Philosophy of Technology: Bob Johnson

User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts (1998)

Reading Response: Preface-chapter 2:

Preface: Johnson summarizes previous philosophers approaches to technology, including that of Winner (based on limits), Mitcham (taxonomy bridging applied and intellectual), Feenberg (critical theory), and Wacjman (feminisim). Johnson is the first person we’ve read who explicitly addresses TC in the discussion of philosophy and technology. He asks, “where are the technical communicators in this important field of scholarship?” (xiii). He defines the audience for the book as scholarly and workplace technical communicators, researchers and teachers of rhetoric and composition, and scholars of technology studies.

Part I of the book is titled “Situating Technology,” and it consists of two chapters that deal with the “mundane” (or everyday) uses of technology and a user-centered rhetorical model for technology. Johnson suggests that users of technology live in a world of the mundane—technology has become so much a part of our lives, that it is hidden from view, blending into the backdrop of our everyday lives. He believes there has been a value-shift from everyday knowledge, or know-how, to knowledge in the machine  or the system. He cites Michel de Certeau (ironically I just downloaded his book onto my Kindle), who says know-how has become folklore, and as such, the appreciation of know-how and use has been lost and is part of our collective unconscious. Johnson suggests that rhetoric can be used to resurrect this lost knowledge and make it visible.

Johnson points out that within our knowledge of the mundane, we often act and “do” as specialists, but we are not allowed such knowledge because we received this knowledge in the practice of our everyday lives, not as part of a formal education. He suggests this is a reversal of “theory then practice” to “practice then theory,” and asks “what would it mean to our educational insitututions … if we made the knowledge of know-how visible within the confines of the academy?” I would argue that the TCR program does exactly this. We study both theory and practice, we apply theory to practice and vice versa. Seems to me to be a question of the chicken or the egg…. Using Aristotle as a historical guide, Johnson suggests that we, as users of technology, are empowered by our role as users and that we will need to theorize the mundane—aka revalue and refigure technological development from a user’s perspective.

In chapter 2, Johnson explains how modern technology has been mostly centered on techne—the technological system or artifact itself, with inventors or developers as those who know best about use. He offers a new model of technological development based on rhetoric with users as the “end,” which he calls a “user-centered rhetorical complex of technology.” He argues for users as an integral, participatory force in the process, and using Beniger and Norman’s user-centered models and Richards and Kinneavy’s rhetorical triangles as building blocks, he places users at the center of his new, more complex, iterative model (p. 39). While he acknowledges the shortcomings of any theoretical construct or metaphor, his “complex” can serve a heuristic for analyzing technological artifacts and processes, and a mode for exploring people--inventors, designers, users, and luddites—who make, design, use, or destroy technologies.