Caracterización del gobierno de Venezuela impulsado en el período

My work dwells on rhetorical genre studies to push forward the agenda that technical communicators can contribute to technology studies when they examine genres that accompany technologies we adopt and use. Genre is used in two senses. First, it refers to

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texts that contain knowledge of what we want to do (Johnson, 2008b). It also refers to “a way of talking about how people regularly interpret and use texts” (Spinuzzi, 2004, p. 110). It is a call for more research to be conducted into the various ways that different local rhetorical cultures, continents and societies relate to technology. I must say that some work has gone into studying technology in Western societies but little on non- Western societies. Hence, our knowledge of how societies outside the West use

technology is limited. Therefore, we must study technology use in international contexts and we can start by analyzing genres that accompany technologies. Such research takes into cognizance the broader cultural, historical, and rhetorical patterns that push or pull societies, nations and organizations to adopt a particular technology for a specific purpose. It is a journey into the micro and macrocosmic rhetorical and cultural contexts which provides and captures attitudes about technology. Subsequently, the project advances that more research is to be conducted into how international or cross-cultural users relate to technology. This can inform designers on how to include international user needs in technology design. It is also a means of informing technical communicators on the various ways they can adapt documentation to international user needs.

My inquiry will not look at the various forms that the genres take, rather, I look at the actions that the genres enable and how those actions can be tied to a social context. Or in pursuant of my goal, I look at how “genres are tied to the spaces in which they perform rhetorical work” (Swarts & Kim, 2009, p. 211). I am not the first to have placed emphasis on the actions that genres enable. Several scholars before me have charted this path. Steven Katz, for instance, makes us aware that “technical writing, perhaps even more

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than other kinds of rhetorical discourse, always leads to action, and this always impacts on human life…”(Katz, 1992) and it almost always furthers organizational goals (Ornatowski, 1992). Miller’s (1984) groundbreaking article “Genres as Social Action” also stresses that the study of genre should not be about the taxonomy it will create, rather, it should center on the action it is used to accomplish. “if genre represents action, it must involve situation and motive, because human action, whether situation symbolic or otherwise, is interpretable only against a context of situation and through attributing of motives” (1984, p. 152). Genre becomes a pragmatic entity and not syntactic or semantic. I make a case that genre study in international context focuses so much on genre forms to the neglect of the actions genres enable. Most scholars have channeled their energies into studying how materials accompanying technologies are designed to meet the needs of users or how cultures outside the United States or North America design such technical documents as memos, reports, proposals and letters. Mostly, research focus in this

direction is to learn ways that other cultures design technical documents with the purpose of informing students. See for example (Barnum & Li, 2006; Beamer, 2003; Connor, 1998; Dong, 2007; Fukuoka, Kojima, & Spyridakis, 1999; Honold, 1999; Khadka, 2014; Roach & Byrne, 2001; Stevens, 2000; Thatcher, 2006, 2010; Thatcher & Amant, 2011). This tendency to study the ways that other cultures design documents tends to tokenize and label culture as a monolithic entity. This perspective is common because of the belief that each culture is unique and hence has “its own specialized knowledge related to what constitutes an acceptable and a credible presentation of information” (Amant, 2006, p. 49). As Agboka (2012) indicates, “the worry is that this conceptualization can be a

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catalyst for stereotyping,…[and] they may limit our appreciation of diversity among groups.” Worst still, “stereotyping can lead to tokenism, and tokenism can lead to essentialism. Essentialism can lead to racism, while racism may lead to culturism. Culturism can, in turn, lead to cultural/economic imperialism, because it becomes an instrument of oppression against many marginalized groups by powerful groups” (Agboka, 2012, p. 172).

Therefore, international technical communication must research into the dynamic ways genres enable action in international contexts. Scholars must pay attention not only to the genres but also the various situations and motives that enable the use of the genre.

Genres, therefore, become “a rhetorical means for mediating private intentions and social exigence” (Miller, 1984). Not only will the emphasis on actions genres enable

communicate our values and our worth within workplace, it will add value to international technical communication research by resolving “the tension related to balancing local appropriateness of methodologies with comparability across global contexts” (Walton, 2014), or the tension between culture and rhetoric (Amant, 2006; Boiarsky, 1995; Ding & Savage, 2013; Hunsinger, 2006; Lovitt & Goswami, 1999; Thatcher, 2010; Thrush, 1993). We also become exposed to the ways that diversity “affects the ways in which technologies and documents are designed and used, how national and political values can inspire users to transform the work of technologies beyond their designed intent, and how non-Western cultures use and produce with

Western and non-Western technologies differently than Westerners do” (Haas, 2012). My fourth chapter, for example, analyzes an instructional manual that came with the

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biometric device. My end goal is to find out whether or not the instructional manual helps users to gain power over the biometric technology and how the use of the instructional manual articulates users into a technological system. How do we use or how are we used by technologies through the genres we create? The fourth chapter leads to a more

informed discussion on technology studies and how it enables or informs our knowledge of localization, social justice, and technical document designs.

I look at genre studies also as a study of technology. It is indisputable to consider genres as technologies and technologies as genres: genres are human constructs, so are

technologies. Genres come to being through the activities of humans. Genres, are

“specific human activities” and “enactments of recognized social motives” (Sun, 2012, p. 66). They are “produced, reproduced, and modified by individuals through a process of structuring” (ibid p. 68). Just as technologies, genres are structural. This notion of structuring is captured vividly in Langdon Winners claim that “technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning” (Winner, 1986, p. 6). Genre, Bazerman states, “shape regularized

communicative practices that bind together organizations, institutions, and activity systems” (Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010, p. xi). As a technology, genres shape human activity. We must also bear in mind Winner’s claim that technologies or artifacts do have politics. Thus genre and artifacts are political. Adam Banks also draws the connection between genres and technologies when he argues that “genres and the discursive conventions that comprise them can, through their privileging of certain kinds of knowledge and

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maintaining established patterns of social, political, and economic relations” (Banks, 2005, p. 87); or he makes us understand that language and discourse are “our trump technologies, especially when specific language and discursive conventions are codified in generic conventions as they are in legal scholarship and jurisprudence” (Banks, 2005, p. 89). Language in this sense has technological functions. If we accept that genres are technologies, then a study of the rhetorical nature of genres, or a study of the various ways that genres enable action, or a study of the various ways that we solve problems using genres, is a study of technology. A study of genres is a study of technology and, in my case, a journey into the political, economic and legal situations in a country. If we study the rhetorical nature of genres, we embark on a rhetorical study of not just technology but also technical communication. In sum, genre studies “provides a

foundation for interpreting actions from a social angle” (Sun, 2004, p. 46); it enables us to “understand the artifact we are studying in a social and historical context” (ibid pp. 47, emphasis mine); and finally, it illustrates “how uses of technologies are structured in social contexts” (ibid p. 47).