Digital Futures: Technical Communication in the Digital Age

by Fei Min Lorente, President

Ken Coates, Dean of Arts at the University of Waterloo, was the guest speaker at the 2011 Annual General Meeting for the Southwestern Ontario Chapter of the STC. He discussed technical communication’s future in the digital age – where are we headed, and how will we fit with the new trends.

The effects of the Internet on worldwide communication have been hard to predict, but several decades after its inception, we’ve observed a deleterious effect on reading and writing. We spend more time skimming a search engine's results or a web page than actually reading. When we do read a web page, we find it usually provides a superficial treatment of the subject because writers know that it’s hard to read a lengthy article online (often on a small screen like a smart phone), and readers have low expectations. Lack of publishing rigour leads to incorrect grammar and articles that are typically written for a grade five level.

Most of the writing done now is in the form of emails, text messages, or tweets. Even university level exams are moving away from essays and long answers and moving towards multiple choice because they are machine readable.  Between the reduction of book reading and the rise of writing for the Internet, writing skills are in decline.

In the meantime, the fastest growing economies are in non-English speaking countries, such as China, India, South Korea, and Germany. Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Finland lead the way in digital media. They are learning English as a matter of course; as a result, they can harvest information from the English websites. About 350 million people in China are learning English, while very few North Americans or Europeans are learning Mandarin or Japanese. These countries are rapidly gaining a huge advantage over North America.

Emerging countries have embraced the digital revolution on a scale that is hard for us to imagine. The University of Waterloo started a digital media campus in Stratford this year. The masters program can accommodate up to 20 students. Compare with China—they built a digital media campus that can accommodate 425 000 students. The digital economy has shifted to Asia.

Asian students have to compete for the relatively few spots available in universities. In the international workplace their graduates have many advantages over ours: multilingual ability, better work ethic, competitiveness. One advantage we still have is that the English that they are learning is not very good.

Our educational institutions are part of the problem. Schools require less book reading and expect more Internet research. As a result, students get used to finding simplistic information about a subject. Furthermore, schools provide little instruction on basic writing skills, and few opportunities to learn and become proficient in a second language. Students with short attention spans are accommodated by the curriculum.

As a consequence of the digital age, the audience that technical communicators are writing for has changed. Readers expect to find information faster, and when they do find it, they expect it to be simple and easy to understand. With the global economy, our readers are a more multicultural group. Many readers understand English as a second language, and might be reluctant to ask questions when they don't understand something.

Digital media will continue to grow at a rapid pace, and as technology matures, the majority of workers in the field will shift from technology makers to technology users. We can already see that content is growing in importance. This enables communicators like us to find new career opportunities. See Michael J. Totten’s blog (http://pajamasmedia.com/michaeltotten/) for an example of some of the best freelance journalism, and he doesn’t have to sell anything to a media company. He makes enough money from his blog to travel to the areas that he is reporting about.

Dean Coates' advice to us was to learn another language if you have the chance. Instant translation is still at least 25 years away. If you can’t learn another language, at least try to understand other cultures so that you can write for a global audience. Our ability to write properly and organize material to explain a complex technology will be a rare talent in the future. It will be up to us to maintain the art and science of good communication.

He recommended reading Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku. This book will give you an inkling of the social ramifications of communication in a digital age.

Shortly after Dean Coates’ presentation, I came across two other related items of interest:

·        See guest post on Tom Johnson’s Idratherbewriting blog, http://idratherbewriting.com/2011/06/15/technical-writing-in-china/ about “Technical Writing in China” by Ivan Walsh

·        Listen to the interview on Spark, a CBC program hosted by Nora Young. Author Cyrus Farivar talks about his book The Internet of Elsewhere: http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2011/06/full-interview-cyrus-farivar-on-the-internet-of-elsewhere/. It examines the internet experience in four very diverse societies: Iran, Senegal, Estonia and South Korea.

Dean Coates’ presentation and these other sources are signs that we have to start looking beyond our own language and culture to see the future of digital communication.