Title

Who Are The Users? Media Representations As Audience-Analysis Teaching Tools

Abstract

Although usually meant to be humorous, this clichè underscores a truism: Instruction manuals are often unhelpful and difficult to understand. In fact, the quote's bitter tone suggests that customers feel alienated from technological products and that they blame such alienation on flawed instruction manuals. Of course, the technical communicators who write these instruction manuals do not set out to alienate customers; in fact, just the opposite tends to be true-most technical communicators consider themselves to be user advocates. Nevertheless, many technical manuals are, indeed, unintelligible to their intended readers. This problem affects two kinds of stakeholders. Obviously, unintelligible documentation affects technology consumers, the primary audience for documentation. But it also affects technical communicators, whose reputations and job satisfaction hinge on producing products that users can relate to. Audience analysis is touted as the way to get in touch with the users of technical documents; however, this mainstay of technical communication pedagogy and practice has changed very little in the past thirty years or more, despite all the technological changes that have occurred during that time period. Even a cursory review of the audience-analysis chapters in a selection of recent technical communication textbooks reveals that regardless of the theoretical allegiances of the authors, all textbooks recommend practically the same procedures for analyzing audiences. In most cases, textbook authors recommend a classification model like the one outlined by Karen Schriver (1996, 153). Such seeming agreement among textbooks concerning audience analysis implies that technical communicators have settled on the best way to understand readers. As Jan Youga (1989), author of The Elements of Audience Analysis, puts it, "When the concept [of audience] is explained to us, we can all nod in agreement at this commonsense notion." However, I suggest in this chapter that the taken-forgranted classification method of audience analysis, while necessary, is not sufficient, especially given recent and continuing changes in both the technological landscape and the users who populate it. As Youga puts it, "to really understand what audience is and how it affects a piece of writing, we need to look at it more closely" (2). To look more closely at audience analysis in technical communication, I characterize it in terms suggested by J. MacGregor Wise's (1998) concept of the differentiating machine and Bruno Latour's (1993) concepts of purification and hybridity. I propose an alternate or supplemental approach to understanding audiences that blends figural analysis, a method drawn from cinema studies, with what Schriver calls intuition- And feedback-driven audience-analysis methods (1996, 153-154). This alternate method involves regarding as representative users the figures who populate media representations such as advertisements, news reports, and cartoons. © 2004 by Utah State University Press.

Publication Date

12-1-2004

Publication Title

Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication

Number of Pages

168-182

Document Type

Article; Book Chapter

Personal Identifier

scopus

Socpus ID

84901174580 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84901174580

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