Wicked, Incomplete, and Uncertain: User Support in the Wild and the Role of Technical Communication

摘要

The practice of helping users accomplish tasks with various technologies has long been a central concern for technical communicators. For Jason Swarts, this activity sits at the core of technical communication scholarship, and it acts as a cornerstone for Wicked, Incomplete, and Uncertain: User Support in the Wild and the Role of Technical Communication. In this book, Swarts builds on his previous treatment of user forums as networked sites of composition to argue that current practices of user help are in the midst of a sea change. Users' technological needs are now exceeding the scope of traditional documentation. Swarts draws from an extensive content analysis of software user support forums to both diagnose these changing needs and explain how practitioners of technical communication can adapt to this new paradigm of user help. The key notes in Swarts's argument are as follows: the ongoing shift from discrete tasks like resizing an image with an editing software to socially integrated ones like adjusting an image's resolution to account for a client's printer model; the problems that arise from this shift, both tame problems with clear parameters and wicked problems that resist enclosure; the methods by which user forums respond to these problems; and the role that technical communicators could play in this environment.