The Rhetoric of Technical Communication

Abstract

Maxims make one great contribution to speeches because of the uncultivated mind of the audience; for people are pleased if someone in a general observation hits upon opinions that they themselves have about a particular instance….A maxim, as has been said, is an assertion of a generality, and people enjoy things said in general terms that they happen to assume ahead of time in a partial way. (Aristotle, trans. 1991, 2.21.15) Technology rich societies have a need to communicate technical information. Industrial and post-Industrial societies rely heavily on technologies. Technologies range from the clothes on our backs to the Large Hadron Collider, but many citizens envision computers and communication technologies when they hear ''technology.'' Technology (among a few other attributes) separates humans from other species. Humans are tool users and have passed down this knowledge using a variety of communication formats from oral to textual to multimodal. Although we cannot say, without qualification, that technology universally gets ''better'' because such a value-laden statement may refer to features held higher in regard for some than others, technologies come to exist in order to fulfill a need. Users may feel a new technology is better than an old one because the new technology reduces the time it takes to complete a task. Therefore, better means quicker or more efficient. In order to accomplish tasks, humans have created technologies— material and intellectual—to fulfill social demands. We can say with certain conviction that Industrial and post-Industrial societies expect technological solu-tions to fix or enhance human life. And being a member of technological society inevitably means one will not only use technologies but will both receive infor-mation about and communicate with technology. The discourse surrounding technology—whether it be in a manual, peer-reviewed article, popular forum, or a variety of other media—falls under technical communication. Although technical communication has an ancient tradition, communicating about technology in the Information Age is a practice members of hi-tech societies cannot avoid doing and encountering. We formally and infor-mally communicate ideas about and with technology: Whether we are advocating (or defending) using one mobile communication device over another or debating which energy sources the nation should pursue, we are engaging in communicating technical information. This communication does not always accurately represent the technologies, but we engage nonetheless because we have opinions about technology formed by our experiences and culture. In fact, even in the most formal A. A. Toscano, Marconi's Wireless and the Rhetoric of a New Technology, SpringerBriefs in Sociology, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-3977-2_1, Ó The Author(s) 2012