localization is the physical setting in which a product will be introduced. Acharya draws from St.Amant’s contextualized design theory to explain usability challenges of medical devices that were being used by health care providers in Nepal. This biomedical equipment was developed in the global north, he calls it. And one of his findings was that the physical setting really mattered here. Things like the portability of the equipment that was not considered in the development of that product, but was really essential in these hospitals in Nepal. The power required to run these devices. There was a much less consistent power supply in Nepal. And if you’re running machines that people's lives depend on, like you need to build in some backup power into that. But because it was not developed in that context, it wasn't doing the job. And then another method kind of in this vein of socially just intercultural communication is what Sano-Franchini calls culturally reflexive us. She says, “there's currently limited work that centers on issues of race and racism in UX scholarship even while examples of the challenges of race and other kinds of bias as facilitated by technology design abound.” The example I'm thinking of here, I don't remember who tweeted it, but the example was featured in the book, Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin. Somebody reporting that their GPS stated, turn right on Malcolm 10 boulevard. The tweeter was saying, you know there wasn't a Black person on this design team. She says “There seems to be an understandable reluctance and slow uptake when it comes to bringing race to UX design. Understandable in the sense that there is indeed the risk of approaches that make easy assumptions about large, diverse, and multifaceted groups of people.” So she presents basically a set of questions that designers can ask, such as “are particular races, identities, or features cast as desirable or undesirable in this product.” It's a way of making race a part of the discussion in a way that it hasn't been in the past.BTo be fair. It looks like the Sano Franchini, that was published in 2017. Bit has happened since then.AThat's a great point. So 2017, a lot has happened. And I would say, right now as we speak, Republicans are trying to censor discussions of race in K-12 schools right now.BThe whole nonsense about critical race theory.ANext I'm going to talk about a category of participatory visual methods. And this comes from Brock Carlson. She talks about photovoice as a possible visual method. And this is a method that's been used in things like public health. Where you give participants a camera and you say take pictures of things that speak to you in relation to this topic and then talk to us about those photos you took. Mapping is another way to do this. Have people create maps or revise maps to reflect a community's needs, for instance. Those are all ways to include your users and to do it in a way that may be more accessible than strictly verbal methods. And I would group within this participatory video methods. This is the rose and Cardinal piece again, so similar to photo voice except give a video camera or ask them to take video on their phone. They write “by deputizing participants to collect data for themselves and to act as researchers, their frustrating experiences are legitimized in a way they might not be without giving them the ability to literally hold the tools of research.”BThat's great.AThey talk about a fascinating example of giving video cameras to riders of local transit, homeless people specifically. And at one point, one of the participants was able to interview like a local politician about the bus situation,BOkay.AAnd capture that on his camera. Which is really cool because he was really taking agency in that moment. And in another publication, Rose talks more about what she was able to learn from this study. Things like riding the bus was almost a form of safety or refuge. for these audiences.BYou get out of the weather.AGet off the street. Another was around the challenges of the fare system. So in that particular city, they were moving to a fully digital fare system.BOh.AAnd you can see how from a designer standpoint, this is going to streamline everything. We're using technology to solve problems. Maybe it is an improvement for certain riders who have a cell phone where they can download the app,BAccess to digital resources.AWhat about the homeless riders?BBack when I was taking the bus in Fargo. So I know that I have seen instances where someone who doesn't have means asks for a transfer, which is essentially asking to bum a ride off someone.AAnd if they're not going to use that transfer, why not give it to someone else?BExactly.ABut digitizing it makes that kind of thing impossible. And theoretically, it is better at making money for the bus company or the city, whatever. But again, as a socially just UX practitioner, that should not be your priority. And Rose even suggests here that in developing personas, make personas that represent the most vulnerable populations so that you're not leaving them out. And then the last method I want to talk about is called productive usability from Simmons and Zoetewey and this focuses on designing for civic audiences. Conventional usability is not enough for civic websites. So like a city website or a local organization or something,Bsomething that by definition has to serve everyone in the community.AAnd those sites might pass traditional usability testing, but not enable, quote, citizen collaboration, work or action. And those are things that users might want to do with those websites. So the authors argue we should focus on not just usability but usefulness, which Mirel defines as the ability to do better work, not just use an application more easily. They provide a model of what they call productive usability, which allows room for users with goals and purposes that the designers may not have prioritized or even considered. Simmons and Zoetewey watched people use these civic websites. They discovered that people wanted to engage in these websites beyond the educational purposes that the websites were defined for. They wanted to be problem solvers. They didn't just want the definition of storm water regulation. They wanted to know what actions they could take to minimize pollution in stormwater. They didn't want just summaries of research. They wanted to be able to see the data themselves. That's where participation by users is really important in the design process. Think of ways to empower users and think in terms of what do they want to accomplish versus what does the designer want to accomplish. Last, I want to talk about some cautions and challenges with doing socially just UX.BChallenges and cautions?AFor instance, we have to watch out for UX, human-centered design, even participatory design as terms to be co-opted by industry.BOh, yeah, they’re great at that.AYeah. Opel and Rhodes write, “UCD is attractive in its seeming values, its optimism and its ubiquity. It is attractive and it seems to be in the air these days.” Yet the more ubiquitous an idea, the more meaningless it can become.BMm-hmm.ASo it can become a label to put on things versus a philosophy that's genuinely driving something.BSo the concern here sounds like it is the, the social responsibility version of greenwashing.AAbsolutely. And they note an example where the words efficiency and engagement cropped up in a practitioner's definition of user-centered design. And so they ask, where did this come from? Since when has efficiency been a goal of user centered design?BNo joke.AEven engagement. We think of that as an ultimate good. Like if students are engaged in our classes, we know they're learning. Well. I mean, ideally, we don't know that. And again, let's think back to that example of Nextdoor. They are engaging with the app by reporting suspicious activity. But is that the way they should be engaging? Not exactly. Another caution is that some types of participatory design could put your users at risk. Let's think back to the public transit study and the author absolutely acknowledges this. Some of her participants might reveal that they had strategies for fare evasion, for instance. And that could put them at risk.BMm-hm. Yeah, it could, at the very least put their strategies at risk of being fixed.ARight. So what's going to happen with that data? Is it going to be used to make it harder for these people to get by. And another thing I want to add is that participatory methods, social justice methods. Human decenter, if human, human decentered design, yeah, let's not do that.BHuman dysentery design. Sorry.AYou can't overlay those on an already oppressive product.BAh. If oppression is a feature, not a bug, you can't remove the bug,ARight? Again, just a caution to practitioners that sometimes you cannot solve the problem through your methods because the problem doesn't want to be solved. And I'll give you an example. One of my former students actually, Michela Sims, recently published a piece about the US application for asylum. And she analyzed it using plain language guidelines, which are theoretically more socially just than bureaucratic legalese. Unsurprisingly discovered that that's not enough to judge whether something is socially just or not. I mean, not that it would have mattered because these forms were a nightmare, not readable. And I love what she says here. “On the surface, TPC, technical and professional communication, communicates varying levels of complex information or instructions to enable an audience to act. However, TPC may be constructed to compel audiences to act in ways that place larger agendas above human beings.” And that's absolutely what's happening here.BIt is designed to be a barrier. The whole concept of closed borders didn't come into the international awareness really until World War 1. You could go wherever you wanted through most of human history. World War One, one country was like, Hey, don't leave our country. You've got to stay here and fight. Rutger Bregman’s most recent book is where that can be found.ABack to this application. It was not written in plain language. But even if it was, that does not mean it is sensitive to the audience. Because as she notes, the audiences of this form are often traumatized. If they are fleeing their home countries for asylum, they may have been tortured. The form has language like I would I would almost call it gas lighting through tech comm in a way becauseBOoh.Athere's one, there was one place where it asks people to describe their experiences that justify asylum. And it even says, like, if this is hard for you, then ask a health care provider to help you because we need enough information to legitimize your claim. So it's basically saying, we don't care what effect this has on your mental health to detail how you've been tortured or whatever. If this form, we're designed in a human centered way, then this form wouldn't exist. Do you know what I mean?BYeah.AAnd the system wouldn't exist because it's inherently unjust. So there's ways to do some surface level revisions of these things, but it's not going to transform an oppressive system. Sorry,BRight.AAnother caution for UX practitioners to be aware is that participation by real marginalized users may place an additional burden on them. They already have potentially limited time, resources, finances. There's going to be limits to how much they can participate or that they want to participate. And those things need to be taken into account. Part of that might mean being really sensitive to the locations of your research. Can you go into the community versus trying to bring them to where you are? How can you compensate them to make it worth their time? This is hard. My, my final note to listeners is, don't give up. You may have been thinking, as we're talking about this, that seems impossible. My company would never support that, that kind of thing. And again, there's no such thing as a perfectly socially just research design because we can't see the future. We cannot anticipate every conceivable consequence of our choices. But that doesn't mean we don't try at all.BRight.AAnd part of this work is going to require practitioners and academics to advocate for the additional time and research it takes to make projects truly participatory. Thinking in terms of the academy, that values very specific things. If you want to get hired, if you want to get promoted, if you want to get tenure. Committees are going to be looking at things like peer reviewed publications and how many you completed in a certain time-frame. That is not conducive to long-term sustained engagement with a community.BLongitudinal studies are not attractive to academia.AAnd it's not even necessarily a longitudinal study, but it takes time to connect with the community and not just drop in and out as it suits your needs as a researcher. So this is also a message to people sitting on hiring committees, tenure committees, grant funders, journal editors, and of course, workplaces where UX happens.BMm-hm.AUm, you know, if you are in a decision-making capacity, then you need to shift towards valuing and investing in those practices that are more likely to lead to socially just designs. View that as part of your job description as a technical communicator, a UX practitioner. You're an advocate as well. Thanks to Natasha Jones for that idea of technical communicator as advocate versus someone in a strictly neutral role who relays information objectively. That is impossible in the world we live in.BI think it's really interesting the point that you brought up about how when we're encountering like systemic issues of non-human centric design. There is in fact a built-in limitation to how much a technical communicator can actually accomplish. If the problem is capitalism, no amount of money you throw at the problem is going to fix it. Because the money is the problem. And a technical person in a for-profit workplace is sometimes going to be asked to do something that is literally impossible because it looks good for the company. When in reality it is a smoke screen.AYeah, people are going to be asked to bend ethics in the workplace. And ideally, people would be able to take a stand against that, but people also need to feed their families. You know what I mean? I don't want to black and white this. But I also don't want to say that because there's no clear answer, just give up.BThe only hope that you have is in trying. And in fact, you can be pretty confident that if you don't try, things will get worse. The status quo created the myth of progress as a smokescreen. The status quo wants things to be humming along just as they are. And soAprivileging the same people,Bof course, they're going to tell stories to mollify the unsatisfied masses. The myth of progress is really just like the inherent belief that things get better.ASociety is always getting better.BSociety is always getting better.AWhich is tricky because society is a lot better in a lot of ways, but not for everyone.B“The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed.” And that's a quote from William Gibson.AThank you for that. Thanks for talking TC with me today, Benton.BThanks for having me.AHappy birthday.

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Last episode, we focused on UX (user experience) and usability as a discipline; in this episode, we focus on UX as a practice. We discuss various stages of the UX process, from "empathize" to "ideate" to "prototype." Abi describes typical methods in UX research and testing and when to use them. To demonstrate, she springs a (poorly conducted) usability test on Benton. Finally, they discuss the typical skills and traits required of UX professionals.

Sources and further reading

• Buley, L. (2013). The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide. Rosenfeld Media.
• Kobar, C. (2015, February 19). The UX Design Process. Medium. https://chriskobar.medium.com/the-ux-design-process-6e3935837520
• Krug, S. (2009). Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. Pearson Education.
• Lauer, C., & Brumberger, E. (2016). Technical communication as user experience in a broadening industry landscape. Technical Communication, 63(3), 248–264.
• Lanius, C., Weber, R., & Robinson, J. (2021). User Experience Methods in Research and Practice. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 51(4), 350–379. https://doi.org/10.1177/00472816211044499
• Nielsen, J. (2000). Designing Web Usability. New Riders.
• Redish, J. (2012). Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works. Elsevier.
• Rose, E., Putnam, C., & McDonald, C. (2020). Preparing Future UX Professionals: Human Skills, Technical Skills, and Dispositions. Proceedings of the 38th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1145/3380851.3416774
• Sharp, D. C. (2018, November 6). Understand Your Business and Your Customer: A Lesson from UX Models. Medium. https://medium.com/@c.sharp/understand-your-business-and-your-customer-a-lesson-from-ux-models-21805b5f4f81
• Sheldrake, M. (2020, October 20). Why the hidden world of fungi is essential to life on Earth. Resilience. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-10-20/why-the-hidden-world-of-fungi-is-essential-to-life-on-earth/
• What is Design Thinking? (n.d.). The Interaction Design Foundation. Retrieved April 26, 2022, from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/design-thinking

Transcript

BHi, I'm Benton.AI'm Abi. And this is TC talk. That's TC as in tech comm. That is the area I specialize in. I'm an academicBand I'm not.AAnd yet we have an awful lot to chat about,Bboy, do we. All right, so what are we talking about today?AYou'll remember last episode. I kind of introduced the series I'm doing on user experience. What do you remember about our last episode?BSo if I remember correctly, usability is kind of an evaluation that happens towards the end of a design process. And user experience is more of a full design process perspective.AYes. And that accounts for more than just whether a thing as easy to use.BSo you're saying that something could be very usable but very frustrating as well?AYeah. I mean, maybe it's an easy process, but it's still a pain.BLike gas pumps, they're very usable.AI disagree because they're not designed, wait were you being sarcastic?B Not at all.AI hate getting gas because they're all different. And some of them have that little thing you have to flick up and some of them don't.BAww.A shut up.BI'm sorry.AAnd It's always when I'm in a rush. It's like my brain has a harder time figuring out which buttons to press. Not to Mention. There's always three options. And I don't entirely know the difference between them. I always go with the cheapest one. But sometimes there's likeBpremium, mid gradeAwell sometimes there's what do you call it, that stuff made with corn?BE85?AYes. And I'm like, is this the kind of thing that's going to blow up my car if I use it.BYeah. E85. PSA here, is only for use in flex fuel vehicles.AAnd do I know if I have a flex fuel vehicle? No, I don't.BYou do not have a flex fuel vehicle.AHere's a good UX study. I mean, it wouldn't pass IRB in a million years, but take the surveillance video of people at the gas pump and track how frustrated they are. You know, I'm jealous of you folks that live in OregonBWhat?AIsn't it? The law that you can't pump your own gas?BJeez, I don't know. So I'm teasing you because it's a mechanical minded thing.AAnd that's not me,Band that's not you.ASo gas pump designers are catering to you, not me. Although I would not want to see is gas pumps for women. Gas pumps for English majors. What would a guess pump for English majors look like?BIt would have all of the instructions would be in Elizabethan English. Methinks thou must lifteth the lever. Anyway, you completely hijacked what I was trying to say. For the mechanically inclined, a gas pump is very usable. That does not mean it is a joy to use. They freaking stink. They make you think about your carbon footprint.AYou're paying money. A lot, recently. What about the little video screens?BUgh I hate them. At least they put in a mute button.ADo they? See I didn't even notice thatBthe KwikTrip ones, the ones that that yak at you.ABut it's not the default. As soon as the gas starts running, that video comes at you telling you about the bananas on sale inside the storeBor cheddar TV, whatever. I don't even know what the, how they make the decision of what to put on those stupid things. ButA is it just for, do they have like a news show just for gas pumps?BGSTV.AThat’s what it’s called?BGSTV, gas station TV.AAre you kidding? You're lying.BIt is not an actual TV Station.AYou are pulling my leg.BNo. I am not pulling your leg. Gs TV is a thing. And I think that it's really just like a five-minute loop or something like that, that plays over and over and maybe they do a new one for every day. I don't know.AOh, and we didn't even get to the part about payment. Here's the thing. I will not get gas anymore at a gas station that requires me to go into the store. Because the only thing worse than struggling with a machine is talking to another human being.BThat's another difference between us.AI don't mind humans. I just, in fact, I avoid them when possible. And you're going to hate me for this, but I don't even use our rewards card because there's not a way to apply the rewards at the pump. You have to go in and pay.BYeah.AAnd there's also, so you put your card in so you have to figure out, do you swipe it? Do you put the chip end in? What is the orientation of the card?BYes.Ahow long do you leave it in and to their credit.BI see what you did there.AI didn't mean to make that joke. I should pretend like I meant it. To their credit. They did design it such that it will beep loudly at you to remind you to take the card out when you're done with it. And you know that that was a design feature built-in because of all the people who forgot their cards stuck in a gas pump. Yeah. I mean, I think even though this was a bit of an odyssey, we have demonstrated that usability is not a universal thing.BYeah,Awhat's usable for you is not usable for me. And that does not make me any lesser of a human being. Just because I prefer Elizabethan texts rather than octane numbers. No, just kidding. Friends, Romans, countrymen. Lend me your ears. I come not to praise gas but to pump it. Okay.BWell said.AWe also know via this discussion that something being usable doesn't mean it's an enjoyable experience. And there's a lot of reasons for that. People need gas. Of course, there's not going to be incentive to make it more pleasurable because it's not like people have a choice.BYou can't really do anything about the way it reeks.APlus there are financial incentives on the part of the gas station. I heard once that gas stations get their profit from selling snacks,Bright,Aversus actually selling the gas. And so they're going to blast that commercial at you to make you go, oh I really want a banana right now or what else do they sell?Byeah. Have you gone into the KwikTrip lately?A No.BI know that they did change the store so that instead of walking in the door and straight to the counter, You gotta walk around like a hot food thing.AWow. Additionally, they are motivated to potentially confuse customers with the pricing. They always add the teeny tiny nine, which is so pointless.BYeah.ABut at any rate, I'm going to be motivated to choose the more expensive gas if I'm not sure if the cheaper gas is going to blow up my car. See what I mean?BYeah, but cheaper gas won’t blow up your car. E85, you cannot use in your car.AWhat would happen?BThe reason that you can't, like the gas tank has to be made out of stainless steel. Because ethanol, the 85% of E85, draws moisture in from the atmosphere. And you don't want your gas tank to corrode too early. The other difference is that instead of monitoring the amount of fuel and air going into the engine it monitors the amount of fuel going into the engine and the amount of oxygen in the exhaust. Because depending on what fuel you're using, you would need to add a different amount of air into the cylinder to get a good explosion. Because explosions are internal combustion engines work.ASo it would make my car explode in a series of tiny functional explosions.BYes.AOkay. I did not know I had that much to say about gas pumps,BNor did I.AI had said last time that I want to approach the topic of UX in categories. Last week would have been the disciplinary category. What is UX and usability? This time, I want to focus on the practice of UX and usability. So in other words, what are practitioners actually doing when they conduct UX research or usability studies?BOkay.ATo get a handle on this, I read a bunch of trade books, guides for practitioners, I guess. UX team of one by Leah Buley. Don't make me think by Steve Krug, Letting go of the words Ginny reddish, Nielsen's guide to web usability. And these books were basically a mix of, here's some generalizable principles gleaned from research about what makes for usable websites, and methods for conducting local research on how are users responding to our product. Or how do we research the audience for this product that we're going to designBOkay.AAnd I also read academic research about other academic research about UX and tech comm, interview studies of UX practitioners, surveys, analyses of job ads. So this gives a picture of the role itself. What's included in the day-to-day? What are the variations on this profession? So I'm going to touch on those couple categories today. Okay, let's start by talking about methods. When it comes to research methods, generally, whether pertaining to user experience or not I like to think of methods as less of a how-to and more of a when to. What I mean by that is there's no point in learning how to conduct an interview study if an interview study’s not going to get you the information you need in the first place. In other words, I approach research methods as a set of choices you can make depending on what your needs are, what your research question is.B Okay?AThere is, of course, this ideal vision of a perfectly designed study that has all limitations accounted for, but that's impossible. And even if it were possible, it wouldn't necessarily be worth it. You know what I mean?BYeah,Abecause research is really a set of trade-offs. Maybe you give up some rigor in favor of more urgency andBOkay.FMeow.BGet out of there, Get out of there.AUX folks are working within time constraints, budget constraints. That doesn't mean they can't advocate for greater attention to detail or rigor when it is needed. Okay. And so in part, their role might involve kind of evangelizing others to the value of this kind of work.BHm.A Basic starting point is, what is it that you want to learn or research or test?BIt does seem like an important place to start.A It's not as simple as it sounds though. Because you can say, I want to test a website. But what do you want to know about the website? How people can complete a specific task? Do you want to study like a layer of the website, like focus on the visuals or the navigation throughout the entire site?Bokay, what do you want to know here? I want to know if my website is good. Oh boy. What is good? Good how?AFor whom?Bfor whom, ask for what they want.AAnd then maybe you are starting from the ground up. You don't have something to test because you need to learn about your audience first. When you know what you want to learn, then you know what stage in the project do you need to learn it? The earlier, the better generally. One thing UX practitioners should be acquainted with is the UX process. I shouldn't call it the process because there are multiple models that I've in fact printed out for you to take a look atBOh boy.ASo I've printed off three. Take a moment to look them over. What do you see that's kind of similar among them?BCircles. There are lots of circles in all of them,Asome of the circles are standalone. Others have smaller circles emanating out from them. Others of them have overlapping circles. What do you see in terms of similarities in the state, like the main stages.BSo it looks like define and prototype. I'm seeing in of them. Also ideate.AIdeate?BIdeate.A An Ideate’s Guide to UX.B Stanford design thinking process looks very basic and very, this looks approachable. So empathize seems like an interesting way to say, get to know. Whereas other charts show discover.AWhat about the, the latter steps? Are those essentially the same, maybe go by different names?B Experience design, tests, measure, and all seems like, you know, the quantitative step at the end. Evaluative.A Yeah, and I think this part is important too on this model where there's like a little cycle in the middle,Bthe Kobar model where it gets into the ideate test and prototype cycle. Which is good because that's the process of revision.AAnd the last step here is measure with an arrow back to that cycle.BAh yes.AThat might be an additional step depending on the results of your testing.BMm-hmm.ATo simplify things, let's think of UX methods in two major categories. This is what Lanius, Weber, and Robinson did in their 2021 study on UX methods is divide it into research methods and evaluation the methods. So research, meaning maybe you're aiming for generalizable results or you are trying to learn, answer some of the big questions about who your audience is and the evaluation would represent you've got a product, now you're testing it. It's not a clean distinction really because you could use certain methods for either a research or exploratory stage versus an evaluative testing stage.BBut aren't you missing something there? Sorry, podcast listeners, I'm showing a physical thing to Abi. So it sounds like this is the research methods and this is the measurement methods. What about the development methods?AOh, design methods. You're right, maybe design methods could be its own category. An example of a research method might be an ethnography or an observation, observing people in their natural environment.BYes,Abecause you want to design a gas pump for English majors. You observe people in their kitchen preparing breakfast. Because you want to design an, a, an appliance, or a type of toaster that better meets their needs. And then an evaluation method would be. Here's this Closer to final product. You want to get really specific local feedback about what aspects of it work. You've got a toaster, a prototype of a toaster. It's not going to change too much, but at least you can figure out, is it doing what you needed to do? Make a toaster strudel, and we'll watch how it goes.BOkay.AThere's also the question of who, who was going to be involved in your research or testing. You can see I'm following a pattern here, right? What, when, who,Bbut why?Athat's coming up. Actually, no, it's not. I feel like Huh. Last episode basically covered the why.BOkay.ASo when it comes to who, ideally you are working with actual users. Again, one of the tradeoffs might be it's difficult to access users. So maybe you use a representative user or maybe you just grab someone in the cubicle next door andBprovided that they consent to that.A Yes. You shouldn't use a colleague as your one and only opportunity to test. But maybe you're in that little cycle in the middle. And you want to make some headway before you test a more complete prototype on actual users.BYeah, before you start talking to someone you've never met about something that’s Never left your head.AYeah, exactly. Another question is, How many people do you need to test?BYes, that is an interesting question that whole fields of study look at.AAnd there's no magic number.B No,AThe general rule is the more people, the more confident you can be in your conclusions. But again, maybe you don't need a lot of confidence. You just need immediate feedback that you can implement so that you can do more testing and maybe increase in rigor as time goes on. So let's say you have a pool of 30 people who are actual users of your product, What do you think would be better? Waiting till the product is nearly done and having all 30 test it. Or maybe split them up into groups of say, 10 and do three rounds of iteration.BYeah, My first thought was like start with a small group of five and then you go to a group of 25 after you integrate the, what you learn from it. But three rounds is better.AI like no, I like your idea. And actually, there's this kind of rule of five from Jacob Nielsen that suggests that five users will catch about 80 percent of problems in your website. Now, this is debatable. But, it is encouraging to know that you can get a lot of really actionable data from Just a few good sessions.BOf course, if you're going to get good information from five people, they have to be very different people.AAnd let's say one out of five people really, really struggles with it. You don't know, does this mean 20% of our customers are going to struggle this way? Or is this person an extreme outlier that if we did a bunch more testing we would discover. And I would argue that even if they are an outlier, you shouldn't just dismiss their needs. You know what I mean? And I think that, that can be very easy to do as a designer.BMm-hmm.ABlame it on the user, right? User error. It's not us, it's them.Bit's definitely easy to take that approach in academia. Like but why wouldn't you cater to the outlier as well? Well, there's this thing called money and resources that Like it's, it's kind of a trade-off situation.ABut if the point is, UX, practitioners should advocate for the user. There needs to be a voice in the mix. That's not just focusing on how do we make the most money out of this thing. And legally, in some cases, you need to make things, for instance, accessible to people with certain disabilities. Visual impairments, for instance. AndB right,AAnd maybe that's a small percentage of your actual audience. But that's a really crappy experience for that small percentage because they can't access it at all. And you're potentially violating the law.B Yes, that's And what does definitely possible.AAnd what does that say about you as a company? “ It is not worth it for us to make this accessible to you.”BBut, you know, if, if we're talking about like a non-profit sort of thing where the goal is to actually help people. They might have a situation where they need to look at the trade-off between. I can make sure that 90% of people that we want to help get a good experience now, or work towards a 100 percent. And hopefully we won't run out of budget. Or it might take longerAI see what you're saying. I think that something can be released without maybe being 100% accessible. But my concern is that people are going to shut the door on the project at that point and say we've done our job.BYeahAwhen like even in the instance of a non-profit, the audience you're serving, the most marginalized members probably need your services the most. And if they are the 10 percent that can't access the website, then you're not accomplishing your mission anyway.B That's a, that's a very fair point. And so it might be that a UX person would say we have some accessibility issues here. We could we could launch version 1.0 with acknowledgment that we will be updating to include x, y, and z. We didn't want to make everyone wait.A And that's where advocacy can come into play. Then if you see a need then you can argue for the money needed to make it happen.BYeah.AYeah. Okay. Where will you do your testing? A lot of usability testing had been done in labs, computer labs where maybe there's a video camera to record somebody using a site. Maybe there's that one way glass so that you can observe somebody but they don't feel like you're necessarily there. I think more recently that's been moving out of popularity in favor of more realistic settings. You don't necessarily need a special lab to get good useful data.B Right.AI mean, maybe your goal is to learn something more generalizable and you need to kind of control outside factors, I don’t know. But I think again, moving away from that quantitative mindset of we need X amount of confidence and instead thinking more in terms of how does this play out in the real world when someone's actually struggling with this gas pump or whatever, trying to make their breakfast bagel.BSo going back to where you said that originally a lot of UX testing was done in a lab. And my my first thing that I wanted to say was, you know, did anyone think, well, is this a good use of resources? And I realized that that with, combined with the other things that I've said so far on this podcast kind of make me sound like a, an economist. Saying is this a good use of resources, I feel is actually more of an engineering mindset. Like, are you using a sledgehammer to kill a fly?AI'm actually really glad that you're bringing up these comments because that is what a UX practitioner will be dealing with. These people coming from different disciplines with a different set of criteria for what the product should do or, how resources should be allocated. And that's going to be part of the job, is negotiating amongst those potentially competing values.BYeah. And to stretch my metaphor a little bit further, you know, if you're trying to use a sledgehammer to kill a fly, not only are you way overdoing it, You're not going to be able to hit the damn fly. Unless you're a freaking robot with unlimited hydraulic power, you aren't going to swing that thing fast enough to kill a fly. What I'm getting at is that taking someone into a lab out of their natural environment, Sure, you can control things. But not only are you making this synthetic environment, your results are also synthetic.AYeah, it's absolutely a trade-off. And that happens with any research project. Like I tell my students, the goal is not to eliminate all possible flaws in your research design, but to be able to make thoughtful choices and explain those choices.B Okay.AThen decide how you want to conduct the research. And here I'm going to draw from this paper by Lanius et al. They did a lit review of methods in academic journals, along with a survey of UX professionals. From the lit review, they found that surveys were the most common method, followed by usability testing and then interviewing. And they also included things like bio-metric data.BLike what?A So things like eye tracking. And I've actually been able to see eye tracking software in use. One of my students worked for the campus usability lab and brought it to class for a demonstration and it was weird. Was it eye-catching? It was. like there was a student upfront kind of wearing the goggles or whatever. And I shot my hand up and like started waving it around and you could see like their eyes went directly to my hand. Don't get me wrong. It's it creeps me out too, like the whole idea of having somebody know exactly what I'm looking at at any given point. But it's a thing that might be useful in some contexts. Maybe you want to measure heart rate or something. I don't know. Some of this is probably a sledgehammer when what you need is a fly swatter, but it's there, there's been a small increase in those types of methods over the years. They also found that mixed methods studies were the most common. There's a common misconception that mixed methods just refers to using more than one type of method, but it refers to using quantitative methods plus qualitative methods.BAh.AQuantitative of course, referring to the numerical, the countable, and qualitative, referring more to the descriptive. A survey would give you quantitative data. So it would allow you to see how widespread a certain preference or phenomenon is. But interviews, which is a more qualitative method, would help you get at the why behind those results. Then they turn to the results of the survey they did of professionals. Again, they split them into research and evaluation. And the top research methods were interviews and ethnography. Let's also talk about once you have completed some of that foundational user research, how do you convey the results of that research in a way that's useful and actionable. Couple ways, I've mentioned them before. Personas, where you might create a few, say, composites that represent different categories of your users. And some go so far as to add a picture and a name and invent a whole character. And use those as kind of guiding documents for the design team to think about. How would Tracy approach this web-page versus how would ambiguous user approach this web page?B It kind of sounds like that approach is to invent, representative diversity of users so that you can have them in mind?AYes, because like I talked about before, if you don't have that specific image in your head, then it's very easy to default to someone like me.BYeah, that's trueAor white person, whatever.BWhich is exactly why I said that gas pumps are very usable.ARightBBecause who has trouble with a gas pump?AMe. I cannot be the only one.BI'm sureAWrite in.BPleaseAIf only to help me feel not alone in this world.BYes.AThen again, you also run the risk of turning your persona's into stereotypes. The better the research informing the personas, the better the personas. Because they are less an invention of your mind. And the biases therein.BRightAWe'll talk more about personas in the episode on social justice and UX. I think that's a good enough introduction for now. And then scenarios or situations that those personas might be put in. Tracy is not just a decontextualized person using a gas pump, but they are nearly late for a very important appointment. And you had mentioned maybe there should be a different category for design methods.BMm-hmmA So that might include things like prototyping, wireframes. Are you familiar with those terms? Yeah. Tell me what what has prototyping meant to you in your world?BPrototyping means making a physical thing,Abut not final.BRight a physical thing. So you can see, you can check fit, function.AAnd a wireframe might just be a precursor to that, something that's sketchier. You might think of it as a skeleton of a websiteBOh okay, of a website.Aor I mean, a mobile app, whatever it is you're making. The sketchier prototypes or wireframes would be more useful earlier in the process.BYou just don't want to spend any more effort on a prototype and you need to.AYeah, you've gotta do that cost-benefit analysis. Something does not need to be polished and perfect in order to get good basic feedback about it. And in fact, if something is too polished, too early in the process, people might feel hesitant to give the global feedback you really need.BYeah.AAt least if something’s on paper they know this is not the final thing. And by on paper, I mean, literally, sometimes you can do a very low fidelity prototype where you have literal pieces of paper that represent screens on a website. some people have gone so far as to with people and say, okay, now which button would you click? And then they will physically take the screen that corresponds to the button they pressed and put it in front of them.BCute.AYeah.BSo in your statement that if it's too polished, they might be hesitant to give global feedback. In a way I experienced this in my first job. There was a project where there was like an implantable into the eye device that would dispense medication. And one of the engineers that I was working with said, maybe we're looking at this thing the wrong way. Instead of trying to make this rice grain size thing by injection molding, which is what the company did. Maybe this is something that would be a lot better done blow molding, which is the way that, you know, pop bottles are made. It starts out looking like a test tube. You heat it up, fill it with air, and it expands into the mold.ASo by the time it got to your company, it was too late?BYes.AAnd that's not to say that blow molding would have been better. You don't know the decision-making along the way, but I see what you mean about there comes a point of no return andBRight. Yeah. And if blow molding was the right one, maybe the wrong decision was just working with this company because you've worked with them on something else and you like working with them, maybe you should have taken it to a blow molder.AAnd when you're talking about something that's going to go in someone's eye. You don't want to be taking risks.BRight? AndAbut it all turned out fine, right? Say yesBTo, to intend to every pun I will intend this one. I didn't see how that one turned out. It was a new project. So the idea was that popping a little reservoir into the eye and having that dispense slowly was better than having injections into the eye on a regular basis, which I can't imagine would be pleasant in any way.AI mean, getting lasik surgery was one of the most horrifying experiences of my life. So I would also opt for non-regular injections.BMm-hmm.AIn the eye. I'm a wimp. I know it. The survey they did of professionals. The top evaluation methods were expert review, which I think could also be called a heuristic evaluation, and usability testing. So a heuristic evaluation, that wouldn't involve real users at all. That could simply be you as an expert in usability, going through a website with a checklist looking for very specific best practices.BWould that use a rubric?AIt very well could. Yes.BIt could.AAnd also, how much does each error affect the overall user experience? I mean, that's one of those challenges you have to work through is within our limited resources. Do we go after the low hanging fruit? Or do we go after the more serious stuff? Obviously the answer should be the more serious stuff, but sometimes there needs to be that blend. It's not an exact science. So a heuristic evaluation, you might be looking for things like, is the loading speed quick enough? Can you tell when a hyperlink has been clicked or not? Can you distinguish a hyperlink from the rest of the text? These are kind of basics that are so conventional that you don't necessarily need a user to tell you to fix those things. But again, you would not want to stop at this expert evaluation,B RightA Because as someone who's been working very closely with the product, there are blind spots to be sure. Usability testing. Let me ask you this. Wouldn't it be easier to just ask them what they think of it that have to actually sit and watch them use it?B Yeah, it would be easier. But are you after easy or are you after good?APeople are very easily swayed by appearances. That’s just the reality. And so someone might have a very positive evaluation of something because it looks really professional or flashy or whatever. That doesn't mean they can do the thing that they need to do. usability testing. You want to watch somebody use a product instead of just asking them about it. And there are a few things that can make this yield more useful data for you. Number 1, you are testing the product, not the person. And you need to make this very clear. Because people have a tendency to look internally when something goes wrong, like, Oh, I'm so bad with technology. It's like, maybe it's not your fault. Maybe it's a bad design.BI have a feeling that that is less the case with men.AI wouldn’t be surprised.BI mean, myself, like if I encounter a thing and it doesn't work I’m like what a piece of shit. nothing wrong with me. This thing is broken.Ayes. Whereas I encounter a thing and I'm like, I'm such an idiot, I put my credit card in the wrong way the first time.BIt could be that having spent time doing design, I am quick to see this should've been designed different.AAnother thing to keep in mind is you want to encourage your user to think aloud as they poke around on your website and complete the task. this helps you get at sort of the inner monologue. It helps you capture, again more than just the operations taking place. But why are they doing what they're doing? Are they feeling frustrated when they clicked this, but meant to click that or, that kind of thing. And that can be awkward for people if they're not used to narrating their thoughts out loud, maybe you can get pairs of people and have them kind of work together and then they have a natural audience that they are talking to that's not like creepy researcher sitting behind you with a clipboard kind of thing. And then this one is also hard. Don't help the user. Because you're going to want to,BMm-hmmA especially if you created the thing and you have a vision in your head of exactly how it's supposed to work and somebody doesn't do it the way you wanted them to. You just want to jump in and be like No, no, no. Do this. Do this. Okay.B No, not like that.AThey're not going to have you with them in a real context.BWhen they pull the thing out of the box,Athey're not going to have a real live designer at the ready to walk them through it. And so you want to capture that authentic experience as much as possible. Of course, if they literally cannot proceed, then help them out. But like I tell my students, don't move on until you have either fixed the problem itself on the spot or thoroughly documented what happened and what change you're going to make. I have a surprise for you.BYou do?AYes. I'm gonna have you do a usability test.BOh,AI'll be the observer. You be the user.BOkay.AAnd you are going to test the TC talk website because to my knowledge, you have never been to it or even looked at it. And so maybe I'll get some feedback.BHow does this electric internet thing work here, huh? Just there? Pardon the fan.AThe first thing I'm gonna do is called a 5 second test. What that means is you're going to look at the website for five seconds and then I'm going to take it away. I'm going to ask you some questions about what you remember, what stood out to you.B[Mumbles]AOkay. So based on that five seconds, what do you think the purpose of the website is?BIt seems to be something about a podcast. So on that on that page without clicking any links, I saw that there was an entry for what must be the most recent episode. It had a, uh, a thing where you can just hit the play button and play it right there in that website. And there were sources and additional reading, stuff to support the wild and outlandish claims on this episode.AOkay. If you had to sum up your impression of the website in one word, what would it be?B Purple.AReally? There's a lot of purple, but there's even more turquoise.BThat was a bit flippant of course, butAIt's okay. Now you're going to actually do some tasks.BTasks?AI'm going to have you think aloud as you're doing it.BYou want to subscribe to TC Talk on Apple podcasts.A[Mumbles]BThis is driving me nuts.AIs it?BYou've had all of like 20 options for subscribing and you've scrolled past every single one.AOh, it's on every one of these things. Okay. And where am I subscribing? Apple podcasts? Okay. Apple podcasts. Yeah.BI mean, you found what you needed to. Thanks for the five-star reviews, everyone. And by everyone, I mean, all two people.ABoth of you.BBoth of you.AOkay. Thank you. What was it like being test, being a, what was it like?BBeing a pop-tart?AB[Sings] Have you ever put butter on a pop-tart, it’s so freaking good.AHow did it feel being a participant in usability, a usability test?BIn a sense, it kind of felt like trying to figure out how to use a website just with someone watching and expressing their frustration.AI was a bad observer.BThat is one thing we've learned.AYeah. I can't keep my mouth shut.BYou would need to have someone do it for you. And that's okay.AAnd then maybe you'd be more honest with them also. Because I'm kind of asking you like Benton, what do you think of this website that I have created with my bare hands and poured my identity into?BYou need an easier way to identify how to subscribe. I’m sure it's all over the place but it's just text. You know, it isn't that icon.AYeah, you're right. Dang.BYou need buttons. My other thing was, oh yeah, number the episodes.AOh, really?BYes.ASo last little piece is I wanted to touch on a couple more articles that describe sort of the day-to-day life of a UX professional.BOkay.AThis does feed really logically into the pedagogy category because real workplace practices should inform what we are teaching students. That's not to say that industry should drive what happens in the classroom. But we don't want students to emerge from our program With, with no sense of where they're ending upBor with no sense.AYes. Lauer and Blumberg are analyzed job postings and were looking for overlaps between technical communication roles and UX roles in the kinds of skills needed. And unsurprisingly, they found there are more similarities than differences. And so UX is a natural kind of outgrowth of technical communication work. They found kind of five categories of UX roles. Designer, developer, architect, manager, researcher. The developer would be more of the, the coding side of it. And so those roles kind of reflect where you'd come in at certain points in the project or what your contributions are going to be. But you might be hired as sort of a UX generalist who needs to know a little bit about every stage of the process versus coming in and doing solely research and never any design.BOkay.AAnother piece was by Rose, Putnam and McDonald. And they interviewed 71 UX professionals about their current work, and the skills and dispositions needed to succeed in their role. Think of the times you've been on the job market.BUgh.AWhat kinds of what kinds of skills or qualities tend to pop up the most? Like there's the classic communication skills,BResults Driven.AWhat the fuck does that mean?BYeah. Sometimes they manage to get in there. Five years experience in this software or designing in this industry.ADo you think it's fair to say that there's a mix of technical skills and like more people skills,BSoft skills.AYeah, these authors add the category of dispositions, which they say is “character traits that define a person's motivation for acting in certain ways.” I'll give some examples as we go. Some of the top technical skills that someone hiring in UX will look for were research, and that includes knowledge of multiple methods and when to use what methods. Design, sketching, wireframing, prototyping, and a knowledge of process thinking,BOkay.AWhich we talked about at the start. The authors make an interesting note here. Have you ever heard the phrase T-shaped a person?BNo.ASo a T-shaped person is the idea that somebody has a breadth of knowledge in a bunch of different areas. But there's maybe one area that they have a depth of knowledge in as well. Candidates for these jobs ideally would know a little bit about each part of the process. But maybe they specialize in research or design or something.BYour jack of all trades.AYeah, some might say that academics are, perhaps I-shaped people. They only know one thing, but they know a lot about that one thing.BLowercase L?ARight. Employers meanwhile want everyone to be squares, know everything and also be really good at each one.BYeah. Employers want people to be squares in more ways than one.AAnd they also emphasize that the human skills and dispositions, those are unsurprisingly highly valued and is something that we want to try to instill in our students as teachers. So human skills, the top ones were approaching problems, communication, collaboration. And I liked this one, storytelling. And they talk about storytelling in the context of describing a portfolio of work. Here's how I solved this problem beginning, middle, end. But it could also come into play with personas and thinking of creative ways to compile and report results of your research. And then the dispositions are independence, right? Especially in UX, there's not going to be a magic linear process for solving a problem. You're going to need to come in there and use your judgment in all these cases where those decision points come up. Flexibility and curiosity. So that's what the practice of UX tends to look like. That’s just a tasting of methods that might be used.BA tasting? Does it taste like cheese? I'm sorry. We have nothing more to accomplish, so I'm just having fun.ASpeaking of fun.BFun with fungus.ATurn on your science teacher voice.BAll right, students, students, settle down now. Okay, pop quiz. Are fungi more closely related to plants or animals?AI would say plants for sure. BecauseBThey grow in the ground? They don’t move?AYes. And mushrooms are a vegetable, you know, at leastBCulinarily.AYes.BIn fact, they are more closely related to animals than to plants.AWhy? How?BFirst of all, like animals, they don't make their own food. They don't have cell walls like plants do. They are made out of chitin, which if you're familiar with a lot of biology, chitin is whatAsomething you do on a windy day?BIt is also that. But chitin is what insect exoskeletons are made out of. And I could be wrong about this, but I believe that chitin is what crustaceans’ shells are made out of. Very closely related is keratin, which is what makes up your fingernails your hair.AAlright, mushrooms sound a lot less appetizing when you put it that way. But I get what you're saying. And the not creating their own food kind of thing. I hadn't thought of that either. And they are active decomposers, you know, in, in ways that plants are not.BPlants are creators.ASo plants are creators. Mushrooms are cleaner-uppers?BYeah. Fun fact about fungi is that it is estimated that we have identified maybe 5% of the species of fungi that exist. It's estimated that it's somewhere between 2.8 and 3.2 million species of fungi. Another pop quiz. How does that stack up to plants in terms of total species?ALike how many plant species exist, whether or not we know about them? Millions, I would have to guess.BNo. Hundreds of thousands.AOkay.BIn the estimation of scientists, there are roughly ten times as many species of fungi as there are of plants.AThen why do we not know about them?BThey're shy.ADoes nobody care?BOne reason is that up until the invention of the microscope, the only way to know about fungi was either through the fruiting bodies of mushrooms or through their collective action, like brewing yeast or molding bread. Because they are so small. And yet in a healthy teaspoon of soil, there exists anywhere from 100 meters to ten kilometers of mycelia.AThat's unbelievable.BYes. It's amazing.

View Details

Abi and Benton explore the differences between usability and UX (User Experience) through the extended example of a toaster (and share their secret for extra delicious pop-tarts). They discuss the origin of the field of usability and its overlap with technical communication.

Sources and further reading

• Acharya, K. R. (2022). Promoting Social Justice Through Usability in Technical Communication: An Integrative Literature Review. Technical Communication, 69(1), 6–26.
• Gould, J. D., & Lewis, C. (1985). Designing for usability: Key principles and what designers think. Communications of the ACM, 28(3), 300–311.
• Gross, D. (2010, June 25). Apple on iPhone complaints: You’re holding it wrong. CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/06/25/iphone.problems.response/index.html
• Johnson, R. R. (1998). User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts. SUNY Press.
• Johnson, R. R., Salvo, M. J., & Zoetewey, M. W. (2007). User-centered technology in participatory culture: Two decades “Beyond a narrow conception of usability testing.” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 50(4), 320–332.
• Lauer, C., & Brumberger, E. (2016). Technical communication as user experience in a broadening industry landscape. Technical Communication, 63(3), 248–264.
• Marrone, T., & Yerich, K. (2020). Mushrooms of the Upper Midwest: A Simple Guide to Common Mushrooms. Adventure Publications.
• Peuc, G. (2017, January 10). Debunking Bad Design Memes, Part 1: “Design vs. UX” infamous pictures. Medium. https://medium.com/@gpeuc/debunking-bad-design-memes-part-1-design-vs-ux-infamous-pictures-d9b9d3baa728
• Pittato. (2014, February 1). Butter on a pop-tart song from Family Guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlsFgDjyePc
• Rouse, W. B. (2007). People and organizations: Explorations of human-centered design. John Wiley & Sons.
• Rude, C. D. (2009). Mapping the Research Questions in Technical Communication. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 23(2), 174–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651908329562
• Salvo, M. J. (2001). Ethics of engagement: User-centered design and rhetorical methodology. Technical Communication Quarterly, 10(3), 273–290.
• Sullivan, P. (1989). Beyond a narrow conception of usability testing. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 32(4), 256–264.
• Tham, J., Howard, T., & Verhulsdonck, G. (2022). Extending Design Thinking, Content Strategy, and Artificial Intelligence into Technical Communication and User Experience Design Programs: Further Pedagogical Implications. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 00472816211072533.
• Woodman, K. (2010, January 1). Lemon, lime and bitters. Www.Taste.Com.Au. https://www.taste.com.au/recipes/lemon-lime-bitters/58926db0-001c-44d7-b111-aa4c9be3bbc3?nk=5dfbba203f567d930c503285864da61b-1649783351

Transcript

BThis is episode 17 of TC talk.AWelcome. I'm Abi.Band I am Benton.A I'm the tech comm expert.BI am a non-expert.AYet you are becoming increasingly expert episode by episode.BEpisode by episode. Yes. If we're going to completely discount all the expertise I gained in,Athe times that you let me rehearse my conference presentations in front of you? I wasn't half bad.BNo, you weren't half bad. I was half with it.AYou were half paying attention?BI don't know half of you half as well as I should like. And I like less than half of you, half as well as you deserve.ANice.BI fucking nailed that.AAll right, I'll give you more credit.BThanks.ANow, onto the drinks.BInteresting.AListeners should know that I don't let you taste it before we record because I want to get an authentic reaction.BIt doesn't seem really strong.AIt's sort of a, an inexact science. How much bitters to add.BYep.AWhat are we drinking today?BI believe you told me it is a lemon, lime, and bitters.AYes. A non-alcoholic drink.BOh. That's why it doesn’t seem very strong. Technically, not fully non-alcoholic because bitters, you knowAIt’s negligible.BIt's negligible. ButAyou don't want to drink it straight. Okay. I'll tell you the ingredients. I don't know if I can successfully pull it off with an Australian accent though. Australian.BYou do it first and then I'll see.AYou didn't even cover Australian dialects in your dialect class though.BNo.AOkay. Lemon, lime and bitters.BLenin lawn and bitters.AI wanted to try this because I was watching an Australian show and they kept ordering lemon, lime and bitters. And I was like, What the heck is that? And I looked it up. And it's simply Sprite with Angostura bitters added. It makes it a little fancier, but I will say I had trouble figuring out what exactly they mean by lemon lime because in all the recipes I found for it, it would say lemonade and then in parentheses, Sprite or other lemon-lime soda. And to me, those are not the same thing.BNot even close in America.ATo me, lemonade is flat.BAnd it is only lemon, not lime.ARight. I did supplement with a little straight lime juice. And then, like I said, sort of a sprinkling of bitters to your liking.BYou need to start with your lemonade.AThrow ‘em on the barbie.BWhy the hell would you throw ‘em on the barbie? Add in a dash of Angostura bitters,ASalt and pepper.BSalt and pepper?AI just wanted to say that.BOh, don't put salt and pepper in this drink. If you're feeling salty, sure add a dash.AA dash.BA dash.AWhatever. Let's talk about bitters. Angostura bitters come from Trinidad and Tobago. It's just off the coast of Venezuela. Hey, if you get a fun with fungus, can I have my geography corner? Although all the other content is kind of in my wheelhouse. Trinidad and Tobago is where we get calypso music and the steel drum. Now, bitters to me, remind me of eggnog. I don't know what goes into eggnog. I have to assume this is an ingredient or at least a similar spice profile. Does it not?BYeah. Yeah. Festive. Sure.ANow, eggnog does not strike me as an inherently refreshing drink. Kind of the opposite. So you wouldn't think it would, that flavor would pair well with a lemon lime soda, but it works. What I imagine would not work well is mixing eggnog and Sprite.BI didn't actually throw up in my mouth a little bit, but I imagine if I were to try that, I would.AYes, that's fair. Today we are talking about usability and UX. UX, as we've mentioned before, stands for user experience. And here's why I wanted to talk about this. Number 1, I feel like this could be the missing piece of some of my research right now.BOoh.AI have data and I need a framework for understanding it. And I think this could fit the bill, but I need to learn more about it. Number 2, usability and user experience are both courses in the curriculum in which I teach.BOkay.AAnd they're popular courses, but we just don't always have enough people to teach them. Ideally, I would go into teaching a course with more than a chapters’ headstart on the students. I would say, I've been reading dozens of articles and books. And I bit off more than I can chew. I think every researcher can identify with that feeling of, you find some stuff, the more you read, the more that unearths until you've got potentially an endless, you know, infinite paths you could take.BIt's the academic’s version of the Wikipedia rabbit hole.AYes. Except there's more pressure because a Wikipedia rabbit hole is fun. When you're an academic and you're trying to write a paper or prepare to teach a course, there's that feeling of I'll never know everything there is to know. Maybe that's just me.BImposter syndrome. Yes. It's just you. You're the only one who is a fraud here.AAnyway, I'd like to think I did a reasonably comprehensive job. Although I did not choose to access the microfilm resources in the university library.BYou are a fraud!AAnd so I can't claim to have read everything.BYou know you're legit when you go to that microfiche reader.AAnd so faced with these dozens of resources, I was trying to figure out how do I possibly talk about this in an accessible way on a podcast? And initially, I thought of doing separate episodes on usability and UX, but then I realized they are too interrelated to separate them like that. Furthermore, I had been under the misconception that usability was kind of inferior to UX. Which is puzzling when you've got a course on each topic in your curriculum. Like why would we teach old-fashion usability when there's UX right there.BIs it actually old-fashioned or is it just re-branding?AWell, let me put it this way. There's a right way and a wrong way to think of usability.BOoh.AThis is the part where you start taking notes, listeners, because my thesis statement is forthcoming.BThere'll be a test later. You won't be able to listen to any more podcasts if you don't pass.AOkay. Usability refers to how easy something is to use. Cool, That's fine. The problem is when you stop there and use that narrow conception to guide your philosophy around designing something. that is not good enough.BOkay.AIt is something you should consider absolutely, but it should not be a standalone consideration.BOkay. So ease of use is a small subset of user experience?AAbsolutely.BOkay.AAnd so we can't do away with it. But again, is insufficient on its own.BI'm going to try to synthesize here. Usability would look at a toaster and say, ease of use. I want it as simple as possible. You put in bread, you push the thing down, bam, you got toast. That's good usability. User experience would be like, Now hold on. You might get different grades of bread. You might get bagels. You might get freaking toaster strudels.ADid you just say bagels?BMaybe.AYou mean maybe?BOkay. You're helping. You might have a toaster strudel or a Pop-Tart that you want to make.AMaybe you want an Internet connected toaster. I don't know what the purpose of that would be.BI don't know.AMaybe it texts you when your toast pops up. So you don’t miss it when you're in the other room.BFor those who can't be bothered to sit around and wait for toast to happen. User experience would say, I like the idea with the toaster. Can we put a dial on it to adjust how much toasting happens when you put it down.AFalse.BNo?AYou are viewing this from a designer-centric perspective.BOkay.AYou're thinking, what are all the bells and whistles I could add. A UX perspective would say, let's get some folks who would be customers. And let's talk to them and learn who they are. Let's perhaps watch them as they prepare their breakfast in the morning and learn about their values, needs, attitudes, emotions, even. I mean, we've talked before about how when I try to make my coffee in the morning, sometimes I forget to add the literal coffee, or I add the coffee but not the water.BNeither way works very well.AAnd so it would account for human error. It would account for the reality of human beings as being imperfect, shall we say. You know what? There was a phase where you would make my coffee in the morning because you always get up before me. What happened to that? Can we reinstate that?BBecause I get up at 430 and leave around six.AFair enough.BOkay. So maybe user experience would take this usability-designed toaster, watch someone use it. And observe that they're frustrated that their bread didn't get toasted enough for them or that it burned a little bit. Or gosh I gotta put this toaster strudel down three freakin times to get it ready.AIt's true, by the way, the toaster strudels are a challenge because the outside can be burned and on the inside, like the filling is still frozen. Toaster companies get your act together.BYou need to make that flaky surface more thermally conductive. So let's try adding nano iron into the flaky surface. I just threw that out there because I'm sure it's an awful idea. Nano anything into food,AEggnog and Sprite. Terrible idea.BThere you go.ATerrible combo. Pop-Tarts, they are a little bit easier than the toaster strudels, theyBThey have better thermal conductivity.AThey're not as delicious, but I have a tip. This comes from my dad. It essentially amounts to adding sugar and butter to things that don't need sugar and butter, but in this case it’s simply butter your Pop-Tarts.B[music] Have you ever put butter on a pop-tart? It’s so freaking good. Have you ever put butter on a pop-tart? If you haven’t then I think you should. [end music]AYou're still a little off because you are thinking in terms of you've got this finished product and then you're watching people use it. You need to step back. You need to start at the beginning. The information you've learned about your customers, you then build into the design process.BOkay.AIdeally, you even involve the customer somehow. And then once you've got a prototype of your toaster, you do some usability testing. You make changes. Quickly. Put out another prototype, test again. It's this iterative process.BExactly. Okay.AAnd, and so you are gauging the usability of the product, but you're also paying attention to, let's say you do have an Internet connected toaster. What is the experience of accessing the app that coordinates with the toaster? This is highly hypothetical. But again, you'd only internet-connect it if the users were like, Heck, yeah, I want to be able to leave the room for two minutes and not forget my sizzling bagel.BOh. Since we’re talking about it. Okay. Oster, if you're listening and I know you're not. If they had like a smoke detector built in. So that once it starts to burn, toaster’s like, Oh shit, We're done.ANow that's not a bad idea. So UX or usability can apply to, of course, our toaster, as well as the app, a website, even a paper document such as a ballot.BOkay, I can't stop on the toaster. Back to the Future.AWhat about it?BThe first scene in the first movie of Back to the Future. Like people have, you know, people have their coffee maker on a timer. Why not toast?AHow many jigawatts does it take to power a toaster?B1.21 jigawatts! Marty! Interesting note. Jigawatts is an acceptable pronunciation for what is more commonly pronounced as gigawatts.AIt’s a real thing.BIt is.AImpossible.BIn fact possible.ABut surely the jigawatts in Back to the Future is spelled with a j because it’s its own fictional thing, right?BNo. It is not fictional. And don’t call me Shirley.AThank you for introducing the example of a toaster. I think that was a nice way to get at what the distinctions are. So anyway, how do I even begin to synthesize the research about this topic? I was thinking I could go chronologically. I could try to do it thematically. If I were to group the articles, what kinds of things are they addressing? I started with that second option, trying to group things into themes. And as I was doing so, I came up with categories, like these are the ones about teaching ux. These are the ones about doing UX, like the specifics, the methods. These are the ones about sort of how does UX connect with the discipline of technical communication. These are the ones about how do we enact social justice through our design practices? It occurred to me, these seem familiar. And in fact, they match the categories that Carolyn Rude identified in her article Mapping the research questions in tech comm.BOh.AShe has categories of disciplinarity, Pedagogy, Practice, social change. I'm going to go with that. I don't mean to imply that these are necessarily easily distinguishable categories. For instance, questions of social justice, I think cut across any usability practice you're doing, whether or not you’re aware of it, right? You're either being intentional about it or you're not. Of course, the research about practice is going to feed into the research about pedagogy. With that said, let's move into this disciplinarity category. To put that in less stodgy terms, how did the field come to be? What does it have to do with technical communication and vice versa, what have been some of the major evolutions in how we've thought about it over the years. So this is going to be a bit chronological. And in fact, I would like to name this section UX-istential questions.BYou're looking proud of yourself for that.AIt wasn't that bad. Alright. Overview. Over time, there's been a general shift from systems-centered thinking towards more user-centered thinking or even user-involved thinking. And this emphasis is reflected in the shifting language to define the multi-disciplinary field of usability slash UX.B Okay.AThat's part of the challenge here. It goes by a lot of names. I'll try to address that as we go. And also the shift from systems-centered design to user-centered design is also reflected in the language around users. Edward Tufte has a famous joke. “There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users. Illegal drugs and software.” So somewhere along the way you'll see the term human-centered design, which acknowledges that the people who use our products are humans. For the purposes of this podcast, I will refer to them as users just because it does clarify their relationship to the process. But by no means am I implying that they lack full human dignity. And by all means, don't refer to them as research subjects.BWhy not?ABecause that implies that they are being subjected to research, not being involved in the process. Participants, you could call them site visitors. You could be more specific. Are you referring to learners or patients, what have you? So just something to be aware of. Let's go back in time a little bit. The word usability didn't come into being until a few decades ago, but usability-adjacent work was happening years before. I bet you can guess what kind of triggered an interest in this topic.BThe Industrial Revolution?ANailed it. Late 1800s, early 19 hundreds. That's where we see the division of labor model, Fordism. Have you ever heard of Taylorism? Frederick Taylor?BI haven't.AHe wrote a book called The Principles of Scientific Management. So before usability, we have what you might call the field of human factors or industrial management, I guess, where the focus is on wringing as much labor out of people as you can.BWhat could go wrong there, huh?AWell, I'll tell you, I'm reading here from the book, User-Centered Technology by Robert Johnson. “Taylor had been commissioned by Bethlehem Steel to study the efficiency of workers who loaded steel ingots onto flatbed railroad cars. Adams describes Taylor's method as follows.” You're giving a knowing nod.BI'm familiar with Bethlehem Steel. There were huge, you know, Pennsylvania had coal and iron ore resources, both of which are required for making steel. And so they had this natural synergy of, boy, we don't have to move very far. We can just get it from this mountain and from that mountain and put it together and bam. I know that I've seen structures here that have Bethlehem Steel stamped on their girders.AOh, wow, is it still around?BThat I don't know.A“Each ingot weighed 92 pounds. And each man on average loaded 12.5 tons per day.” Which is unbelievable, actually.BWow. Holy cow.A“Taylor studied the workers and their work behavior and concluded that it was possible to load 47 tons per day.”BShit.A“To prove it, Taylor chose a worker who was strong. (The worker ran home every night after carrying iron ingots all day.)”BRan home.A“And who was not too intelligent. (Taylor believed that bright workers found repetitive work monotonous and boring.) And who would do exactly as he was told so that the new steps of the restructured job would be followed. The man started to work, being told when to pick up an ingot, when to walk with it and when to sit down and rest. At the end of the day, he had moved 47.5 tons and he continued to do so thereafter. His increase in productivity earned him a pay increase of 61% from a $1.15 to $1.85 per day in 1898. Management could easily see that the increase in wages was more than offset by the increase in productivity. And they were impressed. Taylor selected other workers and trained them in the same way.” So don't do this to people.BRight.ABack then, obviously the people studying this were advocating for the company, not the worker. Nowadays, if you are a usability specialist, you should advocate for the user. That's what you're there for.BLike Tron. I fight for the user. It's never mind.AIs that a line?BYes. Yeah. In both the original 1980s Tron and theATron Legacy?BTron Legacy. “I fight for the user.”AOh man, I'm going to get a screenshot and put it in my syllabus. By the way, Tron Legacy is not that great of a movie, but the soundtrack is fire.BFire? Is that an acronym?AIt's a good soundtrack.BYeah, the soundtrack is phenomenal. It’s true.ADaft Punk. Alright quoting here from Johnson, Salvo and Zoetewey. “The overall goal of most of these investigations was to take already in place technologies and study how people use them. And then in turn, either a) adapt small parts of the machines, such as knobs and dials to make them more efficient and accurate in their use.” Adding a dial to the toaster after the fact. “Or more commonly, b) determine what needed to be taught to the users of the technologies to improve efficiency and accuracy of use.” Focusing on the documentation for the toaster and saying, this is how you use it correctly.BThe Steve Jobs, you're doing it wrong.AWhat's that?BPeople were complaining about not having good signal, holding an iPhone. And he said, You're doing it wrong. You're holding it in the wrong way. Because you get better signal if you hold it like a certain way rather than with a different grip. Because if your hand is like right over the antenna, it attenuates the signal.AIt's interesting that he said that because Apple is kind of known for the modern user experience. But that's not a particularly helpful approach. You need to anticipate errors and try to be proactive about designing things so that they show users how to use them and don't need to be corrected because your design was poor or your documentation was lacking.BInteresting comment on documentation. In my current line of work, I have experience with a fair amount of heavy machinery. Obviously, all heavy machinery has manuals. The typical user of heavy machinery does not read manuals.AThe typical user, period, doesn't read manuals.BTrue. But how bad you going to ruin your day if you screw up the way you hold an iPhone.AThat's fair.BI have noticed in my line of work that there is a lot of documentation that is affixed to the equipment, like lubricate three times daily or caution, warning, stay out of the way of outriggers. It could turn your foot into a pancake, sort of things. Which if you're not familiar, out riggers are those things that shoot out from the sides of trucks or other equipment to increase their effective wheel base.AHm.BMakes them more stable. So they don't tip over.AIs there a picture of someone's foot being turned into a pancake?BThere is. Let me tell you, the more dangerous the equipment, the better the little images are on the warning stickers.AYou need to take photos.BI'm going to take photosAand we're going to post them.Blike okay, so there's a body dump too, that one of theAThat sounds pernicious.BAnd so there's a, there's a good one on that too, where, warning, do not lower body dump when personnel are under there and then it's got your typical stick figure being crushed by the lowering body of the truck.AI'm glad to hear that they have visual documentation and that it is visible and accessible at the point when you would needBThe reminder, yes.AThat caution. That's that seems smart. Ideally, and this is probably going on as well. Things would be designed to block the errors from happening in the first place. Something like vehicles having a beeping sound when they back up.BThat too.ASkipping ahead to the 1940s. This is quoting again from Johnson et al. “For the first time in the history of the US, the Selective Service was implemented in peace time. One of the results of this move was that many soldiers were drafted into the military and were immediately being trained to work dangerous and complicated machinery such as artillery and other types of weapons and explosives.”BDangerous by design.AYes, exactly.BDesigned to be dangerous not for the user, butAbut are often dangerous to the user. That's the problem here. “Soldiers were taught by instructors in the very traditional classroom type environments, where they studied textbooks and then went out into the training fields to apply their newly acquired knowledge. The outcome was often disastrous.”BI bet.A“Many recruits suffered horrible injuries or died misusing technologies. These consequences gave birth to the first concerted efforts to understand how people read and then apply knowledge to technologies.” So this study of, you could call it the mismatch between humans and technology, or humans and machines came to be known as human factors engineering. This emerged formally around World War Two, in particular with airplanes and usability of the cockpits.BCockpits are very busy places.AAnd as you can imagine, this opened a real window for Technical Communication. You can see that this history is kind of paralleling the history we laid out in the tech comm’s existential questions episode. Because the next big event for the field was in the 1980s, the explosion in personal computing. And that's where the word usability first came into use. It's helpful to see how people have defined the term differently. And as Acharya points out, usability, the term, can refer to an attribute of a thing, right? This is a usable toaster. It can refer to a process of determining how usable something is or making something usable. Like let's do usability on this toaster. Or it can refer to this multi-disciplinary field of usability studies. And when I say multi-disciplinary, I mean, this can include like more quote unquote, scientific professions like human-computer interaction, human factors engineering, cognitive psychology, and some of the, I would call them more rhetorical professions like technical communication. You could probably throw marketing in there.BThere's a lot of places I’d like to throw marketing, but.ASo Jacob Nielsen, one of the big names in usability studies, defined five components. Learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, satisfaction. So something is easy to learn and you also remember how to use it for the next time around. You can get your job done efficiently, you're satisfied with the end result. Steve Krug’s definition of usability is “a person of average or even below-average ability and experience can figure out how to use the thing to accomplish something without it being more trouble than it's worth.” Redish says that usability means that “people who use your product can find what they need, understand what they find, and use what they find to meet their needs.” Those last couple of definitions came from more practitioner oriented sources. And let's turn now to tech comm’s original connections with usability. Patricia Sullivan, as far back as 1989, wrote, “I think it makes sense for technical communicators to be involved in the larger quest for usability. Because we have a close connection to end-users, because we have an audience theory and because we have a growing body of information about users in action.” This was in an article titled “Beyond a narrow conception of usability testing.” And this call to broaden usability has echoed throughout even pretty recent research in tech comm. So it's been an ongoing concern. In 2011, Redish and Barnum published a paper in Usability Studies Journal on the natural links between usability and tech comm. They were almost introducing the usability field to tech comm, or at least saying, Hey, pay more attention to us. We have good contributions to make. They wrote “in the early days, technical communicators focused mostly on the usability of documents. But it was not long into the era of personal computer software that many technical communicators realized they could be even more helpful to the final product by making the interface communicate better. Why struggle to explain a difficult interaction when we could help more with the user-centered changes to the underlying architecture and wording.”BWhy explain it when you can fix it?A20 years after the publication of Sullivan's piece, three of her students, Johnson et al, who I’ve cited already, published a follow-up, noting that rhetoric is concerned not with certainties, but with relative certainties. “Rhetoric is most applicable, not in deciding general principles, but in articulating the contingent and the particular. We must embrace the contingency of the situated design rather than move toward a science of usability that would ignore context.” So technical communication with a grounding in rhetoric brings context into the equation, brings audience into the equation in a way that some other fields might have unfortunately downplayed.BSounds important.AAs far as a more academic definition goes, Keshab Acharya did a recent lit review of usability and tech comm and came up with a definition that represents the consensus in our field, I guess you could say. “Usability, particularly in tech comm, is now broadly perceived as a rhetorical practice for designing a product that satisfies the demands and contingencies of culturally diverse users, including underserved and under privileged user groups in the increasingly globalized world.” So that definition emphasizes the social justice turn in tech comm that we talked about a few episodes back.BRight.AIn the late nineties, early two thousands, there started to emerge this emphasis on user-centered design or human-centered design. Which the name there is meant to contrast with that original focus on system-centered design. The idea is, like I mentioned before, design stuff for people as they are. Not what you want them to be. People will skip over stuff. People will forget stuff.BWait, wait. You mean that not everyone reads the end-user agreements on every piece of software they get?AOnly researchers in my field who are interested in the rhetoric of end-user agreements. People will make mistakes. That means you build into your design a way to go back or undo something. The undo button, that was not always a thing,BRight.AThe back button in browsers is like the most used button. So something can be a user-centered design. But the idea really is the process. Gould and Lewis in 1985 outlined three principles for a user-centered approach. An early focus on the user. So talk to people before you build your toaster. Empirical measurement, such as usability testing and iteration informed by data from users. Try out a bunch of things, make improvements little by little. You don't need to stop at designing for humans. You can also design with humans. Michael Salvo in 2001, argued for shifting from observing users to designing with users. And this requires technical communicators to develop skills of dialogue, negotiation, collaboration with people with different perspectives and expertise and cultural backgrounds. There's a few names for this. Participatory design. Cooperative design, Scandinavian design. This is the ideal. I know it's not always feasible in work environments to have that much involvement by the users. But it's a good principle to keep in mind. It's a good ideal to strive for. The goals of human-centered design, quoting from Rouse, “enhance human capabilities, help overcome human limitations, and foster human acceptance.” Again, we're seeing that it's not just about how easy is a thing to use, but how inclusive can we be?BNot only how easy is it to use? Does it do what the user wants it to do?AYes. Focusing on what the user wants versus what you want for the user. And that's a great shift to discussing UX. If usability focuses on how easy it is to complete a specific task within a specific product, then UX takes that step back and looks at all the context. According to Nielsen, “generally, UX design is based on principles to promote design of intuitive, seamless and pleasing experiences through designs, products, and services. By focusing on total experiences of a user, UX design widens the understanding of usability.” According to Lauer and Brumberger, “UX attempts to build a more holistic and fluid experience, including one that acknowledges the multiple platforms, interfaces, and spaces by which a user may interact with a brand or information product.” And this can include accommodating the unanticipated ways people use technology for their own purposes. So there's sort of a classic UX meme. I'm going to show you.BSo it looks like a park with kind of walking paths. It's paved andAProfessionally landscaped.BYes, professionally landscaped. There's a corner and the path is labeled design, and there is a beaten path where foot traffic has turned the grass into dirt that someone is walking on and that's labeled user experience. I think that the message there is that you may have designed your park for people to stay off the grass. But in reality, the user wants a straight line from where they're at to where they're going. And so they will walk on the grass because it will save them ten seconds of their lives.AAnd so ideally, the designers would have let people walk around a little bit before actually finalizing where the sidewalks are going to go.BYeah.AFigure out what users want, what are their goals, and support them in that versus trying to redirect them to something that you think looks pretty. Or because that's how people, quote unquote, should use a product.BRight.AOkay, so UX as a field is, again, multidisciplinary, but it's more, it's generally more qualitative in approach than some of the contributing disciplines we talked about earlier. What I mean by that is there's less focus on collecting, say, numerical data through rigorously designed usability studies, and more on that more fluid iterative design process. Where is UX going? An article by Tham, Howard and Verhulsdonk, They identify three trends that technical communicators working in the UX space should be aware of. They are design thinking.BOkayAcontent strategy and AI. I don't know much about these areas, but basically, they represent a response to the proliferation of smart devices. The fact that people have Internet access all the time, wearables, Internet connected toasters, and how algorithms impact user experience, such as serving you personalized content. I'll get more into ethical concerns with UX later. But I think a good general question to keep in mind is, creating a usable product, even creating a great experience for users shouldn't necessarily be definition of good UX. I think there also needs to be that question of, is this a task users should be doing? Or is this an experience that we should want users to have? And I'm thinking here of the role of personalization algorithms in say, radicalizing YouTube viewers orBsocial media experiences.AYep, Facebook groups, that kind of thing. Again, I think that that social justice orientation could be something that a technical communicator brings to a team. Hopefully they're not the only one thinking of those things, but.BHopefully not.ATo conclude, let me highlight a couple of the big threads that I saw running through this history. First is the evolution towards more consideration of and involvement of users. From viewing humans as cogs in a machine who literally transport 47.5 tons of, like how is that possible?BI honestly don't know.AThrough the Principles of Scientific Management.BIn fact, it sounded like that was actually scientific micromanagement. Tell them when to take a rest, when to lift this, where to move it.A It sounds like a fucking nightmare.BOh my gosh.ASo that's the end of the spectrum we don't want is actively harming users to make rich people richer. And then we saw an evolution towards viewing users as non-experts who needed things perhaps dumbed down. You ever seen an idiot's guide to whatever?BYeah.AWhatever.BThe yellow books.ATo thinking of humans as active participants, active contributors who have their own knowledge and backgrounds to inform a product design, to the most interactive end of the spectrum where they actually participate in the design process.BWhat, you mean people can have an identity that is larger than consumer? Amazing.AI hope you're seeing parallels to our episode about the role of audience in rhetorical theory and technical communication. How it also reflects that shift towards greater involvement of the audience.BYes.A Another big thread in the path from a narrow conception of usability towards UX is broadening of focus from single tasks, single products, to the full experience. That also means it matters when usability comes into the process. Before you design the toaster or after? Ideally all the way through.BMaybe people don't even want toast and you're not making the right sort of thing.AExactly. And there are a few, of course, debates, or at least questions that remain about the process of UX. How formal or scientific should it be? Part of this comes from the multidisciplinarity of the field. What's the value of more exploratory research or generalizable research versus this very local or focused research? And these kinds of choices essentially mirror the kinds of considerations that should come into play with research methods generally. And in fact, we recently made a change in our curriculum to count the UX course as meeting the research requirement for graduate students in our program.BOh.AAnd I will talk more about specific research methods for usability and UX in the next episode. But overall, I think the most interesting thing to come out of this research for me is seeing UX as such an inherently creative kind of role and also a rather undefined role. And that's not necessarily a bad thing because UX practitioners need to come in there with a rhetorical, flexible perspective. Assess the context, figure out what kind of data you need, how best to get it, what to do with it, how to report it. And along with that, all the people skills that come into play. Interacting with participants to selling your colleagues on why UX matters. What have you learned about UX and usability today?BUx is more of a whole process rather than something that gets tagged on at the end.AYes.BI have one question for you. How many episodes are there going to be in this UX series?AAt this point, I'm looking at at least a three parter.BOkay.APotentially four. So stay tuned.BOne of X of UX.AWe've got time for one more thing.B Is it time forACue the bongos.BFun with fungus. Today our fun with fungus is going to revolve around the species Calvatia Gigantea. That's right, the giant puff ball mushroom.AI don't think I've ever seen one.BWell, there is a lovely picture in this book, which isAIt looks like a dinosaur egg.BMushrooms of the Upper Midwest. One of the fun names for it is Moon Melon.ALet me see that picture. Now that looks like a giant muffin right there.BThat is called a skull shaped puffball, whichAI can't see it.BYeah, it is a muffin. That's absolutely a muffin shape. There are a few different species or varieties of the giant puffball. They are typically about eight to 12 inches across. But they can grow up to three feet wide. So it says in the book, “grows from the ground singly, in groups, or sometimes in large circles called fairy rings, in grassy areas or woodlands.” That is where you'll find them. They are edible.AOh. What is their texture? Like, I hear the word puff ball and I think of cotton ball. And that doesn’t sound appetizing.BRight. It's definitely less fibrous than cotton. I have not eaten one. I came upon one in the middle of winter. I saw one at the near the base of, I believe it was an elm tree. It was about the size of like an artisan loaf of bread. Obviously, it was into the spore releasing phase of its maturity, so it was not good for eating. You want to get these when they are immature because then they are edible, the texture is very homogenous. And that's how you can tell you've got a good giant puff ball is you cut into it, it isAall the same color?BIt is all solid white. As though it were a big marshmallow. They don't taste like marshmallows. Just to put that out there. But I have seen people on Facebook say that you can take these guys, slice them up, cook them like meat and they're delicious that way. So I am hoping that I can, with the one that I found that was out of season but still sporing, I am going to take that thing and I am going to attempt to seed our lawn and wooded areas.AHow do you tell if it's releasing spores versus immature?BOh you'll know. immature, when you cut into it, it'll be solid white, no structures. When it is beginning to mature it's going to be starting to convert some of that mass into what? I don't know. But once it gets to the spore phase, when you touch it, like when you poke at it,AIs it like when you blow on a dandelion? No. So they just poof out.BIt's, yeah. So they're really big and so there's space for, for air in there. And then it's got like a hole, spore jet, I guess. The structure where like it purposely makes a hole so that any pressure on the outside will make it more like a bellows and squirt out of a puff of spores.ASmart. And how far do they travel?BDepends how windy it is, I suppose. A big puff ball can release several trillion spores.AWhat?BWith a T, not B. Million, billion, trillion spores.AThat’s prolific alright.BYeah.AI'm still stuck on the ways to prepare it and serve it because I don't know. Are you going to have a dinner party and serve roasted puff ball encrusted with Himalayan salt or something? What do you call it?BFair question.AI mean, does it have a better name? Like we’re having puff balls tonight everybody.BMushroom steak is what I would call it.AOkay, that's fair. What is the takeaway?BWhat is the morel of the story? I would say that puff balls in comparison to something like morels, small mushrooms that aren't soccer ball sized. They definitely have a much bigger pay off. They're much easier to find. You don't have to be looking hard to see.AYeah.BAnd then you have that much more food out of it having picked just one.AYeah. Are there any lookalikes that we should be aware of that are inedible?BThere are some kind of lookalikes, but that tends to be only when it's smaller. And again the solid tell is that you cut it open.AIt’s white.BNo structure. All white.AGot it.

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Audience is arguably the most central concept in the fields of rhetoric and tech comm. What have theorists been asking about audience from centuries ago up until the modern day, when social media has exploded the reach and interactivity of audiences? What does the evolution of audience mean for technical and professional communicators? And what is the best episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000? Books discussed include Involving the Audience by Lee-Ann Breuch and Update Culture by John Gallagher.

Sources and further reading

• Asante, M. (2011). Afrocentric Idea Revised. Temple University Press.
• Bakke, A. (2019). Trust-building in a patient forum: The interplay of professional and personal expertise. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 49(2), 156–182. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047281618776222
• Breuch, L.-A. K. (2018). Involving the audience: A rhetorical perspective on using social media to improve websites. Routledge.
• Brizee, A. (2015). Using Isocrates to Teach Technical Communication and Civic Engagement. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 45(2), 134–165. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047281615569481
• Collins, D. F. (2001). Audience in Afrocentric Rhetoric. Alternative Rhetorics: Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition, 185.
• Dayton, D. (2003). Audiences involved, imagined, and invoked: Trends in user-centered interactive information design. Professional Communication Conference, 2003. IPCC 2003. Proceedings. IEEE International, 9-pp.
• Dik-dik. (2022). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dik-dik&oldid=1077493803
• Gallagher, J. R. (2020). Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing. University Press of Colorado.
• Houser, R. (1997). What is the value of audience to technical communicators? A survey of audience research. Proceedings of IPCC 97. Communication, 155–166. https://doi.org/10.1109/IPCC.1997.637043
• Ede, L., & Lunsford, A. (1984). Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy. College Composition and Communication, 35(2), 155–171. https://doi.org/10.2307/358093
• Johnson, R. R. (2004). Audience involved: Toward a participatory model of writing. Central Works in Technical Communication, 91–103.
• Mallon, J. (1994, September 17). The Creeping Terror. In Mystery Science Theater 3000.
• Munroe, R. (n.d.). Duty Calls. Xkcd. Retrieved March 29, 2022, from https://xkcd.com/386/
• Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1973). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. University of Notre Dame Pess.
• Plato. (2003). Phaedrus. Hackett Publishing.
• Schriver, K. A. (1997). Dynamics in document design: Creating text for readers. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Whitburn, M. (2000). Rhetorical scope and performance: The example of technical communication. Greenwood Publishing Group.
• Wilkins, N. (n.d.). Bay Breeze Cocktail Recipe. Make Me a Cocktail. Retrieved March 29, 2022, from https://makemeacocktail.com/cocktail/6753/bay-breeze/

Transcript

AI'm Abi, I'm a professor of technical communication and rhetoric,Band I am Benton. I'm not.ABut you are a science-minded civilian. That's not the right word.BCitizen, that's the one you're looking for.ANon-academic. I come on here, I talk about my field, what I'm reading, and I attempt to make it interesting for Benton. And he makes the whole thing more interesting for everyone.BAt least I hope so.AWe are TC talk, by the way,Bwe are tc talk.AAll right. I want to play a game.BOkay.AI'm calling this game name the drink. And by name, I don't mean identify, I mean, invent a name for this cocktail.BI need to try it again then.A I'll tell you the ingredients. Vodka, cranberry juice, pineapple juice.BSweet and sewer.AGross. It's not that bad.BNo, it's, it's tasty. The color though is not appealing. Pretty much like cloudy brown water.AOkay. This is a real drink. The real name is a sea breeze cocktail or bay breeze actually,BBay Breeze,Awhich sounds quite a bit nicer than yours.BYeah.AYour turn. So either give me an ingredient list and I'll name the cocktail, or give me a name and I'll tell you what would go into it. I should note, our invented drinks don't need to taste good.BOkay. A Mount Doom.ANice.BFireball.AOh, yes, it would be fireball whiskey. I was thinking absinthe because wasn't it thought to be poisonous at one point or in large quantities?BWell it's fermented wormwood.AIt definitely needs Mountain Dew for the mixer.BYou nailed that one.AMountain Dew, fireball whiskey and absinthe. All right. Now you tell me the ingredients for a dog's breakfast.BDog's breakfast, huh? Boy, that's a tough one. Rum, say spiced rum.AI have a history with spiced rum.BI know you do. You know what a dog's breakfast is?AYou want to tell the audience just so we're all on the same page.BAbout your history with spiced rum?ANo!BOh.AThat can never leave this room. Nor can it leave the library.BRight.ANo. Tell the audience what a dog's breakfast means as a saying.BYes. So a dog's breakfast is a figure speech describing a mess, a haphazard.AThat should be easy then. Just list off anything you can think of. It doesn't need to have any rhyme or reason.BGrenadine.AThe breakfast theme.BShot of espresso, yes.AOrange juice, champagne.BYes.AThat does sound like a dog's breakfast. Thank you for humoring me.BIn fact, it is one of my great pursuits to humor you.AI mean, you won't, you refuse to sing a round with me.BI’ve got a, it's got to be a really specialARow, row, row your boat.BStop. I'm giving you the Sauron eye.AHand me a Mount Doom already because I'm getting the Sauron look.BI see you. It's gotta be a special occasion for me to participate.ATo deign to participate in singing a round with me. Very well. You do not know what our topic is today.BNah I don't know.AI'm going to quiz you a little bit. What would you say? Oh, I need to cover up my my notes here so you can't cheat.BAs you wish.AWhere's my folder? So I can make a littleBOh, I see.Aprotective standBI thought that was the first question. Just likeAThe theme of our podcast today, where is Abi’s folder,BI was like, is this another Middle Earth reference in that you're pulling a Bilbo with Gollum. What have I got in my pocket?AOr as Socrates would say, is that a scroll in your pocket or are you just happy to see me. It’s in the first part of the Phaedrus, I’m not kidding you. Although most translations tend to tone down the innuendo.BOne of the earliest fallacies.AAgain, just leaning into that unprofessionalism. What would you guess is potentially the single most important idea to the fields of rhetoric and technical communication? When I tell you what it is, you'll be like, Oh, of course. Audience.BOh, of course.AWhat is the first image you get in your mind when you hear the word audience. Like if you had to turn it into like a concrete picture of something, what would it be?BAudience makes me think of someone coming before the king in a medieval court, having an audience with the king.AOh. I was thinking of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The setup is, we've got our main characters, the robots.BTom servo, who looks like a gumball machine, Croooow.AWho are watching a B movie.BI think in most cases it's like a C or D movie in honesty,AThe worse the movie the better. Because what they do is, so it's like they're silhouettes kind of framed around the, the bad movie. And then they just make jokes about it the whole time. And then it's gone through a few hosts.BIt has, it started with Mike Nelson.AYou told me before that it started in Minnesota?BYes.AThat’s cool. What's the best MST3K?BHobgoblins was a good one.AYou're forgetting the creeping terror.BThe creeping terror is phenomenal. It's very good.AThe one where the guy ineffectually attacks the giant alien with a guitar.BInstead of running away. It is a creeping terror, not a running terror.Aand how the victims literally climb into its mouth because they had such a low budget.BI've never eaten a whole prom before.AOkay. Yeah. So that to me is like a literalization of audience. Or I think of throwing tomatoes at the actors in a play. So what's interesting about the way I think of audience in all those examples is that they are heckling or throwing fruit or ridiculing whatever it is they're watching. Also, it's either a live performance.Bor a recorded thing.ARight. So audiences of writing did not come to mind for me right away. Which is interesting because of all people you’d think a writing professor would think of that. But my sort of first conception of audience does match with the earliest senses of audience. Which isBpeople watching a play.AYou are watching or dialoguing with a real person. Not that audiences of writing aren't real, but I mean, like flesh and blood, in your face.BThat sounds like an uncomfortable experience. Agh.AWhat is this, the final scene of Jaws?BMaybe.ASo I thought what I would do today is give us a little tour of the notion of audience through time. And bringing us up to date with what do audiences mean for professional communicators? Now, technical communication is a relatively new field, but it links back to ancient rhetorical theory. And that stretches back centuries. In the field of rhetorical theory a big question has been, what is the audience? How important is the audience, and what is its relationship to other aspects of the rhetorical situation. Rhetorical situation being this combination of things that come together when communication is happening. There's a writer or a speaker, an audience, a context. There's the actual text itself or speech itself. Those all form the rhetorical situation. Now when I say rhetorical theory, I'm referring largely to the Western rhetorical tradition, which has its limits and problems. For better or for worse it is the foundation of a lot of how we think of rhetoric today. I'm not going to get into the specifics, butBBesides the Western conception, what else is there?AI'm going to get to it,BOkay, good.AAt least some of it. A lot of this rhetorical thinking emerged out of ancient Greece. What were the conditions there that made rhetoric flourish? What do you think?BThe whole participatory democracy thing was kind of important. You know, there was that there's a sense of equality imbued in that so that everyone can feel like they have a voice that matters.AEveryone, of course, meaningBmales, of course. Males who have a chance to leave the fields for lovely public discourse on things.AThe extent to which it was truly democratic is certainly questionable. But compared to decisions being made strictly byB the monarch,Athe nobility orBdespot.AReligious leaders, it was a change. It suddenly mattered that people had the tools to communicate, make a case for something, perhaps defend themselves in court. And also in that context, you can see how rhetoric would take on kind of an agonistic vibe. Agonistic meaning conflict, fight, debate. There's a winner and a loser. I think it's also fair to say that a lot of that has persisted.BWhere do you get that idea, the news?AThe role of audience during these times was pretty distanced from the speaker. Was sort of this mass of people who you could analyze psychologically and craft a message to get the results you wanted. So the audience wasn't especially involved. Yet, say, Aristotle's conception of audience may not have been the best known at that time in ancient Greece. Have you ever heard of Isocrates?BI would never have heard of Isocrates, if not for you going on and on about Isocrates,AWhen have I gone on and on about Isocrates?BIsocrates this and Isocrates that andAIsocrates, You-socrates,BWe all Socrates for dialogue?AHe was a contemporary of Plato and Aristotle. Like I said, he was better known at the time. He was viewed as a sophist by our more famous Greek friends. When you hear the word sophistry, what is that word meant to convey, do you think?BSophistry seems to me to be embodied in Jim Carrey's character in the movie, Liar, Liar.AOoh.BThat is who he was.AHe was a Sophist.BHe was a sophist. He was there to try and convince you that his blue pen is red. Until his son makes some mystical wish that makes him unable to lie.AYou can thank Plato for that reputation that sophists have to this day.BPlatonic propaganda.ARight, I mean, he was stealing their business. So sophistry was more associated with relativism, contingency, civic engagement versus philosophy and ultimate truth and exact knowledge, which is more in line with Plato's thinking. In fact, it's from Isocrates that we get the idea of kairos.BWhat is Kairos?ASaying the right thing at the right time. Isocrates may not have spoken explicitly about what the audience is or what their role is. But reading between the lines, we can see that audience was thought of more actively. As Alan Brizzee writes, this more relativistic approach “asks the rhetor to consider contextual information such as culture and audience to develop communication.” This can lead to more engagement with the actual members of the audience versus just talking at them. Now, because I love some drama.BOoh,ALet's dig into this supposed rivalry between Isocrates and Plato.B I'll get my popcorn. And a popcorn meme.AThe pigeon with the binoculars meme, that's you. Okay, Merrill Whitburn writes, “Ancient Athens was clearly a hotbed of academic competition with feverish posturing for competitive edge.”BWow.AThe Sophists and the philosophers “were engaged in a major battle for academic supremacy.” I was curious how much of this rivalry is real and how much of it is inferred. And it looked like they were kind of sub tweeting each other more so than like outright fisticuffs in the street kind of deal. Plato for instance, he didn't necessarily call out Isocrates by name, but indirectly referred to him unfavorably in one of his dialogues. Do you want to know why Western history has gone awry?BI have wanted to know why all my life.AMerrill Whitburn has the answer. And it's that we didn't listen to Isocrates. “What has become clear is that improving our lives in many respects is contingent on reversing a trend that received its greatest impetus from a struggle between Isocrates on the one hand, and Plato and Aristotle on the other some 24 centuries ago. In the very cradle of civilization, Western history began going awry and has continued on that path ever since”BAll these last 2400 years.ADo you want to know what has had the greatest adverse impact on the emergence and development of technical communication in the 20th century, according to Merrill Whitburn?BYes.APlato and Aristotle. In fact, he has a chapter all about corporate irresponsibility. He was writing in the Reagan era of deregulation. And attributes this problem to practitioners of technical writing not having the Isocratean tradition to draw from, which would've helped them pull their heads out of the clouds of philosophical contemplation of what is when they needed to be ethically deliberating about what ought to be.BThose last two questions you asked me definitely made it seem like to Merrill Whitburn the world was full of Platonic nails and Isocrates was a hammer.AYes.B Which would be a great named for a philosopher’s band.ACocktail. What would an Isocratean Hammer consist of? It would make sense for a recipe for an Isocratean Hammer to not consist of absolutes. Like it's not two ounces this 1.5 ounces that, it would be whatever ratio is most fitting to the situation at the time.BOkay.AI do really enjoy the Whitburn book though. He just puts it out there. He's got opinions. Plus it's a nice summary of the gist of the various philosophies. I would recommend it if only, if only for the drama. So yes, even in ancient Athens itself, there were competing conceptions of audience. But there's a world beyond Greece.BIn a world beyond Greece,AI cannot cover them all here, but I do want to bring up one that I found especially interesting and useful, and that's Afrocentric rhetoric.BDo tell.AThis comes from an essay by Daniel Collins published in an edited collection, Alternative Rhetorics from 2001. He compares Western to Afrocentric rhetoric. And obviously this involves making some generalizations. The idea is that we don't have to start from just one assumption about how to relate to our audiences. Quoting from Molefi Asante’s book, the Afrocentric Idea. “Rhetoric in an Afrocentric sense, is the productive thrust of language into the unknown in an attempt to create harmony and balance in the midst of disharmony and indecision.” Whereas Western rhetoric has that agonistic bent.BWestern rhetoric is the rhetoric of conquest. Afrocentric rhetoric is a rhetoric of cooperation.AYeah, I mean, not that I want to reduce it down to these single ideas, but if you were to capture the distinction, I think that's a great way to put it. “Afrocentric rhetoric frames the individual in relation to the collective.” Versus in Western rhetoric which sort of pits a rhetor against the audience and success depends on excluding other viewpoints versus bringing more viewpoints in and collectively refining them. I'm guilty of falling back on thinking of argument in terms of a debate. My students, that is often what they have learned all through school. So I have tried to open up that idea in my own classes and I'd like to share one activity that I think interrupted the argument as conflict framing.BOh, okay.AFirst I showed a YouTube video. It wasn't particularly controversial though, because I didn't want it to get people upset. So it was something kind of mundane, like smart phones are better for society. I don't know. And as a class, we tried to sum up the thesis statement of the video.BOkay.ANot establishing is this view correct or not, but just can we summarize the argument being made, being made here as fairly as possible. So then I asked everybody to pair up. And then half of the pairs were assigned to agree with that thesis statement and come up with supporting reasons.BI see where this is going.AAnd the other half of the, of the groups were assigned to disagree with the thesis statement. Where do you think this is going?BI thought that you are going to finish up with, in the Western tradition, death match. Fight it out. But then you surprised them by saying, okay, switch spots. First half take the second position. Second half take the first position.ANo, I didn't do that.BWhat?AWhat I did is I had one member of each group stand up and shuffle over to the next person. Speed dating style, so that now the pairs were remixed so that there was one pro and one con paired up. But then what I said, and here I'm quoting from my class plan, which I had to dig up. “Share your ideas with each other. The goal is not to persuade your partner that your perspective is better. The goal is to listen to each other, consider the best of both perspectives, and see if together you can identify a more nuanced, accurate claim about this topic.” And I had a couple of caveats. First, respect each other as people, yes. But it's a cop out to say all perspectives are equally valid. Because when it comes to like a smartphone, it's not that high of stakes, but there are other things whereBBelief systems.Asome opinions are just objectivelyBTrashy.Ahateful and should not be entertained. And then the other thing I said is that the goal is not even necessarily to compromise. At least if you think of a compromise as a point that's exactly equidistant from both perspectives.BRight.AAnd I even did math. The one and only time I've ever done math on the whiteboard and I did it wrong on purpose. If person A says two plus two equals four and person B says two plus two equals six, then the correct answer isn't five. After that, we reflected on what was it like to approach argument in this more collaborative way versus in the pro and con way. And students had really good reflections about it. Any listeners out there, if this is something you want me to like, write up for you and send along, I would be totally happy to do that.BMagnanimous of you.AAnother big shift in thinking about audience came along with writing because you don't have that flesh and blood in your face anymore.BYeah. It's a lot cleaner.AMuch more distanced. Plato took issue with that, but we don't need to get into that.BSocrates took major issue with that, right?AWell, Socrates never actually put his own stuff in writing. So Plato was Socrates’ mouthpiece, so it's hard to know how much of it is actually Socrates so much, you know, needless to say, Plato would be the guy whoseBAh you kids these days and your bookface, your whatnot have your electric Internet thingamajiggers.AYes. Exactly. So when you are writing versus speaking in front of a crowd, your idea of audience isBdecoupled fromAby nature like not a real audience, it's in your brain. Skip ahead to the 1960s. We have Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric, What's new about their rhetoric? You ask?BWhat is new about their rhetoric? I ask.AWell, they complicated the idea of audience quite a bit. I wouldn't say that they made an explicit case for giving the audience more agency or what have you. But they did talk about things like the starting point of argument is agreement, which I love because it means if you're arguing with someone, focus on what is the common ground that you share and kind of work up from there.BHm.AAnd they introduced ideas like a composite audience, which acknowledges that audiences of a piece of writing are not homogenous and they may have competing values and competing goals. Particular audiences versus universal audiences, which is in theory an audience of all reasonable people. And I'll be honest, I have never quite understood what they mean by this. Do they actually believe there is such a thing asBA reasonable person?APrecisely. Or is it more a writer's conception of what an audience of it? I don't know. 1984 Ede and Lunsford wrote a widely cited piece in composition studies called Audience Addressed, Audience Invoked. They essentially gave labels to these two ideas of audience that a writer or retire must keep in mind. There's the imagined audience,BThe invoked one.A And they write here, rather than relying on incantations, writers conjure their vision of an audience.BClever.AAlthough I kind of like the idea ofBsummoning an audience through paranormal means.AYou know, that could be my next article. Writing for a paranormal audience.BWritten by Abi Normal. Thank you Young Frankenstein for that.A It's Young Frankenstein.BFrankenstein. That's right.AAnd then the audience addressed is the literal people. Their whole thing is that you shouldn't emphasize one over the other. Think of how they work together.BThat difference between audience invoked an audience addressed. It would be really interesting to look at persuasion. Say you're talking about one of the great pivotal speeches in history, like what comes to mind for me being a space nut is JFK's address to Rice University where he said “we go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” I know that a lot of what happened in the 60s has been rewritten historically in terms of how popular and how obvious it was at the time. Martin Luther King Junior was, or he had an 18 percent approval rating by the public at the time. NASA up until the moon landing was probably right about there as well. But they just, they had the funding because it was a military slash geopolitical priority.ACold War.BCold War. In the case of that where clearly the speaker is trying to persuade, is the invoked audience, what you imagine the audience is, and therefore needs to be persuaded from, to something else? Or is that invoked audience what you want your audience to end up as?AThat is such a good question. Are you invoking an ideal audience? Or are you invoking a realistic audience? Is that kind of what you’re getting at?BYes.AI think it's a mix of both because there has to be that recognition that you do want to move the audience from point A to point B. Possibly what JFK was doing in that moment, was constructing a role for his audience. It, it kind of appeals to like the American values of independence and innovation. And I was not aware of that context that you just shared. That there was not a lot of public support behind going to the moon.BOh no. I'm not deifying JFK because he had his personal and political blunders to be absolutely certain. That level of inspirational speech I don't think has come back to the White House since he died.AInspiration, that's exactly the right word for it. He was speaking to them as though, of course, you want to be the kind of person who cares about taking on these challenges. And in that sense, his speech was in part epideictic or epideictic.BIn the middle of a dik-dik?AOn top of a dik-dik. Epi, above. And a dik-dik, meaning a small African deer.BLook them up. Adorbs. Sorry.AOkay. Back to ancient Greece to explain epideictic rhetoric. It was one of three main modes of rhetoric, the others being deliberative or deciding what to do in the future. So policy. Another was forensic or judicial, kind of deciding what happened.BThe past.ARight. And then epideictic is the rhetoric of praise and blame. So you would hear that at things like eulogies or celebrating a military victory or something. What it's doing is it's appealing to cultural values.BIn the present.AGood catch. Deliberative, future, judicial, past, epideictic, present.BNailed it.ADid you platonically nail it though? Let me get out my Isocratean hammer. Epideictic is not overtly persuasive in the ways that the other types of rhetoric are. But what they are doing is they're kind of cementing values that can then be appealed to, to persuade later on, perhaps.BOkay.AAnd I think that's probably what was going on with the JFK speech. Do you agree?BYeah. Absolutely. Yes. He was lifting up these values of service and duty,Aand he was asking his audience to rise to that challenge. AnywayBIt definitely has the feel of the encouraging coach.AThe locker room pep talk. Yeah. There's another article, the locker room pep talk as epideictic rhetoric.BThere you go.AYou can have that idea for free. Run with it.BOh listener. Or me? I can write that article?ABut don't write an article about locker room talk because that has an entirely different connotation. So Ede and Lunsford brought us audience invoked, audience addressed. In 1997 Johnson brings us audience involved and this was one of the first efforts to really theorize audience in the field of technical communication.BHm.ASo he connected it really closely to usability, which we've talked about before. What's your one-sentence summary of usability?BWhether you can use it. How a thing made by somebody with their invoked audience in mind is actually experienced by theAaddressed audience.BAddressed audience.ABut what usability brings into the picture is that it's not just a matter of hearing or reading something, but with much technical communication, people are interacting with it. They're using it to aid them in accomplishing something. According to Johnson, “Audience Theory historically has been central to technical communication. The very nature of technical communication begs for conceptions of audience because technical writers are fundamentally charged with the responsibility of translating information from one context to another. As a result of this responsibility, it should be no surprise that technical communicators advocated the importance of audience long before composition theorists showed interest in audience in the 1970s.”BCool.AAgain, I'm going to be here for the shade. Johnson introduces the idea of audience involved. Users who collaborate on something with writers. So they're not just the end-user, but they're brought into the process of creating that documentation or that product.BAnd it was 97 when he?AYep.BInteresting, so 97 is pre-Google, but it is not pre-internet.ANo, and it's not pre microcomputers.BRight. Did Johnson have an eye towards the Internet as like a place where this audience involved tech comm was happening?AProbably, I don't know.BHe would have been, he would have been on the ball.AHere's something he said. He defines users, “those audiences we literally work with as we produce everything from reports and instructions to online help and World Wide Web sites” with each w capitalised. So, yeah. And he is calling communicators to recognize the knowledge that users bring to a situation. Instead of thinking in terms of idiot's guide to blah, like what is it that audiences bring to an interaction with technology and how can you build on that to make something more usable. Here I'll interject with an example of what it looks like to have an audience involved in a usability test. Because I have my students do that in my classes. Mostly they just like setup different stations around the room with their instructions and their materials. And then people just kinda wander around. And if somebody needs a usability test and no one else is free, I'll sometimes hop in. There was one time where somebody wrote instructions for how to take a screenshot using a PC. And as you know, I use a Mac. I could not make the thing do a fucking screenshot. I'm not stupid. I would hope.BNo.ABut it was a great experience for the students to see me struggling with that because it helped them realize, oh, we are assuming that our audience is used to a Windows operating system,BWindows literacy.AYou get enough different users to test something out and you see how do we need to fill in the blanks or word this differently, et cetera. Also in 1997, we get an article from Houser who talks about how a technical communicator kind of oscillates between an imagined and addressed audience throughout the process. So you always have to start with your own assumptions. Putting it on paper gives us a chance to kind of challenge that conception and hopefully replace unconscious stereotypes we may be holding with data informed details gleaned from user research. Learn about what their contexts and needs and goals are. Then you update your vision of audience. You create something, have real users use it, refine, so on and so forth. In technical communication there’s traditionally been kind of three main approaches to learning about your audiences. And this comes from Shriver. There's classification driven, which is more analyzing the demographics of your audience. Sure it's useful, but it's not comprehensive. There's intuition which is based on the writer's previous experience with audiences. And then there's feedback-driven, such as the usability testing or observing people use the products or the documentation. These methods for learning about audience, one informs the other, and you kind of cycle through these different approaches and that's fine. 2003 then, Dayton comes along and argues that the audience addressed, audience invoked, and audience involved can be combined using storytelling methods. This comes from UX, user experience.BOkay.AAnd the specific storytelling methods he's talking about are personas and scenarios. Personas are kind of profiles of maybe a representative audience member. It's drawn from real data about users. So you don't want to just have it be fully invented. But it also needs to be specific enough that it helps the design team really focus on how real people are going to respond. Scenarios then are situations in which somebody would be using a certain technology. And so those methods cut across all three audience types. And I like this, he says, “to try out the new storytelling paradigm, such practitioners would only need to start writing more like novelists and less like engineers in composing their user profiles and use cases.”BI take offense to that.AWell, yeah, because you're a soulless technician.BYou're dreaming aesthete. Callback.AJust like the advent of writing changed conceptions of audience, so did the advent of technology, the internet, computers. Now I don't mean to make it sound like it was snap your fingers and there's this technological revolution, this happens gradually. Nonetheless, it gives theorists some work to do to figure out how does this change our audience theories and how does the presence of digital audiences change the work of writers.BI did want to jump in when you said the advent of technology, like all of a sudden, we have technology.AYeah. You caught me. I was using that as a shorthand for digital technologies, but of course, a pen and pencil are technologies, a papyrus and whatever they used to write on papyrus with is a technology.BYou whippersnappers and your technology.AThere's a whole sub-field that studies this exact question. Digital rhetoric.BOh.ASo I want to highlight a couple of books that show how digital audiences change writing and writers. The first book is by Lee-Ann Breuch. It's called Involving the Audience, A Rhetorical Perspective on Using Social Media to Improve Websites. And the second one is by John Gallagher, Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing. We'll start with Breuch’s book.BOkay.AThis was from 2019. She's writing this to an audience of usability specialists and technical communicators involved in creating usable websites. And she's saying that there's this whole wealth of information we can get about user experience from social media that we are currently not using.BA whole wealth of it, you say.AIndeed, she did a case study actually of the rollout of the MNSure website in 2013, that was a result of the passing of the Affordable Care Act. Do you remember the promotions around MNSure, that website where people who didn't have insurance could go and theoretically shop for different options and get coverage.BI do.ADo you remember the Paul Bunyan ads, they put a lot of money into promoting this. And it was a cute campaign, you know, Paul Bunyan, Minnesota, situations where Paul Bunyan needs health care.BOh, no, I chopped off my foot, curses.ASomething like that. Yes. So MNSure was this large, complex website and people struggled with it immediately and it was deemed a failure at the start.BAnd that was partially because of IT issues, capacity.ABad organization.BBad organization.ASo what Lee-Ann Breuch did in her study, she looked at hundreds of comments that people posted on Twitter, Facebook, comments on blog posts and newspaper articles about MNSure. She searched relevant hashtags and analyzed those to find themes in the feedback. People were complaining, rightfully, they couldn't even make an account or their progress wasn't saved. Don't you hate when that happens?BUgh.AOr there were unclear instructions like, what does it mean to enter information for everyone in your household? Does that mean a family member? Do you have to dig up your roommate’s personal information? It just wasn't clear. Ultimately, this wastes time. It wastes the organization's time. It wastes, I mean, it materially hurt these families who couldn't get coverage or who had to miss work to stay on hold on the helpline.BOh boy.AAnd of course, this user experience affected people's impressions of the whole thing. It’s interesting how she found different types of messages based on the platform. So on Twitter, she found a lot of more politically charged commentary, like the failure of MNSure points to the failure of the ACA, et cetera. So we're not getting direct user experience there, but we're getting impressions. And on the Facebook page, she found more problem-solving type comments. So people were coming on there and being in some cases very specific about their situations and their problems. In that sense, you're getting kind of free personas and scenarios like I was talking about with the Dayton article. People are on social media telling stories about their user experience. Get this. They did no usability testing on this website before they rolled it out. Zero. How was that possible?BDeadlines. That would be my guess. We gotta get it up, just get it done, get it up, get it done, get it up. We're behind schedule. Agh. Alright, it's up. It's down.AThis case introduces a few interesting new twists when it comes to audience. Number 1, you could say the audience is more organic because you're not going out and gathering up representative users and sitting them down in a lab and studying their experience. They're the people who actually needed to use the tool to accomplish a thing. The stakes were much higher.BYes, they completely forwent the, the user testing and so they didn't have the curated, what you were talking about. Pretend that you are a user. And they went instead straight to live application.AYes.BField response.AThe downside of organic audience is that that can include trolls and people who aren't who they say they are. And of course, a social media audience is not representative of the full audience because people who are on social media have to have that much technological knowledge. But that is why, and Breuch emphasizes this repeatedly, this is a supplemental usability method, like this should not be your one and only way of learning about your audience. Not to mention it's, it's too late in the process. As far as problem-solving goes, this is absolutely something that we should be adding to our toolkit.BYeah, You generally want to get as much revision done before version 1.0.AYeah. Second, the audience is relatively immediate, at least compared to the amount of time, again, it would take to set up a usability study. And ideally, organizations would be set up to respond to these usability bugs that are emerging in the social media. Or in like maybe they set up a report a bug feature on their website or something.BYeah, that would probably get overwhelmed and crash too. I could very easily see there being a pretty big structural separation between social media manager and head of IT.ASo bridge that separation, absolutely. Cross-functional teams.BI could see like, Okay, we are launching. Now you are going to have daily meetings together so that there can be cross-pollination of learnings. Circle back on that cross-pollination and we'll run it up the flagpole.AAnd yeah, so this relationship will obviously look different depending on the organization. That's fine. Third, the audience initiates the feedback. Which is another difference from even Johnson's idea of audience involved. Because with audience involved, the assumption is still the communicators are bringing in the audience. In this case, the audience is like, Hey, I'm here. I am involving myself, whether or not you want to hear from me.BI need to talk to someone.AAnd a challenge that comes with this for organizations is that this feedback is fully public. What effect is this barrage of complaints having on people's impression of the organization?BFrom what I remember, I think that they were woefully understaffed. They were likely all very busy running around with their hair on fire.AAdditionally, on, say, the Facebook page, the audience can be dialogued with. And so a lot of that amounted to, hey, send us an e-mail about the problem, understandably, but better than nothing. Interestingly, the MNSure situation had a happy ending. They exceeded their enrollment goal. They had to spend millions of dollars to find and fix the problems. And many of the identified problems were already showing up in the social media feedback. What does this mean for professional communicators? This is another responsibility of, say, a social media manager at a company, have someone there to directly respond to comments, kind of manage the audience. Ideally make proactive announcements when things are going wrong. Because then you canBAnd pin to top.Aget ahead of, you know, a wave of complaints. Surprisingly, she says, there hasn't been a lot of research on what we can learn about a site’s usability from audiences on social media.BWeird.AYou know, take advantage of this and also read the full book. I just talked about one of the case studies she did. What Breuch is saying here is just that this is something you all need to look at, particularly when it comes to large, complex websites. And lastly, I want to talk about this Update Culture book by Gallagher,BThe Afterlife of Digital Writing. Makes it sound soAGhostly?BSpectral.AOh my gosh, oh my gosh. Listen to this.BI'm listening.AAfterlife studies for rhetoric, colon, writing for paranormal audiences. That was a call back. All joking aside, what he means by the afterlife of digital writing is that there is not an endpoint to digital writing. You can post, say, a blog post or an Amazon review or something on Reddit. But you're not done.BHow am I not done? I hit post.AOn the internet there's no final draft for digital writers who, you know, work to cultivate an audience. Often they have to continue to update, edit, discuss that initial writing. And as Gallagher points out, this requires a real shift in how we think about and teach the writing process. Over the years in writing studies, we've gotten a lot more sophisticated ways of thinking about writing process. That it's not just outline, draft, revise, final, you know what I mean? Varies from person to person, it’s often recursive, et cetera. But Gallagher is arguing that we need to now account for that afterlife.BSo the phrasing of afterlife of digital writing makes me think of this, in most cases, talking about people, afterlife is assumed to be something that is eternal and for all. Whereas, you know, like communication isAEphemeral.BEphemeral, made less so through the advances in technology, but still ephemeral to some extent. And so the afterlife is not infinite.AI hope not. I don't want everything I post on the Internet to live eternally.BDon't we all.ANot that I'm posting anything particularly salacious.BDon't look too hard, folks.AI mean, I don't think that's what he was getting at.BYeah, I know, butAIt’s an implication that could be further explored.BIt is an implication that could be further explored.AAnd I suppose that has implications for people who are writing not from their own space, but like writing for Amazon or Reddit. They have less control overBThat too.AWhat happens to their writing. Again, I want to clarify, this isn't some radical shift. As long as there has been writing, there has been response to that writing. But because of these new participatory technologies, the scope of writing and responding has just accelerated and expanded. So for his book, he interviewed a bunch of digital writers and came up with some big themes about what do these digital audiences mean for writing. I want to highlight just a couple that were interesting. Timing came into play here. The role of time in how writers publish and respond to readers. So don't publish your post at 3AM when no one's there to read it and to amplify it.BAh, time of day.AYes. Writers get pretty savvy about what are the best times of day to put this stuff out there.BIdeally, just before people jump on in the morning.AA lot of it is after work too, lunch hour. Or another kairotic moment to post would be posting the first review for an Amazon product.BYes. Get in first.ABecause that's going to be the one that everybody sees and upvotes, and or rates as helpful, whatever.BI feel like a lot of comment sections are no longer organized chronologically.AOr you can choose how to order them. Like most recent versus most comments.BI've definitely seen, I've definitely seen on Twitter of back and forth of how long ago a thing was posted. And I don't know if it depends on how many people you follow or, you know, how close the connections are to people you follow? Or how many likes this comment got?AWell, do you have it set to chronological or home? Because you have an option there. The default is home where they try to compile the stuff they think you want to see.BOh.ABut you can go in and set it to chronological.BSneaky.AAnd then you see the kinds of stuff that otherwise can get buried. Yeah, So there we go. Defaults, they matter. And digital writers need to be attentive to those things. In rhetoric, time is often thought of in terms of kairos, which we talked about earlier from our friend Isocrates. Refresher, kairos represents timeliness, posting something or saying something at just the right time. And kairos is sort of a qualitative way of thinking about time. Interestingly, you can't truly identify a kairotic moment until it has passed. You can't plan to go viral, in other words. And it's a huge burden for digital writers to constantly be on and kind of waiting to jump on those kairotic moments, right? So he talks about how to manage that, they develop consistent posting schedules. And so they kind of take this qualitative information about generally what are the good times to post. And then they kind of make it quantitative and decide I'm going to post at eight AM and 4 PM or whatever. That represents chronos, which is a Greek concept that hasn't gotten a lot of attention in rhetorical theory.BChronos. So rather than timeliness, time itself?AClock time, quantitative time. And I want to give myself some props here because I alluded to chronos in one of my articles in like a footnote. I was talking about how participants in a patient forum build trust with each other. And one of the ways to do that was simply building a relationship over time. Sort of this accumulation of interactions thatBShowing that you're here regularly and for the long haul.AYeah.BI agree that's chronos. It isn't kairos becauseAyou could count the number of days somebody's active on a forum, for instance.BYou count the number of days somebody's active on a forum and it doesn't matter what time of day they're doing it either.AYeah. Last thing I want to mention, he talks about sort of the complex way that these writers engage with their audiences online. It's not quite reading, it's not simply writing. And his participants actually talked about it in terms of listening to their audience. They were kind of framing it as a conversation. So he said we need a better word for this process, this back and forth that writers engage in. It's not that they're reading their comments top to bottom, but it's sort of an active process of filtering. And choosing how to respond to continue the conversation. And that could include strategically ignoring. I need more strategic ignoring in my life.BOf me?APerhaps. Again, there's way more going on in this book than what I've mentioned. And he argues that we need to account for all of the labor that goes into writing that continues after you hit post that first time. He acknowledges that this was hard for the writers. He writes quote, a pedagogy that addresses the afterlife of digital writing values the entire process of writing, including all the labor and time involved in attending to writing after it is published or put on the Internet. Oh, I forgot to do this. I want to show you the first page.BYes. The XKCD comic, duty calls. Are you coming to bed? I can't. This is important. Person sitting at the computer. What? Someone is wrong on the Internet! Banging away on their keyboard. One thing I love about comic is that is so relatable, like who has not gotten, who has not been that person at the keyboard, just like agh.AYeah. I think it's kind of alluding to that work-life balance thing too. I'm not going to bed. I gotta respond. And I'd like to see more extensions of this idea as well. I was thinking in terms of what could this mean for online teaching, for instance, managing a class discussion board. Why did I talk about this in tandem with Breuch’s involving the audience? I think both of these books show how living in the social media age has changed the work of writing, of professional writing and technical communication. It requires us to reorient ourselves to our audiences. Think about what it means for our professional roles. Requires us to think about and account for how active audiences truly are. Versus your traditional sage on the stage Athenian lecture, whatever, or as opposed to Crow and Tom Servo cracking jokes at a terrible movie. Any final thoughts about this evolution of audience in rhetoric and technical communication that I have attempted to portray?BYes. Thoughts.ABesides what I've talked about, the real gap in the literature at this point is a careful theorization of spectral audiences, poltergeists and the like. Maybe I need to dig into that.BThere is definitely some space for it. I don't know if there's any value to be added in that, but,AI appreciate that you said that. A gap in the research is not in and of itself a justification for research. What, have you been listening to my PhD methods professor? All right. I'm off to pour myself an Isocratean hammer, would you like one?BI Socratea company.AMaybe it's like a Long Island iced tea. And so you could create a line of Isocrates. It's too late.BYeah. We can't salvage that one.

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Part 1 established how social justice is relevant to technical communication; Part 2 follows up with a parade of social-justice-oriented projects from technical communication scholars. We draw specifically from the edited collections Citizenship and Advocacy in Technical Communication by Agboka and Matveeva, and Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work by Walton and Agboka. In discussing the chapters, we touch on topics including the Hawai'i false missile alert, tarot cards for tech, ranked choice voting, and Benton's high-voltage senior design project. We hope you come away inspired by the ways people are enacting social justice in their research, teaching, and practice.

Sources and further reading

• Agboka, G. Y., & Matveeva, N. (2018). Citizenship and Advocacy in Technical Communication: Scholarly and Pedagogical Perspectives. Routledge.
  • Expanding Inventional and Solution Spaces: How Asset-Based Inquiry can Support Advocacy in Technical Communication, Lucía Durá
  • Inclusive Practices in the Technical Communication Classroom, Jessica Edwards
  • Open-Source Technical Communication in the Classroom: Digital Citizenship, Communities of Play, and Online Collaboration, Robert Rowan
  • Social Media and Advocacy in The Technical and Professional Communication Classroom: A Social Justice Pedagogical Approach, Sarah Warren-Riley
• Artefact Group. (2022). The Tarot Cards of Tech. Artefact. https://www.artefactgroup.com/case-studies/the-tarot-cards-of-tech/
• FairVote.org. (2022). FairVote. https://www.fairvote.org/
• Value Sensitive Design Lab. (2018). Envisioning Cards. https://www.envisioningcards.com/
• Walton, R., & Agboka, G. Y. (2021). Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work: Theories, Methodologies, and Pedagogies. University Press of Colorado.
  • "I'm surprised that this hasn't happened before": An Indigenous Examination of UXD Failure during the Hawai'i Missile False Alarm, Emily Legg and Adam Strantz
  • The Tarot of Tech: Foretelling the Social Justice Impacts of our Designs, Sarah Beth Hopton
  • Election Technologies as a Tool for Cultivating Civic Literacies in Technical Communication: A Case of The Redistricting Game, Fernando Sánchez, Isidore Dorpenyo, Jennifer Sano-Franchini

Transcript

AWelcome to TC talk.BYes. Welcome.AYou areBI am Benton.Aand I amBAbi.ATc is technical communication. Could there be a clunkier term?BYou know, when I hear that term, I feel like it needs to be said by C3PO. I'm fluent in over 6 million forms of technical communication. Oh my!AWell, that makes that a little better. It just doesn't roll off the tongue. And even the abbreviation tech comm is a little clunky. I don't know. We are going to continue the conversation on social justice in tech comm. We introduced the basics and the books. I just wanted more actual examples of what does it look like to think through and apply social justice in tech comm? And that's where these other couple books come into play.BOh,AAgboka and Matveeva. Citizenship and Advocacy in Technical Communication. What is advocacy? To return to your question. They write, “we see advocacy as the process of using a combination of academic and practical skills and knowledge systems to enact social justice with the goal of improving the quality of life for communities.” They situate their book in the history of the field. So similar to Walton Moore and Jones, they recognize that tech comm has been kind of aligned with this almost industrial or corporate model. And as a field we don't want to be known as just churning out more cogs in the capitalist machine, right? And they identify the literature that has pushed the field towards preparing students to be citizens who can think critically. And I needed this book when I was writing my teaching philosophy. In fact, these authors were the chairs of the ATTW conference, Association of Teachers of Technical Writing several years back. And the theme of the conference was citizenship and advocacy. And I attended that conference. That was also around the time that I had, I was either preparing to go on the job market or was recently on the job market. And that kind of inspired my thinking about what do I want students to come out of my classes knowing? In the field, some of the scholarship on citizenship and advocacy has come in the form of service learning in classes or experiential learning. So students writing for non-profits for instance. Have you ever had to do service learning or experiential learning like that?BIn a way, a lot of senior design projects in engineering are sort of oriented around not exactly service, but working with, my personal one didn't involve working with an industry leader in the area. But a lot of times it'll be something that say a local company, local engineering company doesn't really want to devote all of the resources that it would take to have an actual employee.ASo they exploit students?BExactly. So they, they instead offer an opportunity for professional development at the same time as getting a lot of low-wage labor out of seniors in engineering programs.AYeah. I mean, the experience is not nothing. It’s in the context of a class, so. and that's probably a different situation from what happens in a lot of writing courses, which is that students do work for free, but it's not always that great.BThat's oftentimes the case for senior design projects too.ABut your needle-less electrospinning device was successful, was it not?BIt was successful and I have no idea if it has been used since we finished our design project. Part of the excitement is the 50 thousand volts. It’s truly exciting. Let’s see, I think that the minimum approach distance for conductors for electrical line workers, for 50 thousand volts. It's gotta be like somewhere between 3 and 4 feet.AYour professor was putting his finger in it.BYes, he was. We were mechanical engineers, not electrical, but we needed super high voltage and that made it really funny when he repetitively tried to turn the thing off by touching it and ouch. Fortunately, his grad student was there to bail him out with hitting the button with a pen.AI have used experiential learning in my classes. It is super valuable and super intense to plan and manage and follow through on.BFor the instructor.AYou know, it requires a commitment from the client as well.BYes.A And students really have to step up because the stakes are a little higher for them as well. So it's hard work. I have a lot of respect for instructors who do that more regularly than I have. I've also done service learning as an undergraduate.BWhat manner of service learning?AIt did not go well. Okay, so when I was a freshman in my first year speech class, we had to go volunteer somewhere for X number of hours and then give a speech on the experience. And I was the worst student because I knew there was this unspoken template for what the speech needed to be like and it needed to be this kind of I didn't know this and then I learned that and now I'm inspired. The people I'm helping, helped me more than, you know? And I knew the narrative.BOkay. You saw the genre conventions staring you down.AYeah. So I was a nightmare, I mean, in retrospect, a nightmare to my teacher and flipped that around and went up and I gave my speech. And I basically said, I didn't change anyone's life. I didn't even learn very much. And if I had a student do that, I'd be like, okay, edge lord. Good for you? The only reason I don't look back at that experience with 100% cringe is that the class loved it. And even the teacher was in tears laughing. So I'm going to call that a success.BWhere did you volunteer?AIt was a thrift store, so sorting through donations and there was a lot that wasn't, you know,BSellable.AExactly.BOh thanks for giving us 40 pairs of heavily used underpants. That's just wonderful.AYeah, it was pretty impersonal. But at the same time, someone has to do that work, right? The other time. And again, I feel terrible in retrospect because the professor had set up this very lovely partnership with a health group on campus that needed to get the word out about folic acid. 400 micrograms for women of child-bearing age. And I'm not a good reader of Minnesota nice. And so when our client was displeased with our work, I didn't pick up on it. But another student in our group did and she redid our project single handedly.BYou let someone do that?ANo, I didn't know she was doing it. By the way, I have learned lessons from this. And I use this very example when talking to students about group work and the challenges therein. And it was an excellent example of my complete and utter failure to consider the audience. The main problem was that my design involved a psychedelic pattern and the phrase, Are you on acid? on the front cover. Because I thought it would be eye-catching.BYou were an edgelord.ASo the redesign had a picture of, you know, stock photos of young women. Now, these experiences weren’t framed specifically around social justice. The first one had potential, I think, if we could have gotten into what are the underlying structures that lead to people needing this charity, whatever it was, homelessness perhaps. And it gives me perspective on where some of my students are coming from. This was a fun walk down memory lane, but we gotta get it back on track. The book addresses how advocacy can play out in tech comm research and teaching. But I want to focus on the teaching aspect because that's what feels most immediately implementable to me. And the first chapter I want to talk about is actually the last chapter in the book. Because I think that the author makes a really clear case for how advocacy, like social justice, isn't just an add-on, but is integral to tech comm, whether or not we're aware of it. Technical communicators are advocates. Most obviously, they're advocates for users, in theory, Hopefully, yeah. or should be. But they're also advocating certain positions. Some writing is obviously more overtly political than other writing. But it's still, you know, coming from certain assumptions about how things should be. Sarah Warren Riley wrote this. Her article is about using social media as a place to look for advocacy, and as a place to practice advocacy. She writes, “technical communicators need to be aware of their power and their savvy as researchers and communicators, ultimately as advocates who can make things happen in the world.” She has a series of activities including analyzing their own social media use for what are kind of the underlying, what are, what are you advocating for? Even subtly or unintentionally? I also want to highlight another chapter by Lucía Durá on asset-based thinking.BAsset, not acid.AAre you on acid? So this is essentially looking at strengths rather than weaknesses in a given situation. Asset-based thinking is meant to be highly participatory. It's learning solutions from members of a local community. And I loved this chapter because even though she's talking about big ideas like ways to structure a whole project around community-based participatory research, she also talks about how this can simply represent a shift in thinking in, in how you approach a problem. We can be so focused on solving problems, on fixing things, that we don't focus on what might be working and who is making it work and how.BInteresting.AYeah. She talks about this strategy in a couple of client projects she did. One is in a hospital, on strategies to reduce infections that people get while in the hospital. So what they did was they talked to medical staff and basically asked, how do you solve this problem. And they got a bunch of ideas. They were able to narrow down and actually implement some of them. And some of those ideas were have patients teach their family members to wash their hands. If you are to teach someone else about something, you got to learn it yourself. And the infection rate gradually went down after they implemented some of these practices. The typical approach to problem-solving is imposing these top-down best-practices.BYep. And anybody who has been in a corporation knows all about the regular stream of bullshit that comes flying from corporate down to the front lines and says, okay, we're changing things. We're going to do this and we're going to do that and change is implemented by someone who has no practical idea of, like you said, what is working well, who is making it work?AUh-huh. And the thing is, best practices are legitimate. Their best practices for a reason, they're likely research-based, evidence-based. But those are going to play out differently in local contexts.BMore often though, honestly, corporations are, they'll call them new standard operating procedure, rather than making the claim that they are the best practices, because are they really going to research that? Probably not. I'm a cynic.AThe nice thing about these local practices is that you don't have to work so hard to get buy-in for them because people are already doing them. It's, it's just a matter of expanding it. So best practices aren't bad, but it's also worthwhile to recognize what are the local ways to enact or adapt those practices to make them actually work for the real people carrying them out. About a third of this whole book is focused on teaching specifically. My favorite thing about these chapters is that they had assignment sheets included.BReally?AYes. And I want to touch on a few that I would love to assign at some point. Starting with Jessica Edwards’ chapter on inclusive practices in the tech comm classroom. She talks about three sort of places to engage diversity in a class, including foundational perspectives, content, and teaching practices. So there's lots of different points at which you can incorporate social justice perspectives. And she shares what sounds like a really useful assignment. Make an infographic about a building on campus. So you're getting the practice with visual design. But you also need to share the history of the building. And how does this history engage diversity or social justice? And I can think of other ways you could connect a building to social justice, for instance, the accessibility issue.BWheelchair accessibility.AYes. Are there elevators, for instance? Is there a lactation room? I don't know. Like, these things that a privileged person wouldn't go out looking for because they wouldn't need it. But for those who need those resources, you really notice it when they're missing. So I think that could be really valuable. Okay, another one, by Robert Rowan on open source tech comm in the classroom. He gets at the idea of citizenship and advocacy by teaching students how to be digital citizens, by contributing to their own online communities. And by community, I mean, not necessarily academic or professional, but based around a hobby, perhaps.BLike foraging for mushrooms.AVideo games.BOh video games, that too.AI mean, it could be largely anything that there's some, you know, a fan wiki around, or some kind of participatory website. And have students actually develop content for it, so you’re tapping into something that they already care about. They're having to do that audience analysis, figure out what's there, what's missing? What can I add? Do the research to develop that. And I love this idea because it ties in so well with what we were talking about in the Moby-Dick episode, that is, Tech Comm’s Existential Questions, where we talked about the golden age of technical communication. Remember?BWhat was the golden age?AEverybody's doing it. Tech comm is not just the province of professionals. Again, I love the idea of having students draw from their own passions and interests. I saw a little bit of this actually when we had to pivot to online at the start of the pandemic. Because typically in my gen ed tech comm class I do a group-based project to create instructions. This time, that was not really feasible. So I framed it as, What are you an expert in? How can you teach somebody else about that? People did instructions for how to repot a plant, how to repair a hole in the wall because your roommate punched it in a fit of anger.BHopefully it’s ex-roommate.AHow to make sambusa, how to, oh this is a good one. How to get your cat to sit on your shoulders. Which no, At first I was like, Is this a thing? But I tell you what she made a PowerPoint about it. It's legit, like if you want to go hiking and bring your cat along, they have to be comfortable perched on your shoulders. That is a gradual process.BIt's a stretch, but so is having your cat ride on your fucking shoulders.AHow to make bagels from scratch? I got a bunch of air fryer recipes actually.B Have we tried them?AWe have, because remember you had just gotten the air fryer for Christmas?BThat's true, yes.AAnd so I was like, Heck, yeah, teach me how to make cream cheese wontons in the air fryer. The last book is Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice work. This is also an edited collection, this time by Walton and Agboka. And this is the most recent of the three. This is from 2021, and it’s basically a direct response to that need for accounts of actual practice that was kinda set up in the social justice turn book. So really similar to the Citizenship and Advocacy book, but more closely focused on social justice versus advocacy, which is, a little broader, perhaps? Certainly related. And as with the last book, I'm going to highlight just a few of the chapters. They're all excellent. But again, thinking in terms of what might I be able to use? A chapter by Emily Legg and Adam Strantz, “I'm surprised that this hasn't happened before: An Indigenous Examination of UXD…”BThat's user experience design.AThank you, “failure during the Hawai’i missile false alarm.” That was in January 2018. What do you remember hearing about it?BSo this was around the time that North Korea was doing some missile tests, they were getting progressively more capability in terms of altitude, distance they could go with the missile payload. That sort of thing. Within their range was Hawai’i. So that's the backdrop of this event when there was not a missile coming in, but the emergency alert system sent texts to everyone in Hawai’i that there was a missile inbound.AAnd this is not a drill. It literally said that. I think it took at least a half hour to actually get the correction out. In the grand scheme of things, not super long, but long if you are certain those are the last 30 minutes of your life.BYeah.AAnd I really appreciate how they open their chapter because they paint this picture of the absolute terror that the citizens of Hawai’i must have felt whereas from our perspective, it was just another news item. The authors then explained how things unfolded on Twitter where UX designers had a field day with this interface for the alert system. Here, let me show you.BOh wow, yeah.ASo see here how there's like no sense of hierarchy in the menu. Drills are included in the same drop-down as the real thing. Very easy to confuse that. They write, “while the public's attention was immediately drawn to the problems of the missile launch interface, very little attention was given to the impact that even a false missile launch alarm had on the residents of Hawai’i. Even less was paid to the indigenous native Hawai’ians. For them, even the possibility of becoming a military target is a reminder of the US occupation of the Hawai’ian Islands since 1893.” That did not cross my mind at all when I heard about this. I mean, I think my reaction was something along the lines of this is dumb and awful. It's an excellent example of how that focus on the technical side drowned out the community’s real needs. They write, “the designer asks, how can we redesign this missile warning system interface? While their users want to discuss the need for such a system in the first place.”BHow about you make us not a target?ANo joke. Yes, human-centered design is a good thing, but it's not enough. In UX, there is often this focus on perhaps the relationship between humans and the computer or the app or whatever. But an Indigenous UX approach, quote, “considers the myriad relationships the object has with the intangible, beyond the human, non-human network, the histories, policies, cultures, practices, stories.” So there's a lot more going on there that we're going to miss if we're focused on a drop-down menu.BYeah.AJust a couple of ways that they applied this indigenous UX framework to the missile alert. One change could be as simple as using place names that the Indigenous people use. So Hawai’i with the apostrophe.BYes, Hawai’i.AVersus the Anglicized version. Another thing I like is that they build the possibility of failure into their framework. Because sometimes an interface redesign can't solve the real problem. Yet, failure shouldn't be seen as an endpoint, but a chance to reflect and prepare yourself to be proactive in the future. They're not talking about teaching per se, but I think this would make a great case in class to show that importance of taking a step back, not diving into the surface level design fixes, but really taking the time to understand the impacts on specific groups of marginalized people that tend to get overlooked. Here's another chapter that was great. Remember the episode we did called What Could Go Wrong?BRight. With the duckling.AWe talked about how difficult it is for designers to think past the benefits that they intend for their product and think through the potential negative consequences. This book has introduced me to a tool that can facilitate that thinking. This is in a chapter called the Tarot of Tech, where the author, Hopton, talks about this tool, a deck of tarot looking cards that have various categories of questions like, what could a bad actor do with your product? Or what is the most unsustainable behavior your product encourages. So forcing yourself to look at those potential negatives. This isn't the only tool like this there’s also things like the Envisioning Cards from the Value Sensitive Design Research lab. I will link to that as well. But the tarot format is kind of fun. In her classes, she shares a case study of Norman Borlaug.B Norman Borlaug. He is responsible for wheat being what it is today.AHe wanted to end world hunger.BHe wanted to end world hunger. And the way that he wanted to do that was to make wheat more efficient. If you look at old timey pictures of wheat fields, the wheat is like as tall as people. Now, wheat plants will come up to your knee. And it isn't that people have gotten taller. Back when we had tall wheat, it wasn't harvested by machines, it was harvested by people who would tie it in sheaves, take the grain off and thresh it, usually with animal power. And then the straw that was left would be used for all of the work animals. With the Industrial Revolution, we were phasing out work animals and farms. We had no need for all of that straw on a wheat plant. So he said, let's make it semi dwarf. And so it is putting no energy into getting to be six feet tall. And that energy is instead going into the grain.AHe got the Nobel Prize for, you know, essentially saving millions of lives from starvation around the world. But what could go wrong? Well, what did go wrong?BBecause he developed this super efficient wheat, in the capitalist system we have, it out-competed and basically ran all of the other wheat varieties out of town. We lost a lot of diversity of wheat. It was planted with herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers.AYeah, the monoculture thing. So not great results environmentally. And it’s not like we have to look at that situation and say, oh, our choice is between solving world hunger and the environment, right. There's that binary thinking I was talking about earlier. Instead, how can we plan ahead to minimize harms? She also acknowledges in this chapter that thinking of design in this way is expensive. It slows you down.BEveryone up the food chain from you is like get it done.AShe talks about how technical communicators can use technical communication of their own to make a case for slowing down. Things like making a budget impact statement. Case studies to show your company how this has played out with other companies who either did or did not incorporate that social justice thinking. Again, we should do these things because we desire a more just society. But working in a context where profit is essentially all that matters, you need to be prepared to fight that current.BIt's true.A So you have to get persuasive. Again that's why I appreciate books like this. Because of this turn in the field students are learning different things in their classes about what technical communication is and what it can do. They are going to enter the workforce and hopefully do their part to turn their little steering wheel towards justice. Last one, “Election Technologies as a Tool for Cultivating Civic Literacies in Tech Comm.” This is by Sanchez, Dorpenyo and Sano-Franchini. They talk about the potential for theming a course or assignment around elections and the technologies and communications surrounding elections.BInteresting.AYes. And deliberately fostering that citizenship. Voting is more confusing than it should be. Let's be honest. We know that voting is in many cases, deliberately confusing or deliberately onerous. So that is a place for technical communicators to potentially intervene.BWhere the legal entities are failing to.AYes. Another time I've touched on this has been in talking about usability. I've used the example of the infamous Florida butterfly ballot.BYes. Damn you, chad.AFor the youngins in our audience, the 2000 election between Al Gore, George W Bush, It all came down to Florida. And the design of the ballot may have had something to do with it.BIt started to really get into the weeds in determining who was being voted for on this particular ballot or was it valid or not? The Supreme Court just stepped in and anointed Bush as the winner of the election.AWe could have had a president in 2000BWho gave two shifts about climate change.AYeah.BAnd wasn't necessarily inclined to get us stuck in two 20-year long, endless wars.ASo needless to say, usability matters, citizenship matters, social justice matters. Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect?BYes.AI find it funny that this butterfly ballot seemed to set off a butterfly effect. It's such a tiny thing. But the repercussions have been so sweeping.BYeah, I mean it's been a national disaster for 22 years.AYeah. You could address the role of social media in swaying elections. And the focus of this chapter, redistricting maps.BIt's a process that is ongoing at this moment.AAs we speak. Yes. Not everyone has heard of gerrymandering. This is a place to introduce that. The authors write “the maps produced may conform to best design practices. Yet at the same time, hide on-the-ground inequities that can only be seen and felt when the ballots are counted.” I actually told you about this as I was reading, I had you try out that computer game. How did that go for you?BThe gerrymandering thing, it was basically come up with ways to divide red and blue voters into different groups, such thatA you get a certain result. So this instructor, he had students play the redistricting game and reflect on it. What other types of tech comm are involved in elections that you can think of? well, policies, obviously, like voter ID laws and such. You were an election judge.B I was.A in 2020. Tell me about it. Did you have to teach people how to register to vote?BI wouldn't say that I had to teach people how to. I just kind of had to walk them through it. Maybe that is teaching them. People who had showed up and hadn't registered in Minnesota, we are able to register them right there at the polls same day, which, it is fucking madness that anywhere in the United States does not have that ability. The rest of you states get your shit together. Okay, stepping off my soapbox.ALet me interject here. Those are issues that students can advocate for. Have them work with local groups that are fighting for greater voting access. If I remember correctly, weren’t you having people sign a petition for ranked choice voting in Minnesota a while back?BThat was in 2018. I hung around the polls for awhile to get signatures for people to say they were interested in ranked choice voting. For those of you who are familiar with it, good for you, for the rest of you, ranked choice voting is also known as instant runoff voting. In races where you have more than two people, it is possible for nobody to get a majority of the votes.AWe don't need to get into what exactly it is. But I will say this, it's not entirely intuitive how it works. But the results are much, I think, fairer in that it breaks us away from that. I'm going to vote for the better of the two evils. How does that saying go?B Yeah. The lesser of two evils.A I'm going to vote for the lesser of two evils, which is problematic in and of itself.BWithout getting into the nuts and bolts of how it works. It is very simple for voters, because people know how to put things in order. People, people know how to say like, I like this one most and this one next, and this one next. that's easy. The counting of it, that's where the hard part is. And that land squarely on the wonks.AAlthough it sounds like if you're going to rank a list of more than two, that is going to require more active participation on the part of citizens to learn about those candidates.BYeah.A That's not a bad thing.B That's true. Some people are only going to rank 1. That's fine. If they pick someone who gets the least votes in the first round then their vote just won't count anymore.AMost people know who they absolutely don't want.BYes. And so they will put them last or not on their ballot, which is fine. It gives people more options to engage.AIs ranked-choice voting going anywhere in Minnesota?BIt is in local elections in Bloomington, Minneapolis. There's a couple of other Twin Cities suburbs.ASo it has caught on a little bit, but it needs more awareness around it.BYes. More importantly, it needs to be implemented in statewide elections.AAll that to say, these are things that are complex and technical. Perhaps not even complex, but just need to be explained in a way that's understandable to a range of audiences. This is an opportunity for Technical Communication. I, for one, I'm feeling kinda pumped up just having had this conversation. How about you?BYeah, I feel really heartened, if that if that works in this case, that tech comm is figuring out ways to maybe not necessarily be subversive, but toAgo against the grain,Bgo against the grain and de-defaultize the audience as straight white man.AAgain, just want to acknowledge all of these authors I've mentioned. I am grateful that they're doing this work and they're putting it out there. Even so, I've only mentioned a handful of the people doing work that touches this topic in one way or another. More to come, I'm sure. But I hope our listeners come away with some ideas about research that they might want to engage a little more closely with.

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Tech comm may have a reputation for being "objective" and "neutral," but that reputation has made it too easy for the field to distance itself from the real injustices it has perpetuated. In their important book Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn, Walton, Moore, and Jones show how social justice is integral to technical communication and explain foundational concepts such as privilege, intersectionality, and coalitional action. For instructors and practitioners wondering "What can I do?" this book is an excellent place to start.

Plus, stick around for Fun with Fungi with Benton, our resident fun guy.

Sources and further reading

• Crenshaw, K. (2022). On Intersectionality: Essential Writings. New Press.
• Graham, C. (2021, September 15). The 7 and 7 Is a Refreshing Throwback to the ’70s. The Spruce Eats. https://www.thespruceeats.com/seven-and-seven-cocktail-recipe-761496
• hooks, bell. (2014). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (3rd ed.). Routledge.
• Rhett & Link. (2013, June 3). Taylor Swift Caption Fail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MuDgfX9C2w
• Walton, R., Moore, K., & Jones, N. (2019). Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn: Building Coalitions for Action. Routledge.
• Young, I. M. (2022). Justice and the Politics of Difference, revised edition. Princeton University Press.

Transcript

AWelcome to TC talk. I'm Abi.Band I'm Benton and Fern is trying to get in.AAnd scratching at the door is our cat Fern. There's always that question. Do we shut the door only for her to scratch at it and us to let her in anyway, or do we just let her hang out with us from the beginning and risk her climbing the walls of our blanket fort? What's TC talk all about Benton?BTc talk is a podcast about technical communication.ANot to be confused with communical education.BCommunical education,Awhich is what our six-year-old thought my area of study is.Bwell, let's get down to it. What are we drinking tonight?A taste it and see if you can guess what it is.BI think that it is sprite with whiskey.AThat, yeah. Also known as a 7/7, referring to a combination of 7-Up and Seagram’s 7 whiskey. But we aren't using those precise elements. Frankly, I like Sprite better than 7-Up anyway. Are you able to tell a difference?BI don’t know.AIt could just be some deep seated brand loyalty thing. Like everybody thinks they like Coke more than Pepsi. But then when they are in a taste test, they can't really tell the difference. I could drink Sprite all day, every day. The last couple of episodes we did, if you'll recall, were downers. Give us the recap.BSo we had one episode that was about how technology furthers racism. The most recent episode was about medical history in fact, and how it was awfully racist. And certainly gives rationality to hesitancy to trust the medical establishment in minority groups in the United States.AYes. You're going to be stuck here all night.BMe or the cat?Abecause you have a cat on your lap. And that was just scratching the surface. I did want to do an episode that's a little bit more actionable. So we know about these problems, but let's address what to do about them in our role as technical communication researchers, instructors, or practitioners. Therefore, our theme for the day is social justice and advocacy in tech comm.BOh, I've got a question for you. A two-part question. What is social justice? Part two. What is advocacy?ALet me turn to page two of my notes. This comes from Walton, Moore and Jones. They say “social justice research in tech comm investigates how communication broadly defined can amplify the agency of oppressed people. Those who are materially, socially, politically, and/or economically under-resourced. Key to this definition is a collaborative, respectful approach that moves past description and exploration of social justice issues, to taking action to redress inequities.”B Oh, okay.AI'm glad you asked me that because it shouldn't have taken until the bottom of page 2 for me to address that since it is the theme ofBour chat here. Did you describe advocacy?ANo, because I didn't get that far.B Oh.A We're going to have this conversation in parts.BOkay.AI don't know if I'll need to break it up into multiple episodes or if we can just knock this out over a couple of evenings. Yeah, so that's, that's a great place to start. And a lot of the, the key terms within that definition should become clearer as we proceed.BBack to page one.ADo you think social justice has anything to do with tech comm? That was obviously a leading question.B Okay.ASo you know the answer's going to be yes, butBThe answer's going to be yes, but I think that you cannot strive for social justice without technical communication.A Ooh.BLet me explain. Justice is this nebulous concept.AThere's like five frameworks for justice that we can talk about later if you want.BNo. I'm just saying that it's nebulous. And as you said, there are five frameworks for it. So it's not something that is universally agreed upon,ATrue.BOkay. So you say that there is injustice. How is there injustice? Let me tell you the statistics.ASo technical communicators have a role to play in demonstrating that there is injustice?BYes.ACan technical communication work to redress that injustice?BYes.AGood answer. No matter what you do, no matter what profession you're in, you can strive for social justice. But what can technical communicators specifically do to contribute?BWhen they are crafting their communication, which is of course, technical in nature, to do so in a way that keeps in mind audience. If you have a picture in your mind as you're writing of. Okay. My boss gave this to me. He is a white dude. I am crafting this artifact for him. Don't forget that your audience may not be your boss.ASo in other words, a big piece of that is broadening, broadening our sense of audience and not just relying on stereotypes. That's huge. I have three books I want to talk about. Needless to say, this won't be comprehensive. I can't do these books justice, in a single episode.BOr would you try to do it on social media?ABecause do it justice and social… we have a rule around here that when one of us makes a bad pun, we need to acknowledge it one way or another.BYes.AIt does not need to be a positive acknowledgement. Groans count and eye rolls.BThey are their own sort of reward. It has to be a visible enough eye roll though.ARight. I've learned that if I don't acknowledge your jokes at all, then you will mansplain them to me.BI will dig into why it's funny and you should acknowledge it.ASo when talking about these books, I want to help people get a sense of what the books offer, why they might be useful. Kind of the big ideas behind the connections between social justice and tech comm. And then give some examples of what people in my field out in the world are doing to make social justice happen in their tech comm work.BSounds good.AThe first book is Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn from 2019 by Walton, Moore, and Jones. And their names might be familiar because I mentioned their article in our Moby Dick episode. That would be the Tech Comm’s Existential Questions one. This book is really an expansion and refinement of those ideas. And I think every tech comm scholar should be familiar with it. Not just those scholars who focus on social justice research. No matter what you specialize in, you can't get away from it at this point and you shouldn't be able to. I mean, we know too much about injustice, inequity, discrimination, to not consider those things in anything that we do.BCan't get away from it.ABy the time I finished this book, the only thing I want to more of was examples, those concrete examples. What does it look like to act out these principles in teaching and research? So the next book I'm going to talk about is Citizenship and Advocacy In Technical Communication. An edited collection by Agboka and Matveeva. And this one was published in 2018. So actually before this tech comm after the social justice turn book. So I think of it as paving the way for a more overt emphasis on social justice in the field. The other book I'll talk about is Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work, published in 2021 also an edited collection, this time by Walton and Agboka, which is basically a direct response to that need for accounts of actual practice. All right, back to the social justice turn. First of all, what the hell is a turn?BIs it like in board games?ANo.BNo. Okay.AAnd I say this because it's one of those things everyone thinks is obvious to everyone else. But when it's your first time encountering it, you're just like What the fuck is a turn. Which in fact was my reaction my very first modern rhetorical theory class in my doctoral program. Professor was talking about such and such a turn in rhetorical theory. And I was just dumbfounded. To the authors’ credit they define it. It representsBGood for them. Before we move on too much, I want to take my turn. I had exactly the same reaction when I heard about the Arctic tern. What the fuck is a tern. It's a sea bird, by the way, and it's spelled T E R N not T U R N. Sorry.ALet's turn this around. A wave of scholarship, but also a change in perspective that whether or not everybody in the field subscribes to this way of thinking, you're going to be affected somehow. I think of it almost like turning a big ship. It's not going to be instantaneous because there's so much inertia. Is that the right physics term?BYes. Yes. Inertia is exactly it. It's the tendency of a thing to resist change.AThen that is an even better analogy than I realized. Like I was talking about before, the dominant narrative of tech comm has been pragmatism and problem-solving. And they don't dispute that. But what they do say is that injustice is a technical communication problem. Quote, “these efforts to problem-solve makes sense to us, TPC, that is technical and professional communication as a discipline has prided itself on practicality, on applicability, on being both an industry profession and an academic field of study. We are scholars and practitioners who prefer to get things done, to get to work, to engage with problems and solve them. Engaging these classic concerns of the field, the social justice turn extends core considerations of TPC even as it shifts the field’s identity.” You can almost see them anticipating their objectors, I think. You can kind of picture someone saying “what does social justice have to do a tech comm? We just write user manuals” and they point out why this is easy to do, to kind of see that disconnect. They write “because the field often appears to be removed, sometimes twice removed, from the atrocities of domination, the field can maintain and has maintained its distance from the violence, oppression, and injustices it perpetuates.”BIt perpetuates.AYes. Like we talked about in the What Can Go Wrong episode. The default is discrimination. So if you're designing and writing neutrally, you are by default supporting the status quo, which is discriminatory. And in that episode we talked about how designers of certain technologies kind of distance themselves from the consequences of that technology. So if people who design technology can create that distance from it, oh, it's not me, it's the algorithm. Then it’s all the easier as say, a technical communicator who writes documentation for said technology to feel even more removed from its consequences.BHence, the twice removed.ARight. Why do we need justice?BOppression sucks. That's why we need justice.AAnd that's another of those terms that we should probably stop and define. And they define it drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young. Her understanding of it is important because it makes it impossible for dominant groups to claim, say, reverse racism, right? There are a few specific things that are components of oppression that white people do not experience, even if they experienced an isolated incident that felt unfair to them. For instance, marginalization, cultural imperialism, violence. And the violence thing is relevant to technical communication because you will recall we had a whole episode on Weaponized Rhetoric and howBViolence need not be physical.APrecisely. And language can contribute to violence or justify violence. And the example they give is Ferguson, so the police shooting of Michael Brown, the officer who shot him, the officer described him as demonic. So, dehumanizing language.BDemonic. Wow. So that’s not only dehumanizing, but also throwing around religious terms.ADrawing from bell hooks, they also bring up a strategy of injustice, which is essentially victim blaming, blaming oppressed people for their own oppression. Think back to when I was talking about the storytelling we do as a society around poverty. And who deservesBoh yeah,Asupport versus who deserves to be homeless because of the choices they've made.BYou've made your bed. So now you can sleep in it, not in a bed though. Metaphorically, you can sleep in your bed.AAnother thing that's important to understanding oppression is that it is intersectional. Have you heard that term before used in social justice contexts?BNever.ASo when two cars arrive at a cross street.B It's an intersection.ANo, it comes from Kimberle Crenshaw.BI think that intersectionality is kind of when you have overlapping oppressions.AYeah, you nailed it. And here's why that's important. You can't look at one type of oppression in a vacuum. Because that's what happened with the feminist movement, which focused on gender but not race.BAnd so it helped white women out.Aprecisely. Or even the Black Power Movement, which focused on race and not gender.BAnd so that helped Black men out.AIn both cases, leaving Black women, leaving them behind. So we know about oppression. What is justice? I mentioned before, we can talk about multiple frameworks of justice. You're right, there's not one thing. And that's part of doing justice right is not universalizing it.BDoing justice, justice.AIndeed. Instead of going through the frameworks, which again, read the book yourself, I'll just give an example of why we need more than one view of justice. Okay. Procedural justice, that can be understood as fairness of process, essentially. So the same process should apply equally to everyone. Sounds nice, right? What could go wrong?BMy guess is that what could go wrong is that not everyone will have the same obstacles to overcome in order to complete said process.AThat is true. They actually say it can be used to cover up discrimination because they can say this was a fair process, but overlook things like, like you said, failing to acknowledge that people face different obstacles due to oppression. Or another one might be insisting that we use the exact same process when we pull over drivers for speeding. Great. But who is getting pulled over more in the first place?BPeople of Color.AAll right, back to their definition, which I read at the top. But I want to touch on a few of those key terms. We know a little bit more about what it means for someone to be oppressed. They also emphasize action. We're moving past just describing and exploring issues of injustice to actually doing something about it. And that action needs to be collective. Their sub-title is Creating Coalitions for Action. What they mean by coalition is not that you have to agree with everyone in your coalition, but you do need a shared goal. And the more diverse the group, the better. But again,BUnity, not uniformity.AHey, I like it. Yeah, that's exactly it because we don't want to collapse differences.BThe American melting pot is bullshit, it's a rebranding of oppression and assimilation.AThe other thing I appreciate is that they acknowledge that you might feel overwhelmed or intimidated by engaging in social justice work. You can worry that you don't know enough or you don't know the right way to do it. And I'm speaking for myself here, right? I am an audience of this book. I'm reading the book. I want to do better. I don't know how. And what they say is that it's through doing it, that you learn it. So don't wait until you feel comfortable. And it's not a matter of if you mess up. But when you mess up and how do you respond to it?BSo it sounds like what I read in the foraging book by Samuel Thayer, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly the first time.AI disagree, there are wrong ways to do social justice. For instance, coming in and being like, Hey, I'm a white person and I'm going to use my privilege to talk all over you and, which is a thing that happens. Reading books like this, it's a starting point. So if you go into this work not quite understanding what it means to have privilege, then you're more likely to do damage for instance.BI'll say then instead of the mantra, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly the first time, perhaps, you don't need to know it allAKnow everything to do anything.BThat's what I was looking for. You got it. You don't need to know everything to do anything. Along with that is the concept be inquisitive. Mentally place yourself in the role of learner so that you ask questions of other people.ABe reflective. Another thing that helps with this feeling of being overwhelmed by all the injustice in the world and what can I do? is to realize that the little things do matter. They write, “one of the reasons we believe tech comm specifically should be committed to social justice is that injustices often live in the mundane choices that technical communicators make. How drop-down menus look, whether a form is translated in another language, if captioning is included in a tutorial video, we believe that working coalitionally the individual choices we make, the small choices about design and representation, the ways we treat our students and colleagues, and the ways we run our programs can work to redress inequities in small ways. These mundane choices become part of a collective that moves toward inclusion and justice as a whole.” I don't know about you, but I find that very encouraging because you're thinking of it not as having to turn an entire ship around, but turning it by degrees, perhaps.BYeah. I mean, you can't turn the whole ship in a different direction because you don't control the whole ship. There are none who can.AYep. Maybe that's where the analogy falls apart because it's not like everybody has their own little individual steering wheels.BThey do, they're just like the things that you give a kid in the backseat of the car, they don’t do anything.AWell now that’s sad, that defeats the purpose of my whole point here. Then they go into this framework they call the three Ps. And it’s essentially how to analyze positionality, privilege, and power. We've talked about positionality before on this show. We all have our own identities, which are not static, but we're all situated in a certain way. It's a lens for viewing yourself and others. Where do you come from? Where do you fit in? What kinds of history, worldview, et cetera, are you bringing to a situation. Closely related with privilege. Which, what do you understand that to be?BWhen you are privileged, you don't know how good you have it, because things that are frictional, things that are hard for other people are not for you. And you, as a consequence, don't think about things like balancing needs in a very tight budget.AYeah. That's exactly right. You have privilege when aspects of your identity line up with what's considered normal or default. White, male, able-bodied. You're right. Those with privilege typically don't notice that they have it. But for those who don't have the privilege there on the outside looking in. So they see others privilege because they see their lack of it at the margins. Like a fishbowl.BWhen you're in the fishbowl, you don't know what water is.AYeah. And this matters to tech comm because when designing user experience or communications, it's very easy to exclude people that don't fit a kind of standard, it's very easy to assume that the people you're writing for are just little copies of you. Here's a super obvious example and relatively minor, designing stuff for left-handed people. Back when people used computer mice. No, people still use mice.BYeah.AScissors. Desks.BYes. That's true. That's true. Like in the auditorium seating? Almost all of the desks are on the right side. Some of them out of a few 100, there'll be like five left-handed desks.ASo if you walk in and you have right hand privilege, you don't know what it's like to have to walk in, maybe get there early, scope things out to find a spot that's going to be comfortable for you. Obviously, the stakes are much higher when dealing with things like race, gender, et cetera. Power, then, they say that when it comes to theorizing power, listen to those who are powerless. They are going to conceive of power differently than those who already have it. And it's not enough to point it out, there's that action piece. And they give the example actually of instructions. Sort of your quintessential tech comm genre. Can you think of an example of instructions that exclude certain audiences?BPlaces where the instruction writer assumes that, you know, that the reader will have all of the things that they have at hand. I love, okay, so I love this example of, we'll say, an Ina Garten recipe. Use fresh organic hand-cut this, store-bought is fine.AIf you don't have hand foraged wild mushrooms, store-bought is fine.BRight. Although to be fair. She at least is aware that people don't all have time to go and forge their own mushrooms.AExactly.BAnd says that store-bought is fine. But it still seems like a, you know, a look down your nose and say, well store-bought is acceptable.AAnd it's great that they have left-handed desks in that auditorium, right? But wouldn't it be better if every desk could fit a person of any handedness?BOn the other hand, you could have just described it as non-chiral. Sure. Oh, okay. So chirality is handedness. It’s from chemistry where certain molecules can have exactly the same structure but different handedness has different effects.AAnd that's where the idea of access can be empowering because you're not making exceptions after the fact to include more people. You're planning from the beginning.BProactively includingAPrecisely,B rather than reactively including,ARight. So that would include things like adding alt text to written instructions and adding captions to video instructions, what?BI was just thinking of caption fails. Rhett and Link.AOh. Yes.BThey're good fun.AThey’re super old by now, but really entertaining. And surprisingly teach a very good lesson about why not to trust the YouTube automatic caption generator. I'll link it in the show notes. Okay, so use the three P's to assess a situation. Then you use the four Rs to respond to a situation. Recognize injustices, reveal those injustices to others. Reject injustices and replace them with intersectional coalitional practices. I'm not going to go in depth on these because again, read the book. But what I really appreciated was that they gave two case studies that showed concrete situations where somebody might think through these three Ps and for Rs, and what that might lead them to do.BI do have to say, it sounds a little bit like a PR stunt,APs and Rs.BThere you go.AAnd essentially it just widens the types of solutions that you can think of. Because we're very, yeah, we're used to seeing things in binary ways. Either I can do this or I have to do that. And, bringing other people into the process too. I think that's enough for now. So let's just take a break and hear a word from our sponsor. Sprite. Just kidding. Let's continue the tradition started as of last episode.BWay back then. Fun with fungi.ADo we need a jingle?BInsert jingle here? A fun fact is that in the grocery store, you might see three fairly common types of mushrooms. White mushrooms, baby bella or cremini mushrooms, and Portobello. Note that all three of these have at least half a dozen names for that specific type of mushroom. And also they are in fact, all the same species. Agaricus Bi I don’t remember how it ends. Bisporus.ADifferent stages of development?BYes. SoAFace hugger versus xenomorph.BAh yes. Although definitely less scary in all casesAand more edible.Band substantially more edible because their blood is metal-corroding acid.AGood call.BBack to mushrooms. I've got a question for you, Abi, out of the entire world production of mushrooms, which country do you think produces the most?AI wouldn't even know where to begin. So I'm going to name a big country, China.BIt is China.AWhoo.BChina in fact produces 75% of all of the mushrooms produced in the entire world.AAmong those three you mentioned, do they taste the same and they're just different shapes, essentially?BI don't think the flavor is substantially different. Portobello is a little bit more developed flavor wise. It has a little more complexity and nuance to it in my opinion.AWhat can you do with a Portobello mushroom?BA Portobello mushroom, because it is mature and big. They get to be six inches across,ALike a cookie.BLike a cookie. A big old shroom cookie.AThat sounds like a different thing, which you may or may not want to eat.BSo Portobello mushrooms can be used, I've seen it typically done where the like the stem gets to be a little bit tough on portobellos. So often it'll be just the cap that you eat. And it is often used as a replacement for meat. In the forms of, you know, replacing a burger patty, putting cheese on it.AYou can just grill it.BOil it up some, throw it on the grill,ATurn it into a little pizza.BYou could turn it into a pizza.Aand you could add baby bellasBLike a mushroom squared.AAnd then if you serve it at a restaurant, you can use the different terminology and make it sound fancier than it is.BYes. A Portobello Cremini pizza, to which I would say Criminy, that’s the same mushroom.AJoke acknowledged.

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What comes to mind when you think of racist medical experimentation in the United States? For most people, it's the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis study, during which doctors allowed Black men to die from syphilis in order to study "the natural progression of the disease," even though effective treatment existed. In her book Medical Apartheid, medical journalist Harriet Washington argues that this is just one example in a long history of racism against Black people in medical research, and that we need to face this history if we are to build trust with Black communities.

We discuss key points from her book, starting in the age of chattel slavery in the United States up through Americans' collaboration with South African apartheid doctors aiming to develop racially-targeted biological warfare.

This topic has implications for health communicators who are writing and designing for marginalized audiences. More broadly, awareness of this history is necessary to make sense of current health disparities by race, most recently made evident with COVID-19.

Sources and further reading

• Atomic veteran. (2022). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atomic_veteran&oldid=1064394377
• Carlson, E. B., & Gouge, C. (2021). Rural Health and Contextualizing Data. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 35(1), 41–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920958502
• Doan, S. (2021). Misrepresenting COVID-19: Lying With Charts During the Second Golden Age of Data Design. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 35(1), 73–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920958392
• Fantastic Fungi: A film by Louie Schwartzberg on Mycelial Connection. (2019). Fantastic Fungi. Retrieved February 15, 2022, from https://fantasticfungi.com/
• Garret, D. (2017, December 18). The Classic Hot Toddy Recipe. Wine Enthusiast. https://www.winemag.com/recipe/classic-hot-toddy-recipe/
• McElroy, S., & McElroy, J. (2013, Nov. 29). Headaches [Podcast Episode]. In Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine. Maximum Fun. https://maximumfun.org/episodes/sawbones/sawbones-headaches/
• Saturday Night Live. (2021, April 4). Vaccine Game Show—SNL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocJCAfFQgCQ
• Washington, H. A. (2006). Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Doubleday.

Transcript

BWe are TC talk.AWhat will people say when they hear that I'm a tech comm freak?BWhat will people do when they find out it's true?

AI don't know what overlap there is between technical communicators and former listeners of nineties Christian rock, but shout out to anyone who caught the reference. I'm Dr. Abigail Bakke.BAnd I am her partner, Benton Bakke.AWe're talking about tech comm.BYes, we are.AThat is, communicating about complex technical subjects to a range of audiences. I kind of see TC talk as meta tech comm because in a sense, it's tech comm about tech comm, is it not?BYes. Heaven forbid, someone should do a podcast about our podcast, which would be tech comm, about tech comm, about tech comm.ABenton, we are going to do that. I have it in my schedule. I want to eventually have an episode where we peel back the curtain so to speak and take listener questions about what goes into TC Talk.BAs long as nobody pays attention to the man behind the curtain.AWe are all behind curtains.BCurtains for you.ALiterally. We are in a corner of our laundry room in a pillow fort of sorts.BYes.AFor sound dampening. A TC talk tradition.BYes.ATell me about what you're drinking because I am not drinking it.BYou are not drinking it, at least not yet.AI'm drinking coffee because I'm ready to go horizontal. Take a nap.BAnd I am drinking hot toddy for much the same reason. I am honestly drinking a hot toddy. Which, for the uninitiated is an ounce and a half of brandy.AStop, stop. If you're going to give the recipe of a hot toddy, you gotta do it your British accent.BOkay.AI don't know. Is it British? Even if it's not, a hot toddy is like the quintessential British sounding term.BThis is technical communication. Begin by boiling five ounces of water, add to it 1.5 ounces of brady, half an ounce of lemon juice, and a tablespoon of honey.ASplendid. Thank you, Mr. Tumnus. I must go back through the wardrobe.BAll right, off you go then.AWe, last episode, talked about racism and technology. Martin Luther King Junior said in 1965, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.”BWow, I had no idea that he said that.AYeah, that's something he stood for that we don't always hear about.BAnd MLK, he was looking at all the racial injustice.ASo that's saying something. Today the topic is racism in medicine, with a special focus on medical research and experimentation. This is going to be a doozy.BWhat could go wrong?AProbably goes without saying, blanket trigger warning. We're going to be talking about someBpretty horrific shit.ABut I'll do my best to be vague. But I think that it needs to be talked about. As with most things, our history as a country informs where we stand today.BThis country being the United States.AYeah, we're not in England anymore.BWell then, Cheerio. I'm sure that many listeners would think of Nazi Germany, medical experimentation, racism, Nazis,AYes. But the Nazis learned from the US. They followed in our footsteps in a lot of ways. Let me ask you, when you think of American medical research and Black people, what comes to mind for you?BNow, I will admit upfront to being a white person, educated by white people. I did know that there was the, was it the Tuskegee airmen. No, that's different.AYou got the right university.BSo I knew that there was a Tuskegee experiment done involving syphilis and Black men. And I knew that it was shady.AIt's interesting that you mention the Tuskegee airmen because how sad is it that that history has been tarnished by this association?BYeah.AWe will talk about the syphilis study. But I want to tell you the, the book that we are largely going to draw from,Byes.AIt's called Medical Apartheid, The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial times to the present. By Harriet Washington. She's a medical writer and it was published in 2006. Her big argument is that there is a gap in our knowledge of medical history and abuse towards Black people. And that for many people, the syphilis study is sort of the one key event that stands out in our minds. That was true for you. That was also true of me., And it's something that I have taught about in research methods courses, for instance, when talking about research ethics.BOkay.AHer point is that by pointing to this single instance, that is in the past, it can lull us into thinking that it's not a problem now or had not been a problem prior. I'm going to touch on just a few examples from the book. So this will not be a comprehensive history at all. I do recommend reading the full book because there is something about just chapter after chapter of these densely documented atrocities that I think people need to experience and come to terms with that. And I will say that the kinds of studies that are going on now are way different than,Bthan what's in that book then, oh yes.ASo I don't want anyone to come away from our conversation thinking, never participate in a clinical trial. That is not the message. Her message is, we need people of all racial backgrounds to participate in clinical trials. But denying the very real abusive history is only going to deepen the mistrust that's already legitimately there.BRight.AWhat do you see as the relationship between medical treatments and medical research?BWell, medical research would be for developing medical treatments.AYeah. I haven't always thought of those two as interrelated. I'm mostly involved in the world of being a healthcare consumer and a very privileged one at that, to have access to vetted and effective treatments. And I haven't always thought of what it takes to get there. And now we know clinical trials are the gold standard for determining whether a treatment is effective. But the carefully designed clinical trials of today are a far cry from say, the days of slavery. If a human being has no moral qualms with owning another human being for the purposes of manual labor, they're not going have any qualms about using those human beings to satisfy their curiosity about what happens to a human body when you do this to it.BOh boy. Wow.AMany doctors at the time made a living caring for enslaved people. And by caring for, I mean,Bmaking sure they were healthy enough to work.AYes, because the slave holders’ interests came first. There were doctors who were inventing diagnoses specifically for enslaved people.BOh boy.AWhose, quote, “principal symptoms seemed to be a lack of enthusiasm for slavery. Escape might have seemed normal behavior for a slave in ancient Greece or Rome. But Dr. Cartwright medically condemned such behavior in American Blacks, offering a diagnosis of, drapetomania from the Greek words for flight and insanity.”BUgh.AOr they had special diagnoses for malingering. Because the belief was that Black people had no inherent work ethic unless prodded to. And so sometimes the physicians would prescribe a whipping or more manual labor. And that speaks to a belief that people really worked hard to invent and hold onto is this belief that Africans were uniquely designed for manual labor in subtropical climates. And therefore, it's doing them a favor to enslave them.BSo I've got a question here. Were there like schools where people in the doctor track would learn like, how to treat people as property?AIt just went without saying. It was so embedded in the culture of the time.BOh, okay. So it wasn't indoctrinated in a professional sense. It was just breathing the same air.AExactly. She writes, “doctors also bought and hired slaves on whom to conduct experiments too painful, too risky, or otherwise too objectionable, to inflict upon whites.” Most benignly, this entailed things like experimenting with dosages of common treatments at the time in ways that they wouldn't do on their white patients. And these weren't even experiments designed to lead to useful medical knowledge, necessarily. A lot of times it was just ad hoc, trial and error.BThis was definitely in the realm of medicine as a practice, not a science.AYes. And it's important to understand just how shitty and unhelpful medicine was in general at that time. I should say, Western medicine, up until about the mid 1800s when they started to learn about germ theory. But before that, many ascribed to the theory of the humors, the four humors. Have you heard that?BI bet it's going to be funny.AAnyway, the general idea is that our bodies are composed of four vital fluids, blood, bile, phlegm, and they need to be in balance. So if someone is sick, the answer must be causing a violent expulsion of a bodily fluid, whether it be vomiting, shitting, blood letting. And so they would give people arsenic and mercury. And when the people get sicker, ah, mission accomplished. And I'm going to insert a little plug here for the Sawbones podcast because they talk about medical history and that's where I've learned a lot of this about how bad doctors were historically. Also, somebody recommended that podcast to me after we had started TC Talk. And it's a husband and wife pair. The wife is a medical doctor. The husband not a medical doctor. And so I was like, Oh, we're kind of doing a similar setup. Yesterday, I listened to their episode about headaches and learned that if I wanted to try an old folk remedy, I could strap a dead mole around my head or a live frog.BBut never the twain shall meet?AI suppose you could do them both if you want to like double your chances of success.BOh boy.AOr you could just tie a snake around your head. I don't know if the snake needs to be alive or not. Ooh, get this. Strap a dead mole and a live frog around your head with a snake.BNow you're talking. That is next level right there.AYeah. Give it a listen. It’s a good time. Back to colonial times in the United States.BVery good then.AIn other cases, physicians would practice surgery on unanesthetized slaves. This was even after ether was invented. Because they insisted that Black people didn't feel pain like whites did. This is a misconception that persists today. Some doctors, they've done surveys. Some doctors still believe that Black people don't feel as much pain. And even if a medical professional won’t come out and say they believe this, it's reflected in the research that shows that people of color and women are much less likely to have their pain taken seriously.BI wonder if nowadays that it's a racist assumption about physiology of people with black skin or a racist assumption about racial tendencies to be seeking powerful painkillers. I wonder what kind of racism it is.AYeah. Back to 18 hundreds. Doctors and slave holders and the Southern elite at the time were obsessed with proving that black bodies are inherently biologically different from whites and of course inferior. And there's no scientific basis for this belief. But of course they couched it in scientific terms, right? But you can see the political reasoning for such a belief. It allowed them to continue to justify slavery. Washington writes, “interestingly, the contradiction of the Black slave as both quote, riddled with imperfections from head to toe. And a hearty laborer who was impervious to most illnesses and pain, I would add, escaped the scientific racists.” Like it was so thoroughly illogical, not to mention deeply inhumane.BWow.AAnd if these doctors sincerely believed that Black people were so different as to be able to be classed as a different species, then why did they feel safe generalizing the results of their experimentation to white people?BThey really went that far?ASome of them did, yes.BOh boy. That is some hard delusion right there.AOkay. Medicine started to professionalize in the 1800s. Medical schools started cropping up all over the country. And to stay competitive, they needed a constant supply of quote, clinical material. Take a wild guess what that's referring to?BMaterial? Referring to human lives as material.AYes.BWow.AAnd so this came in a couple of forms. First is that poor people kind of exchanged their autonomy and dignity for any kind of medical treatment, right? Because it was very inaccessible to them. And, and so it was viewed as payment in a sense, you pay for your medical treatment by allowing yourself to be subjected to medical research,BGeez.AOr allowing students to practice something on them. And this could include things like amputations that were not warranted. This was all kind of driven by the expectation to publish in medical journals or, maybe not expectation, but doctors wanted credit for new discoveries or new procedures.BSo this kinda takes publish or perish and says, why not both?AI publish, you perish.BOof. That sounds like a dying field.AThe other thing is that to this day, medical students always take an anatomy lab and you need bodies for that. You know, there was demand for thousands of bodies for medical students to dissect. Where do you think these bodies came from?BLots and lots of people who donated their bodies to science. Unwillingly.AWell, grave robbers.BOh.ASo it started with largely Black cemeteries, but when it started affecting white people, itBBecame a problem.Agot some attention, yeah. And the people who did the grave robbing were known as resurrection men. How creepy is that?BEw.AWe're leading up to the Civil War by now. And quote, “international opposition to slavery had made it an institution truly peculiar to the US. The medical rationale for slavery, that inferior and feeble Blacks were simply unable to govern and care for themselves, was derided as insular and self-serving and counted few active sympathizers outside the South.” Along comes the census of 1840.BOh boy.ASo what this census revealed was that “free Blacks suffered far worse health than did enslaved Blacks who enjoyed low rates of disease. These data bolstered pro-slavery arguments by providing copious statistical, quote, proof that slavery was essential. The document seemed the very model of objectivity, offering dense, orderly rows and columns of numbers.” How can numbers be biased? Well, some doctor was at home sick with a broken leg and for fun decided to dig into this and found many flaws in the methodology, plus just outright fabrications. One of the problems in how the numbers were collected is that the census takers would go to the slave owners for the data.BWhat could go wrong there?AAnd so they would take their word for it if they said No, all of my slaves are healthy. This census was ultimately debunked, but the damage had been done and it likely delayed emancipation. And I wanted to bring this up because I think it's a good example for Technical Communication students in particular of how statistics are not free of bias, right?BReally.AThere's a tendency to view numbers as irrefutable. So after the Civil War, things got all better, right?BWell, yeah.AAnd here I'll skip to the syphilis study. So first, this was in part another effort to prove that syphilis was a distinctly Black disease, even though it was not. So the participants in the studies were men with syphilis, and the researchers promised treatment in exchange for joining the study.BOkay.AStarted in 1932. It was a longitudinal study, ended in 1972, so followed these men for decades. And this was sponsored by the US Department of Public Health.BOh. Okay.AOne of the doctors on the study suggested that “they save the expense of treatment by merely observing the course of the disease in Blacks and publishing the data” writes Washington. Treatment for syphilis existed at the time.BWow.ASo this is a clear case where the research had no therapeutic value whatsoever.BLike how did we not even, like at 1932 how did we not already know how the disease progresses?AWell, they knew, but they didn't know quite as precisely as they wanted to know. But this way, they could give the men spinal taps every so often and do other testingBUnder the guise of treatment.AYes. And I say this not because I think that was a worthy course of study in any way, shape, or form. But that was the justification. Contrary to popular belief, they did not inject men with syphilis. They deliberately withheld treatment, which sounds like kind of a pass, like still atrocious, but more passive than active.BIt was a sin of omission.ABut here's what I did not realize. They were actively preventing these men from getting treatment anywhere else. They monitored these men very closely for years to the point of giving their names to local clinics, to military physicians. So if they went into the military, they wouldn't get the treatment.BSo the military was in on it too.AYeah. We have outright lies. We have lack of care for human lives. We have a cover up of the evidence of the study. So it is no surprise that this has become so iconic even in pop culture, I would say. Do you remember that SNL skit we watched a while back, It was a game show. Will you get the vaccine? The game show host is Dr. who is begging his family to take the COVID vaccine, offering 500, 1000 than a $100 thousandBI don’t remember that one.Ato get them to take the vaccine. Well, let's watch it. “That sounds means it’s time for ask a doctor, this is where each of you get to ask me, a medical doctor any questions you have about the COVID vaccine, and in the end hopefully someone will leave here with cash and take the vaccine. Let’s start the clock at all day. Tasha. Do it got syphilis in it? Of course not. Why would it have syphilis in it? Tasha. Tuskegee. Okay. But that was a long time ago. I ain’t forget. It doesn’t have syphilis in it. Don? Well I’ll take it when white people start taking it. White people are taking it. Man, you can’t trust white people. Why can’t you trust white people? Tasha. Tuskegee. Okay you’re not wrong. You're not wrong. About Tuskegee. But still.” I don't know, what do you think is the message of that?BOn one hand, it seems to be kind of making fun of the fact that because of what happened with syphilis there, It's a reason that people don't trust the vaccine.AYeah, it's minimizing of that.BBut it also, the doctor does say that's fair.AYeah, “you're not wrong.” So number one, if they really wanted to target vaccine hesitant groups, they would have done this gameshow with white evangelical Christians. Can, it seems to be in line with what Washington says about encapsulating Blacks’ distrust of the medical system into this single syphilis study example, which while a legitimate reason to be suspicious, is just one example in a long-standing pattern.BIt's probably achieved that status by being ended in 1973, still in public memory. And I'm sure that when it came out, people were furious about it and would, it's going to live on in the public memory for a long time.AWait till I get to some of the stuff that doctors were doing as late as the nineties. And this book only goes up to 2006. And I don't want to imply that any one should not get the vaccine. Like that is in no way where I'm going with this. What I'm saying is that as sort of a microcosm of how the medical establishment reacts to the African-American community. It's almost like, “they can't get over this, this one thing from the past. And so it's not worth it to try to reach them.” Right?B“Come on. It was just that one time that I made sure you didn't get any safe treatment for this completely curable disease.”AYeah. And so what Washington would say is, we need to be upfront about not just Tuskegee, but the whole history. That is a prerequisite for building trust and it needs to happen. And the burden should fall on public health, the medical system, white people, the ones who have historically done the harm.BYeah.ALet's skip ahead to World War Two.BGreat times.AOr I should say, after World War II, the Nuremberg trials. What can you tell us about that?BThe phrase “crimes against humanity” was first created or first broadly used. It was used as a device to say that even though we have zero legal jurisdiction over your territory, we, the victors of World War two are going to take and apply this international law to your territory. And they put them on trial. The typically Nazi people in charge, in Nuremberg.AAnd what was the outcome?BThey locked up some Nazis.AThey even executed some.BThey did? Oh.AThe Nuremberg Code arose out of this, which is a set of guidelines for doing research with human participants.BOh, I didn't know that.AYeah. So this is the foundation of institutional review boards today in a lot of ways. Yeah, so those were adopted in 1947. But American researchers didn't think it should apply to them because they were the good guys.BAmerican exceptionalism.ARight. They thought, this is quoting ethicist Jay Katz “It was a good code for barbarians, but, but not necessary code for ordinary physicians.” So the Nuremberg code had no teeth, basically.BIt was kind of a code of conduct. It wasn't a law though.ARight. Have you ever heard of Operation Paperclip?BYes. The United States took Wernher Von Braun from his Peenemunde facility in Nazi Germany. This is where Nazis developed the V1 rocket. Of course, not only the man, but also a lot of his staff, the people with the technical skills, their families, of course, because, you know, even scientists like to have a family. So we made an effort to get them to surrender to us instead of to the Soviets who were much closer to Peenemunde.AYes. So the United States brought over hundreds of German scientists and engineers, many of them Nazis, even high-ranking leaders in the Nazi party.BSo was Paperclip only focused on Von Braun and his team?ANo, no. They brought over medical researchers. Other, a wide range of scientists. And the idea here is to use their expertise to give the U.S. an advantage in the Cold War.BYep.ADo we talk about World War Two a lot on this podcast? It seems like it to me.BI don't know. You know what we don't talk about much on this podcast? The war to end all wars. World War One. That's what they called it. And then 30 years later they're like, Oh, that's embarrassing.ADo we need more diversity in our war coverage?BI don't know. We could just cover it all with a blanket statement of this is bad.AOne of the scientists they brought over did radiation experiments on unsuspecting humans, a group of cancer patients, he tried out total body irradiation.BBigger hammer, huh?AWas that meaningful blinking right there?BYes. That was me. Oh, sorry. Sorry you can’t hear my blinking.AImagine the blinking man meme right now. That's Benton.BYes. That is me.AFrom what you know about radiation, what is that going to do to somebody?BWell, the entire point of irradiation is to kill cells. The modern,AYou focus on the cancer, not the whole person.BThe contemporary, the idea is that you have several different beams of radiation that focus on the tumor so that you're not exposing benign tissue, good parts of the body, to lethal doses of radiation, that you get it focused so that it all intersects on that tumor and it gets a lethal dose.AAnd you'd think by this time, they would have had enough circumstantial data to know that that is not a good thing to do to a body. But it might be helpful information if you are anticipating nuclear war.BYes. There’s that.AYeah. So 30 people,BBefore Operation Paperclip, yes, we had a few harrowing and absolutely ghastly accidents at Los Alamos where they were developing the very first nuclear bomb. So my grandpa, he's passed away now, but not, not from it. He was an atomic vet, meaning he was a physical witness of an atom bomb test. He told me a story about when they were telling him that when it's going to go off, you need to close your eyes and put your arm in front of your eyes. And when it went off, he said, he could see right through his arm with his eyes closed. He could see that bomb, which I mean, with an experience like that, how can anyone think this is a, you know, we gotta do this more. Let's see what happens if we do it again and again and again.AUgh. It's like it's not enough to just know that this will kill you. You have to calibrate the exact dosages and the exact type of, like, some people were literally injected with plutonium without their consent.BShit.AThe justification being, oh, they're going to die anyway. Even people who are terminally ill deserve rights, right? But you can see how racism and other forms of discrimination come into play here when the doctor can make the call of whether this patient is moribund enough to experiment on. Okay, moving forwardBin time,Awe're learning more about genetics and the desire to prove this inherent biological distinction between Blacks and whites continued, this time with a genetic emphasisBa new scientific tool to apply racism with.AA lot of research funding went to trying to study aggression or violence in Black boys and trying to locate some genetic link to that.BJust wow. Huh, that's strange. “I mean, we enslaved your ancestors for hundreds of years. There's no way we're going to give you any social mobility. Why are you so angry?”AAnd not even that. They weren't even necessarily angry. Like so much of this has to do with stereotypes, right? And one of the researchers justified the study by citing the Columbine shootings and saying we really need to study young male aggression.BUgh.AUgh. Even though, school shooters in the United States, the majorityBWhite.Ahave been white boys? They would coerce parents into allowing research on their children. And so they would give them dangerous medications. Somebody did fucking lobotomies on Black boys. Like they were doing fucking brain surgery on some of these boys, children. Again, the political benefit of proving this inherent difference is that if you can blame the victim, then you don't need to invest in better living conditions, better education, housing, nutrition, social support. That's not to say that there aren't genetic differences as far as diseases go. Can you think of any that are unique to Black people, or thought to be.BI know that there's some connection between sickle cell anemia and Black people, but I honestly have no idea any more than just that.AOkay. And most people don't, right? So it's thought of as a quote, unquote, Black disease. And yes, Black people are more likely to have it. But race is not the common denominator.BWhat is?AIt Is proximity to the malaria bearing mosquito. So peopleBGeography.AYes. So people who live where there is malaria are more likely to have sickle cell disease. South America, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Greece. And in fact, if you have malaria, having sickle cell can be an advantage for you,BHuh.ABut my point is that even in cases where we are pretty sure that there is a genetic difference, it's not that simple. And less than 0.5% of Black deaths can be attributed to genetic differences. Which is certainly worthy of study, yes. But it is not proportional to the amount of research that has been done on it, if that makes sense. People are researching it more than it deserves, you know, given that it is only 0.5% of Black deaths that are attributed to genetic differencesBOkay. So it's, it's one of those things where our fear or curiosity completely has no, no bearing on actual threats like terrorism versus deer. Deer kill way more Americans than terrorists do. But we're not afraid of deer. I mean, they, they look so dopey.ANo, they’re cute. Come on.BThey are cute.AI'm going to stop here in my history. I could go on. I was planning to talk about South Africa and Apartheid. I'll just give you a super quick summary. So in apartheid South Africa, the government was interested in developing chemical and biological warfare that could be targeted to Black people. So they were working on that,BFun fact. They also at one point gave a go at developing nuclear weaponry technology.AAnd this sounds atrocious. Yes. And it is. I want to highlight the point that the South African doctors could not have accomplished what they did without the support, without the expertise of American scientists who were conducting their own biological warfare tests against their own people. Did you know that?BAmericans?AThe Army and the CIA released thousands of mosquitoes in Black neighborhoods to test whether this would be an effective delivery mechanism for yellow fever or other diseases that they could then use against their enemies.BJust when I didn't think the CIA could surprise me. Wow.AOf course it was majorly covered up. Okay. Her conclusions. What I've said already, the point is not that medical research is untrustworthy today. The point is that mistrust of medical experimentation today is warranted and needs to be acknowledged and addressed and not dismissed or minimized. So frame the problem, not as Black Americans’ aversion to medical research, frame the problem as the untrustworthiness of American medical research. And finally, she says that even though standards are much higher in the United States, we have IRBs which are flawed, but they're not nothing, and other regulations, a lot of this research is now being exported to Africa because you have, in most cases, a poor population that may be desperate for medical care. And the cost of receiving that care is allowing medical experimentation. So the fight is not over. Never underestimate the depths of human depravity.BI'm, I'm pretty pessimistic and I know I do.AYou underestimate?BI underestimate, yes.ALet's get to applications for Technical Communication, health and medical writing.BOkay.AAnd people involved in medical research. And don't come at me with hashtag Not all doctors. Because I know there are and have been many wonderful, humane, caring physicians throughout history. My point is that. What is my point?BOne bad apple makes you question the whole barrel.ABut we can't look at this as a matter of some individuals being better people than others. You know, “there's good doctors and there's evil doctors.” It's not that simple. Because as you can see, so much of this has paralleled societal beliefs and values, political expediencies, systems. It's something that needs to be looked at systemically and not turn a blind eye to it.BOr a double blind eye for that matter.AWhat’s a double-blind eye? Oh my goodness! Double-blind trials. Double-blind peer review, is a staple of good science. That's the joke.BYes.ASo my message would be similar to, in our last episode when we were talking about how the default is discrimination. And so if you are in the field of medical writing, then you need to be intentional about making your writing explicitly anti-racist. Involve people from the group that you're trying to reach. And don't exclude groups that need information just because they may be mistrustful or hard to reach, or because building trust and understanding their cultural values is difficult. Right now, informed consent is the cornerstone of ethical research. But informed consent means that people need to be informed of potential benefits, risks. That is where medical writers can come in, doing that education, not just about whatever it is being studied, but about the research process itself. I think the more people understand how research is done and why it's essential and what their role is in it, the more they may be open to it.BOkay.AWhen I was talking about making your writing explicitly anti-racist, I want to bring up a couple more recent examples from COVID.BOkay.AThis comes from a couple articles published in a special issue of the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication on COVID and tech comm. And there are two that I want to point out that are relevant here. Carlson and Gouge wrote an article about COVID infographics pertaining to a rural community in West Virginia. Because early in the pandemic, a lot of the data was coming out of the big cities, right? Which has different makeup, different needs from rural communities. And they talked about, yes, infographics are valuable, but the ones in question were not breaking it down by race. So it was kind of covering over the fact that just under 4% of the population was Black. But Black people made up more than half of the positive cases at the time that the infographic was published. They say quote, “to make visible these inequities and support the affected populations, technical and professional communication professionals might consider how to contextualize data-driven accounts of COVID-19 in order to call attention to the under-represented concerns of rural communities and support rural community members who are multiply marginalized, and thus especially vulnerable in times of crisis.” Another article, this one by Doan, she's talking about COVID data visualization. And kind of similar argument here. How, quote, “reducing COVID-19 fatalities to arguably emotionless pie charts ignores the virus’s long-term impact on survivors.” So, long COVID. Not including enough data can cause viewers to misinterpret the visualizations because ‘a chart only shows what it shows and nothing else.’ Drawing there from Cairo. So her advice is, do not minimize fatal instances of disease. Acknowledge the long-term effects on people, especially from systemic racism. So the, the visualization she's talking about, she's saying doesn't account for things like the disproportionate impact on Black and Native American people. And other data points that need to be acknowledged if we're going to solve problems for those populations. All right, This has been a dark topic. Let's close with a little bit more levity. I had noticed when working on our last couple of episodes that you like to talk about mushrooms.BYes, I do.ASo maybe let's conclude with a new segment I'd like to call Fun with Fungus.BThat's good.AOoh, you could be the fun guy.BI am a fun guy.ATalking about your fungus facts.BFunky fungi.AI laughed at you when you said there's so much we don't know about mushrooms. But guess what? There is so much we don't know about mushrooms.BThat's right. I was right.AWe found a documentary about it. And again, jokingly, I was like, haha, let's watch this. My mind is blown. What is one of the things we learned?BFungus can eat oil spill residue and turn it into a thriving, healthy ecosystem.ASo the mushroom, that's just the part you see on the surface, but below the surface, they've got mycelium, which is this complex interconnected web,Bvery small, hair-like,Athat allows for communication between trees,Bwhich is wild.ALike, how is this even real? Actually, I looked up the documentary because I was like, Is this for real? And you know how Google gives you those other people also asked,BYeah?AOne of them was, Is this this movie for real? And I felt validated. I am still skeptical. I don't know if I believe that magic mushrooms are responsible for accelerated human evolution.BThat is the stoned ape theory.AThe stoned ape theory. Yes. Well, they’re stoning, or not stoning, getting, getting people pleasantly high on shrooms as part of palliative care andBtreating anxiety and depression.AYeah. Get me into that clinical trial.BYeah.AAll right. Thanks Benton for sitting through this and offering shocked and dismayed facial expressions at appropriate points.BWell, you're welcome.

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Old prejudices are often coded into new technologies, even those technologies that claim to enhance diversity and fairness. We break down the metaphors of the New Jim Code (from Ruha Benjamin) and the Digital Poorhouse (from Virginia Eubanks) to show how modern technological "fixes" discriminate against Black people and poor people, respectively. Even the best-intentioned algorithms can have disastrous consequences (not unlike Abi's cooking). We suggest some ways that designers and communicators can better account for race and poverty in their designs. In addition, we reveal the fourth rhetorical appeal from Aristotle's lost works.

Sources and further reading

• Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press.
• Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. John Wiley & Sons.
• Bregman, R. (2014). The Case for Basic Income. UBI.Org. https://www.ubi.org/46/ubi-video-rutger-bregman
• Card, O. S. (2017). Ender’s Game. Tom Doherty Associates.
• Delmas, M. A., & Burbano, V. C. (2011). The Drivers of Greenwashing. California Management Review, 54(1), 64–87. https://doi.org/10.1525/cmr.2011.54.1.64
• Dickens, C. (1843). A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Chapman & Hall.
• Downey, K. (2009). The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
• Eubanks, V. (2019). Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. Picador.
• Get Into The Holiday Spirit With Scandinavian Glogg. (2011, December 22). NPR. https://www.npr.org/2011/12/22/144101579/get-into-the-holiday-spirit-with-scandinavian-glogg
• Harry, S. (2021, January 11). Listening to Black Women: The Innovation Tech Can’t Crack. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/listening-to-black-women-the-innovation-tech-cant-figure-out/
• Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the Socialists...” (n.d.). Retrieved February 2, 2022, from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists
• Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press.
• O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Crown.
• Parish, P. (1999). Amelia Bedelia. Harper Collins.
• Plant nutrition. (2022). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plant_nutrition&oldid=1069256995
• TASAT – There’s a Story About That. (n.d.). Retrieved February 2, 2022, from http://tasat.ucsd.edu/
• Townshend, P. (1971, August 14). Won’t Get Fooled Again—Original Album Version [recorded by The Who]. Decca Records.
• Wachter-Boettcher, S. (2017). Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Zachry, M., & Spyridakis, J. H. (2016). Human-centered design and the field of technical communication. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 46(4), 392–401.

Transcript

BWe are super ignorant about mushrooms.AWelcome to TC Talk, where the topic is professional, but the tone isn't.BOh heavens, no. So what are we talking about today?AWe're not even done with the intro yet.

BWhat? I am Benton,AI'm Abi. We're talking about tech comm.BIt's what we doAUnprofessionally.BThat's why I'm here.ACheers.BCheers.AGlogg is our drink of choice. It's a Scandinavian wintertime beverage.BIt would keep you warm.AYou should know this.BYah I should.AYou were the one who took Norwegian.B[Speaks Norwegian]AHow do you say Glogg in Norwegian?BGlogg.AWhat vowel is that? Is it the O with the dots over it?BNorwegian doesn't have an umlaut. It does have the null the crossed out O.AThat’s what it is.BAnd that is more of an uh.AGlugg?BThey also have the A with the halo which is a more pure O.AThat Minnesotan monophthongized O in contrast to a diphthong,BNo, a diphthong.ADiphthong.BI actually learned the IPA from a theater guy. He was rigorous about pronunciation.ASo is it then monophthong?BI suppose it would be because it isn’t dip, it's di.ABut diphthong sounds like a great insult. So what's new for you in the technical communication world? In your work safety training book, you found that somebody failed to use keep with next and it drove you nuts.BOh my goodness, it was ridiculous. It was talking about cold weather hazards. And so the heading was at the very bottom of a page. And then it started talking about hypothermia at the top of the next page with noAPage break, people!BWhat if I were to start on that page and be like, there's something above this and then it starts talking about frostbite. Is this also frostbite? What do I do?AAlthough a good technical writer will not use headings to replace meaningful sentences. So ideally you'd have the heading and then a topic sentence thatBincludes the word hypothermia.AThere you go.BRemember that folks, include hypothermia in the topic sentence of every section.AThat would be a pretty cool paper. In my world, I am continuing to read. I even stopped reading a book. Remember how we talked at the very beginningBOh right, right.Athat it's a challenge for me to not complete a book. And this time I was reading one. And I was like, this is foundational. And it just, I have better things to do. So I closed it.BThere you go. One does not need to read all the works of Aristotle.AIt wasn't Aristotle. But I'm not gonna say who it is.BLest they come after you on Twitter.AI can almost guarantee they're not on Twitter. They may not even be alive. But the nice thing about that is that it allows me the opportunity to start and finish amazing books. Two of which I want to talk about today.BGreat.AAmazing but enraging. As I was reading it, I just kept thinking, this is going to make Benton so mad.BI'm so excited to be so mad.AThe first book is by Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology.BWhat? Oh, too soon? Too soon.AYes, don't get mad yet. Reserve it for when it really counts. Subtitle, Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. Published 2019.BFor the New Jim Crow?AWe'll get to it. Just wait. And Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks, published 2018. Subtitle, How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor.BSome good alliteration, right there.AI actually just noticed that because I'm thinking about all the p plosives that I'm going to have to edit out of this recording.BYou just don't point your face right at, you don't point your Ps because they pew pew pew.AYou redirect your P elsewhere.BYes, don’t P on the microphone.AI feel like when I said where the topic is professional, but the tone is not, I'm really leaning into that right now. So these authors focus on the effects of technologies on Black people and poor people, respectively.BOkay. So this is going to be about how it lifts them up and supports them and keeps them safe from all manner of discrimination?ANo.BNo?AYou saying that sarcastic question though, it does capture how a lot of these tools are being marketed. Which is, makes me feel like I'm living in backwards land. In our podcast so far, I've been, I think, repeatedly emphasizing that rhetoric is not a neutral tool and it's not inherently bad as the public commonly thinks but even the best, or clearest technical communication is not devoid of bias or ideology. The same is true of technology.BTrue.ADo I sound like a Luddite?BWell, you're not calling on the people to wreck the, the looms of 1800s England, so no.AHow do you know what the Luddites actually were? See, I was kinda trying to set up to be like, Well actually the Luddites didn't hate technology just for the sake of hating technology.BThey were taking their jobs.AYes, they hated the human costs of quote unquote progress. And in that sense, I am a Luddite. People in my field, they get that about technology. I don't think it is quite as widespread of a belief on the outside. I'm thinking of students in my classes, for instance. And this is kind of a new idea for them. I teach a lot of IT studentsBOh.Aand people who are going into tech need this message the most, right? But the classic sort of argument about the neutrality of tools that is fallacious is from the gun proponents. You know where I'm going with this.BGuns don't kill people. People kill people.AWell, yeah, but guns make killing people a lot easier. And even things that aren't purposely designed to cause harm, like guns, can still cause harm. Thinking back to a couple of episodes ago, you gave the example of a lighter. You can use it to create a fire to cook your meal over, or you can burn down California. As professionals, we need to get in the habit of asking the question, What could go wrong?BMerely stated in earnest or stated cheerfully with sarcasm: What could go wrong?AYes, the tech bros creating algorithms are maybe more blithely ignorant to the actual effects. You may have heard the statistics about how employers discriminate based on the names on a resume. Names that look non-white or female tend to get rejected more. And they've done studies on this where the content of the resume is exactly the same and still they show that bias. So it's a real problem. And in 2013, Amazon had a recruitment tool, the AI, that selected job candidates. It was found that it was discriminating against women.BHm.AAnd of course it wasn't like the programmers built into this algorithm “exclude women.”BIt was using data.AThe data set consisted of primarily men's resumes. And so you have to ask those questions. Why was it primarily men's resumes included in this pool? Well, because of historical sexism, right?BWell these are the resumes of people that we hired. Well, why did you hire them?AI had a conversation with someone about this once where we were talking about this Amazon algorithm. And he was like, but it's an algorithm. It can't discriminate. Like what if white men really did have the best resumes? And I was like, I don't like where this is going. But I said, Well, then you have to ask, what are the structural conditions that make it so that Black people or women have fewer qualifications? Because of other forms of discrimination that may have shut them out from those opportunities.BSo fully embedded in the AI is the assumption of meritocracy.AYes.BWhich on its own, sounds good. However, it’s this real fluffy thing when you just talk about it, but when you break it down into measurable things that a machine could understand. It is all the programmer who decides what is deserving of merit.ABy the way, the story ended well, the person was like, oh, I see what you mean. Which was unexpected and heartening.BThank goodness.ABut asking the question in a literal sense, what could go wrong? It's not enough to assume that our products will be used as intended. What could this technology do in the wrong hands or for the wrong purposes? And if we're responsible for creating a technology, we can get defensive about that. So I understand that's hard to do.BThere is a lot of good dystopian type literature, novels that can help people to see what could go wrong. Because at the very least, someone who knows how to write a novel has thought aboutAWorst-case scenarios. And maybe that's a better question to ask, is What's the worst that could happen?BWhat could go wrong? How wrong could it go? If this is a line of inquiry that you as a tech writer or perhaps a tech comm instructor would be interested in pursuing, there is a website called TASAT. It's an acronym for There's A Story About That, that kind of serves as a database for, you know, like all of these scenarios that have not happened.AIf you need practice in envisioning worst-case scenarios, that's the place to go.BRight?AI don't need that practice personally.BRight. It isn't all about worst-case scenarios though. It could be something like Enders Game.AAny contingency.BWhere we make contact first and we are the bad guys. And so it's, it's more a matter of becoming the worst case rather than encountering it.APeople are so wired to place themselves in the shoes of the good guy,BGood person.AMost bad guys, quote unquote, don't revel in that identity. They wouldn't self-identify as that. I mean, some, buyBSome do. It’s true.ALike even they have a justification for the choices they make. So I think that's another thing to do, is stop insisting We're not bad, we're not prejudiced. But accept that because we are human, that is impossible. So isn't the answer to create algorithms that make decisions for us because machines can't be biased?BWe're not talking about like the, the Terminator series was a happy story about machines coming back to help us through hard times, right?ALet's get into it. Both authors, Benjamin and Eubanks, introduce phrases that suggest the historical roots of current racist and classist technologies.BOkay.AFor Benjamin, her phrase is the new Jim code. And for Eubanks it's the digital poor house. So let's break this down. New Jim Code. Let's back up to what were the Jim Crow laws.BOkay. We've backed up a long way.AYes, but their legacy persists in ways you wouldn't expect. So racial segregation laws in the South in late 1800s to mid 19 hundreds. So this was post-Civil War, post Reconstruction. And so this was a backlash against, by white people, against Black people for living as humans on equal footing with them or nearing that. So then what is the new Jim Crow? This comes from Michelle Alexander. And she talks about how, that segregation is still happening through racist policing and legal systems. But this time with a colorblind ideology. In other words, laws don't explicitly refer to race, like we will put you in jail more because you are Black. But because Black people are disproportionately imprisoned, that amounts to a type of segregation.BYeah. You get to live in the crappiest part of town of all. But it's free housing.AOh my gosh, we'll get to that too. The new Jim code then is a play on that idea that we don't have the old Jim Crow laws, but we have technologies that continue to discriminate. Harder to see, easier to distance ourselves from because it's the technology, not us. She defines it as “the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities, but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.” So the same racist ideologies are simply evolving with the times.BTo quote The Who, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.AAnd these technologies can claim to be race-neutral. But in so doing, it can cover up the racist consequences. You may not be creating an algorithm that targets Black people. But because of past segregation, zip codes are a really reliable proxy for race. Now, let's move on to the idea of digital poor houses.BOkay,AWhat do you know about poor houses?BI believe that poor houses were preceded by what you see in a Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’ story, where Scrooge’s parents went to debtors’ prison. Because they couldn't pay their debts they went to a jail for people who couldn't pay their debts. And so, in a sense,AA poor house is a little bit more charitable than that.BIt's a little bit more charitable than that. You know, it's, it's showing a modicum of reform.ASpeaking of A Christmas Carol. As I was reading Eubanks’ book, I couldn't help but think, we are Ebenezer Scrooge, like the middle-class,BMe?AThe upper-class. No, I'm serious. Scrooge is meant to be this odious character, right? And yet, if you look at the realities of poverty in the United States, are you mad yet?BI'm starting to simmer a little bit. Dickens obviously was a great author. He picked up on, this is what capitalism does to people. It reduces their value to the value of their money. There's no room for human dignity in GDP. Somehow they managed to get reform to happen. And there were legal protections for people. They abolished debtors’ prisons. But I would like to hear your end of it.AIn the United States, poorhouses started to become a thing in 1800s. New York specifically is where this kinda kicked off. We're giving poor people a place to live. What could go wrong? People got contracts from the government to care for the poor. So they were paid per quote unquote pauper. But then they could use the residents’ labor as a source of profit for themselves. So, people living in a poor house, often, at least able-bodied people in a poor house often had to participate in farming, laundry, working in a quarry, et cetera. And inmates had to sign an oath essentially stripping away their rights for things like voting, getting married, holding office.BGeez./AShe writes, “poorhouse proponents reasoned that the institution could provide care while instilling moral values of thrift and industry.”BThat sounds very Reagan era.ASo in these contexts, I mean, it hastened death in a lot of cases. And that belief, that part of the way to eradicate poverty is to eradicate the poor.BGeez. That’s a line right out of Christmas Carol.ADecrease the surplus population.BExactly that.AConditions in poor houses were generally pretty awful and that started to get noticed. Plus in the 18 seventies, there was an economic depression. More poor people than ever before. And in larger numbers, those poor people had some power that was scaring the upper classes. That was around the time that Franklin Roosevelt proposed some progressive reforms like the Social Security Act. I don't know if you know this history of it, but he made a compromise because he was afraid that the Southern states wouldn't sign-on. And so they excluded domestic and agricultural workers from the protections afforded by this Act. So that predominantly harmed African Americans.BA lot of people on the political left in America raise FDR up as, as an example of greatness. I mean, he got us through World War Two. He put out the new deal and people loved him so much, they elected him to death. There are some racist things in his past, like the Japanese internment camps during World War Two. This. People want to think that he was this great guy pushing for social reforms when really, it was all Frances Perkins, the New Deal was all her.AWho's that?BFrances Perkins was his Secretary of Labor, the first female Secretary of Labor. I got this book about her life. It's titled The Woman behind the New Deal, The Life of Francis Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor, and his Moral Conscience. And it was written by Kirstin Downey.AThank you.BShe was a champion of the poor for numerous years. And she did some of, some of her work in New York City, which got her connections to the elite, which is eventually how FDR came to know her and asked if she would come and work as his Secretary of Labor. She laid down an ultimatum, If we don't do this I’m on not on board. And he was like, All right.AThis meaning what?BMinimum wage, 40 hour work week, Social Security. She twisted his arm into doing it.AAnd that's going to be the case. Any movements on behalf of the people are going to requireBArm twisting. Because the powerful won't relinquish power willingly.AAfter poor houses, we moved into the age of scientific charity. Instead of just putting everyone in these poor houses regardless of whether they, quote unquote, deserve it, we’ll use data-driven methods to figure out who really needs it and who doesn't. This is when casework became a thing. Caseworkers started to make individual determinations about whether somebody deserved welfare. As you can imagine, this involved a lot of bias and it was very invasive for the families involved. For instance,B It is still very invasive for the families involved.AWe're getting there. Listen to this. “In 1963, caseworkers in Alameda County, California invaded the homes of 700 welfare recipients one cold January night, rousting mothers and children from their beds in an attempt to uncover unreported paramours.” They didn't identify themselves. They shouted at them, they broke down doors. That's terrifying.BThat's state-sponsored terrorism, in fact.AThat was ugly and starting to get attention. And the welfare rights movement gained a lot of ground in the 1960s. And so the technologies of poverty management had to evolve with the times as well.BManagement, not alleviation.AYou nailed it.BFuck.AThe digital poor house, then, represents those ways of managing the poor through surveillance and automation and tracking. We, as a country wouldn't stand for Jim Crow laws or poor houses today, you'd hope, because they're too overtly discriminatory. But the modern iterations of these ideologies in the form of technologies are almost worse because they're sneakier and because they are often marketed as efforts at diversity and fairness because you're outsourcing the decision-makers to a machine instead of biased humans. What could go wrong?BWhat could go wrong?ASo maybe the creators of this technology were naive and idealistic and really thought that their product was going to lift the poor out of poverty or end racism or whatever. Or maybe they were just using the language of social justice to get people on board with their product. And frankly, if the impacts are discriminatory, it doesn't matter whether or not you intended that. I love what Eubanks say here, “automation and analytics do not remove bias. They launder it, performing a high-tech sleight of hand that encourages us to perceive deeply political decisions as natural and inevitable.”BLike greenwashing. But for race.AWhat’s greenwashing?BOh, that's when Exxon and Shell and all of those oil companies say, Look at what we're doing to save the environment.AOh, to kind of draw attention away from emissions.BWhat their core business does. Yeah. Anything that you see on the Twitter account of any oil company, it is textbook greenwashing. That’s all it is there.ABecause it makes you go, Oh, they acknowledge this is a problem, awesome.BThey're not so bad. And ignoring the fact that 99.5% of what they do, having oil spills here, there, everywhere, hundreds a year, pipelines, derricks, you name it. Everything they make leaks.ABut they gave the ducklings a bath.BIn Dawn.AThe dishwashing soap.BAnd now Dawn is somehow the good guy? And they've run commercials where volunteers are cleaning up oil-soaked ducks with Dawn.ABenton. That's why I buy Dawn dishwashing soap.BIt's greenwashing.ABut it's cute.BI suppose, in the case of Dawn it is actually blue washing.ABecause it's blue soap. I see what you did there. But honestly forget ethos, pathos and logos. If you want to sell me something, put a cute animal on it. What's the name of the rhetorical appeal for that?BCuthos.AI like that.BIt’s from Aristotle's unknown works. Cuthos.AHis apocryphal works. Let's get into some examples.BDo it.AWe know that the prison industrial complex sucks.BWe know less well than people who know from experience, but we do know.AYes. And we know that Black people are disproportionately incarceratedBDragged into that system, yep.ASo a tech solution might be, well, let's stop putting people in prison. We’ll just use ankle monitors.BWhat could go wrong?ASure, maybe people aren't inside cells, but they're not out of the system. And it becomes easier to deploy on a larger scale.BSomeone's gotta design the ankle monitors. Someone has to produce them. There are workers involved, there's money to be made from government contracts.AExactly. Exactly. And yet if you can slap a label on it, “this solves the problem of mass incarceration.” Then yes, the green washing. Except in this case not greenwashing, justice washing. I don't know.BNot only do you have the product going into that, you've also got the data coming out of it. Can you imagine what it would look like if you mapped out a day or a week of where everyone in a town with these ankle monitors is?AThat would be valuable data.BAnd who would have access to it?AThe company. But then they can sell it to other companies.BI imagine like they would sell that to the police or provide it as a part of their service. And can you imagine like a density map of how often convicted criminals are in a location.AThis is a perfect segue to the next technology I'm going to talk about, predictive policing.BExactly.AThe idea here is that “we can keep neighborhoods safer by directing the police resources where they're most needed.” But again, it's an algorithm that determines where the quote, unquote dangerous areas are. So why are those neighborhoods predicted to be higher crime? Probably based on past arrests,BWhich is based on race.AMaking things worse, with these predictive algorithms, officers will then be going into these locations with an expectation of more crime.BThey're looking for someone to bust.ASo they will make more arrests and that data gets fed back into the system.BIt's a positive feedback loop.AAnd in talking about algorithms with my students, I like to use the metaphor of a recipe.BA recipe?AYeah, because an algorithm, at its essence is a set of instructions to create some output based on some input. So think of all the ways that a recipe can go wrong, either in the writing of it or the following of it.BYes. Amelia Bedelia’s cookbook.ATo those of you who aren't familiar with the children's books, Amelia Bedelia, she's a housekeeper. She takes everything literally.BWhen she's told draw the drapes. She's like, I don't know why I should do that, but she gets out a piece of paper and draws the drapes.ADress the turkey, selects an outfit for it. Yes. So the interpretation of the recipe. The recipe itself could just be shit in the first place. Can you think of an example of a recipe for something that should not exist in the world?BOh, okay. Where the intended output is not worth making?AYes.BPeanut butter and barbecue sandwich?AThat's a literal thing that you have made and eaten in your lifetime.BIt wasn't as bad as you'd think.ALet's not forget your spaghetti sandwich. You've come a long way in your cooking skills. I'll put it that way.BIt isn't, Okay, the spaghetti sandwich, that was not a cooking skills thing. That was I need to slap together a lunch and here is what's in the fridge, done.ABut now you're making mirepoix.BYes, it is very delectable.ASo you can make a recipe for a spaghetti sandwich, which should not be made in the first place. But let's assume that someone has good intentions.BYou could make it out of garlic toast and then it would be more reasonable. See, it just needed to be workshopped.AYou know what though, I am guilty of seeing weird recipes and being like those two things should not go together. So there must be something behind this so I must try it. Sauerkraut pizza. That wasn't even a recipe. I just did that. I kind of modeled it after a Rueben sandwich though.BIt was pretty good.AIt was.BI do remember there was the time where you made that. What was it? It was like a crock-potted parsnip and wild rice something that was not quite right. Something was wrong.AThe wild rice expanded and was like popping out of the pot.BI think there's a special way to do wild rice in a crock-pot and you did not do that.AWhy did we even have parsnips? I don't want to knock parsnips. I just don't know how to prepare them.BYeah, apparently there's an outer rind that needs to be discarded because it's bitter. I didn't know that until this lastAThat’s any kind of parsnip or wild parsnips?BThey are the same plant.AOh, okay.BI remember struggling through it for days. Eating leftovers. Because that's what I do. I cannot waste food.AOur daughters call you our family garbage disposal. Because if I cook something awfulBBecause I eat garbage?Ayou will faithfully eat it. We've come a long way.BYes, we have. We've both gotten a lot better at making food. And I am just as good at eating food, if not better.AAlright. The ingredients, maybe the ingredients do not add up to the thing you want to make.BThere's times where you use an ingredient in multiple different places. And it'll say like butter, separated. Separated how?AYes. So the ratios of things, I'm trying to get us back on track with this metaphor.BOh, you are, I’m sorry.ASubstitutions. You don't have whole milk so you substitute sweetened condensed milk or something, which would probably make it better to be honest, whatever the thing is. And that's kind of like these proxies. If you're going to predict something, then your data comes from past trends, past arrest rates. And maybe you've got a recipe for a good thing, chocolate chip cookies. And then people use the chocolate chip cookies as projectiles to harm their neighbors. I don't know.BThey, they slip in a little arsenic and clear out the neighborhood.ADon't try this at home.BDon't try this anywhere.AAnyway, the idea of a recipe I find helpful. There's a lot of different points along the way where things can go wrong and leave you with an undesirable product. And the thing about algorithms, unlike recipes, is that they're usually much more opaque. And people inherently trust them more because technology, machines, data! Right? So those are some racial fixes that had unintended consequences. Or intended. Perverted. Okay, and then in automated inequality, like I said before, this focuses on technologies of poverty management. She says, “we manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty.” Eubanks gives very specific real life examples of technological systems that were put in place. The first one she talks about was an automated welfare eligibility system put in place in Indiana in 2006. And the problem that that was responding to was supposedly there was some welfare fraud going on and the Republican governor at the time really seized upon that to push this new approach to welfare. And they argued it would be more fair because it took the case workers out of the equation. And case workers are human and therefore, bias, right?BWhat could go wrong?AWell, in order to determine who's eligible, applicants had to fill out this extensive application. And if they missed one thing or one technicality, then the system would automatically reject them without telling them why. People would send in their legal documents, birth certificates, driver's licenses, and would not get them back. They would just go to this black hole essentially. I am sure that my blood pressure was rising as I was reading this chapter. So essentially the system ultimately rejected like a million requests for benefits.BFrom what state?AIndiana.BIndiana?AThe number of people on the welfare rolls was drastically cut. Here's another problem.BTo make it more fair, nobody will get anything.ABasically. Okay, poor people have less reliable access to the Internet and other technologies required. If they tried to get, they tried to talk to someone at the call center, theyBprobably had to wait on hold in a queue for hours because there were a million people who needed help.AIt may not have been a million people. It was a million denials. I don't know how many per person, but the city graveyard was complaining about not being paid for the funerals and burial of poor people. Are you mad yet? The thing about this whole system is that it actually worked as intended, because the intention was to knock people off of welfare. A lot of the errors that people ran into.BThat's what they were going for.AYeah. It wasn't a bug. It was a feature. It was meant to be onerous. The situation didn't start to turn around until poor people started organizing and the media started to pay attention to specific cases like young children getting kicked off of their health insurance or nuns stuck in the hospital worried about paying a bill. Little old ladies, whatever. The point is that the media had to tell a story. And that story had to focus on the deserving poor. They had to paint a picture of innocent people who were being harmed by this. And that's, it lead to action. The public paid attention. But that is not a sustainable way to portray poverty in our country, as either people deserve it or they don't. Because every human has a right to dignity.BYeah, deserving is not a universally agreed upon definition.AYeah. How about this. Skid Row, LA, very high homeless population. And the process of getting people connected with housing was, for a long time, not super regulated. And so obviously discrimination could come into play there. Again, it's difficult to separate the truly vulnerable from those who are not. Those who deserve housing versus who don't. Again, this is all in the logic of capitalism. So here's the tech solution. Create a database that matches people to available housing according to their need. And this was implementedBAccording to their need. You're homeless. You don't need a house.AThat was actually what it came down to because there was limited housing. So they created this algorithm to assess people's vulnerability to prioritize the housing that was available. This was called coordinated entry, started in LA in 2011. What could go wrong?BWhat could go wrong?AApplicants had to fill out the application multiple times. And this did not guarantee housing. And they had to assent to invasions of privacy. They had to give up health information, immigration status, substance abuse, even where they were at different points of the day. Little did they know that this data was shared among 168 organizations. And here's the worst part. Law enforcement was one of the recipients. And they were, are perhaps able to access the data at any time. Listen to this from the book. “There's a long history of social services and the police collaborating to criminalize the poor in the United States. The most direct parallel is Operation Talon, a joint effort of the Office of Inspector General and local welfare offices that mined food stamp data to identify those with outstanding warrants, then lured them to appointments regarding their benefits. When targeted recipients arrived at the welfare office, they were arrested.”BI'm mad.AShe calls this new surveillance. Whereas old surveillance, she said, “the target had to be identified before the watcher could surveil.” But with access to big data, you can then analyze that data.BIt's not personal.AAnd targets will kind of float to the top. This tech solution was meant to solve the problem of limited housing available in LA. But it didn't actually result in new housing. It just dehumanized the process of deciding who gets the existing housing.BThere was a study in, I think it was in London. They were looking at how to get people housed who were, as they say in England, sleeping rough. They had one social worker there who was like working with them to find like a holistic, what can we do to improve your situation? Found in a lot of cases that what they needed was not a lot of money. Frankly, what they were being paid to administer this program was substantially more than these people needed.ASo just give people cash.BGive people cash.AYes, that's actually one of the solutions that Eubanks suggests is a universal basic income, right?BGreat.ACash, no strings attached.BBecause you get rid of all that administration. You don't need to worry as much about fraud.AAlthough I want to be cautious because we have to askBWhat would go wrong. Absolutely.AThat being said, the kind of root assumptions behind universal basic income are quite different than the idea of sorting the deserving from the undeserving.BAssumptions and goals are dramatically different.AAll right, how about this? This is a real problem, child abuse.BThat is a real problem.AThe CDC estimates that one in four children will experience some form of abuse or neglect in their lifetimes. So what do we do about it? In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, they used a child abuse prediction algorithm.BOh boy, what could go wrong? My guess is that it would predict based on demographic reasons, who would be likely to be child abusive, and then people who are good at heart parents and not abusive, but just living in poor conditions, are under greater scrutiny. I have a feeling that there's both the predictive policing conundrum, looking in certain areas more than others, more likely to find false positives.AYou're good at this game.BIt's not a game that I like being good at. ButAYes, one of the ingredients in this algorithm, for instance, was the number of times a certain family gets reported to the Child Welfare offices. But the reporting process is anonymous. And who is more likely to get reported? So Black and bi-racial families were disproportionately targeted that way. And that's an ingredient that goes into the recipe, right? How about this? Their database only consists of data from people who accessed public services.BWhat.A Any kind of public assistance.BOkay. So you’re automatically turning a blind eye to rich abusers?AYes.BFucking A.ABut wait!BThere’s more?AOne thing that they did when using this algorithm that was thoughtful was that they didn't leave the algorithm to assign the final risk score. For every case, there was also a human intake screener. Wouldn't that be the best of both worlds?BOr the worst of both worlds.ACombining human judgment with algorithmic decision-making? The existence of this rating, it causes these workers to question their own judgment.BAnd I'm sure that a part of the, having had reports is say you've got a kid who has narcolepsy or something like that, something that makes them extremely accident prone. And so they show up to school with, with bruises. And because the family is poor, they don't have the means to give them, get them the help that they should have. They've tried to get on public assistance. And so now they're on the radar of this god awful system. And they've got a high score. They love their kid but they can't get the social security to help them. They can't get the this. They can't get the that.AYes. Again, they have to trade dignity and privacy for access to the services. Which again, that reflects the underlying ideological belief about poor people. That they're not inherently deserving of privacy and dignity.BRight. Human rights for all who can afford it.AYeah. Benjamin says that we shouldn't be surprised that old bias is coded into new technologies. But we will be surprised if we believe that technological progress just naturally equates to social progress. It does not.BRight. It's the myth of progress.ALet's talk actual solutions, not just ill-conceived technological fixes.BWhat could go wrong? Oh, wait, are we done with that part?AYes.BOkay. Sorry.AWell, you can't solve systemic problems by only treating the symptoms. And you can't change underlying attitudes with a tech tool. We have to actually change the way that we think about and consequently how we talk about race and poverty. In that sense, one solution is rhetorical rather than technological. Like I mentioned before, how the media tells stories about the deserving poor versus the undeserving poor. That is problematic. That is something that rhetoric scholars should be aware of and intervene in. That's what Benjamin says, is tell stories. As a contrast to data points. So the popular saying is, anecdotes do not make data, but data are also not anecdotes, you know. The word anecdote for people in science and people who value research is almost thought of dismissively. But people’s stories, like individual stories, do matter, you know? We need to acknowledge the intricacies, or that intricacies exist for every human in these systems.BYeah, I think that it's a super pervasive thing to oversimplify in modern society, like just because life is so complex, you know, the scientific method, you want to isolate things as much as you can. And so early on in the scientific study of agriculture, they discovered the three bulk nutrients for plants, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. Because we had that, then people are like, that's all that matters! When that is not all that matters.AThere’s a lot more going on.BI mean, even if you start looking at other components of nutrition for plants, you're still missing it because there's the, the entire interconnected ecology. But you are never going to disentangle all of that. Like we, we know so very little about just fungus. And the crucially important role that it plays in our ecosystem. We are super ignorant about mushrooms. Mushrooms, just the way that like fungus grows in all these tiny fibers that grow together. It's just, it's very difficult to even try to study it.AHere's the thing though. I get that desire to simplify complexity. And it's, it's something that any researcher does, even a qualitative researcher, they still have to derive patterns from complex data.BIt's an evolved, it's an evolved mechanism. Imagine someone who is in a hunter-gather community. People who recognize the pattern of like, it gets really quiet when there's a predator lurking around, those people survived.APatterns are not inherently bad to look for either. It's just that what happens with these algorithms is that they're reverse engineering something that is infinitely complex. So the big solution would be to actually understand the problem because a lot of these are solving the wrong problem, right? Managing poverty, not alleviating it,BOr eliminating it even.ARight. But if there is to be a tech solution, then that technology has to be built deliberately anti-racist.BAgreed.AIt's not enough to be neutral. It's not enough to be apolitical. And it's not even enough to claim that your product enhances diversity or equality because discrimination is the default. So as Eubanks says, designing for neutrality is designing for the status quo. And those who are doing the designing, the status quo happens to work for them in most cases. And so they're not used to interrogating those things. In technical communication, UX, user experience circles, human-centered design has been an important concept. Along with that, we have to ask which humans are we centering? And whether that centering is just or unjust. Maybe centering a certain population is the problem in the first place. Like the child abuse algorithm. The, you're centering people to surveil them. And another good way to think about which humans are being centered is to ask, would the tool be tolerated by non-poor people? She gives an awesome example of this. Somebody made a white-collar crime early warning system.BOh, wow.AIt's modeled after predictive policing. But instead it focuses on who's most likely toBEmbezzle orAAnd so if you were to try to put together a composite, stereotypical criminal in this case it would be, you know, white man. Would we tolerate that?BThe only white-collar criminal I know is a white man. And he is in spa jail, which makes me angry to no end.ASpa jail?BYou know who I'm talking about, right?AYes. But there's a spa at his jail?BIt's a white-collar criminal penitentiary.AAnd it's kinda like a summer camp is what I heard.BOne way to look at it is how would you feel being processed by this system?AOh, yeah.BHow would I feel being identified as a probable white-collar criminal?AYou wouldn't like it!BWould I like having to submit everything about myself and where I am, the answer is no.AYeah. And again, to ask the question, what's the worst that could happen? And because that is so impossibly hard for creators themselves to ask honestly, have third parties do equity audits. An example, that child abuse prediction algorithm was initially going to be rolled out in New Zealand.BOkay.ABut it did not pass ethical review.BGo figure.APeople got up in arms about it. And so it is not happening in New Zealand, but the United States bought it.BWe have a product of inferior quality. Where can we bring it? I know, the US.AObviously transparency of the algorithm. What data is being fed into it, what assumptions are being made? That's important. Giving people control over their own data is important. That's really hard to make happen in a capitalist society where people's data has so much value to corporations.BAnd so much of our legal system is centered around protecting corporate rights.AYeah. Involve the group that will be targeted by the technology. These are all good things. But even that child abuse prediction algorithm we talked about, its design was participatory and transparent. And that didn't solve the root problems of it. So I don't mean to say that, that that's a foolproof solution. And maybe we should ask, do we need to collect data at all? It's not enough to just trust that these tons and tons of data points will not be used in malicious ways in the future. Again, intent doesn't matter. Maybe someone's intent right now is perfectly innocent, but that data is there.BWhen you said, Do we need to collect data at all? I just imagined so many tech optimists, pearl clutching likeASo advocating for strong data protections or data privacy laws. Like I was talking about before, with social media and misinformation. Yes, there is benefit to us as individuals knowing how to recognize it, but we also need to try to address the problem at the level of policy. Technology is political. Benjamin says, “machine learning systems in particular, allow officials to outsource decisions that are or should be the purview of democratic oversight. Even when public agencies are employing such systems, private companies are the ones developing them, thereby acting like political entities, but with none of the checks and balances.” Are you mad?BYes.ASolidarity. Support the organizers, the people who are organizing on behalf of these marginalized groups.BYes.AFind the movements that they've started and join in.BYou had said solidarity. I would take it a step further. So I wanted to kind of bring up a difference that was pointed out by the creators of Crazy Town, which is my podcast of the moment. So one of the things that they brought up is the difference between support and solidarity. So support is going to a rally showing up, being there and then going home. When you go home at the end of it, you don't worry if you're going to be targeted. If you're going to have violence inflicted upon you. Solidarity is, is like a demonstration of not being a fair weather supporter.AYou may feel safely ensconced in your middle-class existence. But the boundaries are more porous than we think. The tools that are used on the poor today or the tools that are used on Black people today. They're going to be used on us.BThat digs right into that great neighbor quote. When they came for the, it starts like thatAYeah, and I mean, it kind of taps into that self-interest. And if that's what it takes, is worrying about yourself, to step in and try to protect others. Although we should want to do it out of the goodness of our own hearts and our desire for a just society. And then a caution for people in my field. And this is mostly a caution to myself, I guess, is to not automatically jump to technological solutions. I’m collecting data for a research project right now that is based on a problem that I want to fix in the world. And I confess, my first thought was oh, we could make an app for that.BWhat could go wrong?AAnd to be fair, the data consists of talking to people who would be the recipients of whatever intervention. And the first phase is not about proposing solutions at all. It's figuring out what is the problem and what do people need. And then we'll see what emerges out of that.BSounds properly investigative.ASo this is heavy stuff. I think these would be totally appropriate to use in the classroom. I thinkBThese? These what?AThese books.BThese books.AThat we just talked about.BOh, yes. Yes. Those books.AThe two books floating above your head, I don't know. I think students need to know about this, especially undergraduates going into STEM. If you wanted to make a course out of it or a unit out of it. There are a bunch of other really great, readable, thought-provoking books that address this topic one way or another. Those are Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble, Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil.BThat’s math, M A T H.AYep, and Technically Wrong by Sarah Wachter-Boettcher. I'll put those on our website. The website is faculty.mnsu/tctalk. that's M as in Mary, N as in Ned. What are the alpha tango whatevers for M and N?BYou mean the NATO International Phonetic Alphabet?AYes.BMike and November.AOh, okay. Speaking of November, you can prevent hypothermia by staying indoors on cold days.BOr being a mushroom.ABut do we know that about mushrooms? Whether or not they can get hypothermia? There's a lot we don't know about mushrooms, remember?BThat's true. That's true. I'll try to remember to ask the next mushroom I meet.