Tactical Technical Communication Research Articles

Tactical Organizing: What Can the r/wallstreetbets and GameStop Frenzy Teach Us About Technical Communication in a Networked Age?

Purpose: What can technical communicators learn from a seemingly swank event such as the Reddit Wall Street Bets and GameStop (WSB-GME) saga? In this article, we identify tactical organizing in online spaces as a complex convergence of social uptake and socialized information afforded by news sharing and mass user interactions in digital platforms.<br/> Methods:We employed a case study methodology that combined positivist and interpretive perspectives toward a developing event. We curated a series of Reddit posts pertaining to the WSB-GME saga and applied critical discourse analysis with a focus on the tactical and multimodal elements in these posts to identify their professional and theoretical implications.<br/> Results: We found the networked social mania to be driven by a discourse founded on a common goal and a shared leadership that emerges from vertical and horizontal community building. While technology assumes an agentive role in facilitating tactical efforts, it can also create an information bubble, where users may be gripped by a cult-like devotion for their heroes and desire to be part of the latest trends, thereby making risky financial bets.<br/> Conclusion: The WSB-GME saga illustrated implications for tactical technical communication as well as the impact of networked interactions on democratization of information, consumer engagement, and the rhetoric of finance.

Tactical Technical Communication and Player-Created (DIY) Patch Notes: A Case Study

Relying on rhetorical analysis, this article explores the rhetoric and ethics of a particular type of designer- and player-created technical communication genre, video patch notes, to further explore how various technical communication genres structure the experience of play. By providing a case study of official video patch notes for the game Overwatch in combination with Youtube user dinoflask's satirical fan made videos, the article examines both developers’ communication practices and the ways in which players creatively negotiate and re-purpose these practices in order to illustrate how such tactical technical communication remixes sustain a subtle dialogue between players and developers. This dialogue in particular illuminates pain points between stakeholders (in this case, discrepancies between developer intent and player experience) in ways that could potentially offer a means of persuading particularly ideologically fixed audiences, highlighting how practitioners might use tactical technical communication with activist intent.

“An Excelent good Remedi”: Medical Recipes as Ethos-building Tactical Technical Communication in Early Modern England

ABSTRACT This article examines how nonprofessionals in early modern England used tactical technical communication and rhetorical strategies to build medical knowledge and healthcare expertise. Using a feminist ethos and tactical technical communication lens, this article details a content analysis study of 4,045 handwritten medical recipes from England dated between 1540 and 1860. Findings from the study extend tactical technical communication by examining non-digital/non-internet spaces and how extra-institutional nonprofessionals build ethos and expertise.

Taking the Tactical Out of Technical: A Reassessment of Tactical Technical Communication

This article interrogates the concept of tactical technical communication specifically questioning the established understanding of de Certeau in the field of technical communication. It argues once readers move beyond the concepts of strategies and tactics, they will find a rich and nuanced explanation of how ordinary people “make do” in everyday life.

The Rhetoric of Online Exclusive Pumping Communities: Tactical Technical Communication as Eschewing Judgment

ABSTRACT “Exclusive Pumping” straddles the most common infant-feeding methods: breastfeeding and bottle feeding. Exclusive pumpers express milk and feed with bottles. Yet experts rarely recommend exclusive pumping, creating a need for information outside of formal communication outlets. This article argues that exclusive pumping forums are sites of tactical technical communication – operating as “anti-institutional” – and explores these forums as places of inspiration and support, as well as spaces where mothers seek to solve technical feeding problems while avoiding institutional judgment.

Managing Gender Care in Precarity: Trans Communities Respond to COVID-19

Transgender (trans) people always already live with health care precarity, particularly concerning gender transition. During a pandemic, this precarity is heightened. Trans people find themselves without access to necessary cross-sex hormones or isolated with unaccepting or hostile family members. As a result, some engage in tactical technical communication, using the Internet to source knowledge and supplies to manage their transition. This article analyzes these do-it-yourself forms of tactical technical communication that support gender transition in the time of COVID-19.

“Figure 4, Peyote”: Comics and Graphic Narrative in Anarchist Cookbooks, 1971-Present

ABSTRACT Journalists, politicians, and law enforcement professionals have linked anarchist cookbooks to various crimes including bank robberies, hijackings, terrorist attacks, and mass shootings. By braiding comics scholarship with tactical technical communication (TTC), this article asks how anarchist cookbooks deploy comics techniques, formal features, and affordances to convey subversive tactics to audiences. We identify visual-verbal tactics that recur throughout anarchist cookbooks, identify comics elements associated with these tactics, and suggest implications for research and practice.

Always Already Geopolitical: Trans Health Care and Global Tactical Technical Communication

Transgender persons face many barriers preventing them from accessing and receiving health care. Gender-transition care can be difficult because such care is frequently contingent upon geopolitics,...

Queering Tactical Technical Communication: DIY HRT

ABSTRACTGiven the barriers for transgender people to access affordable gender-transition care, online environments have witnessed a rise in user-generated instruction sets providing direction on the self-administration of hormone therapy. These ethical forms of tactical technical communication demonstrate the need to consider a new materialist approach to queer theory, which refuses to align queer agency with stable identities. Drawing directly from these user-generated instructions, this article articulates a theoretical framework for queer, tactical technical communication.

‘…Darn Thing Just Kind of Fell Together by Itself after a While’: Exploring the Role of Official and Tactical Communication in Siting a Rural Wind Farm

The growth of wind energy in the United States has created widespread access to renewable energy for citizens in many parts of the country. But while wind holds promise for meeting 21st-century energy demands, the question of how and where to locate wind farms poses significant technical and rhetorical challenges for wind energy companies seeking access to wind resources. Securing such access typically requires companies to work closely with municipalities and private landowners through a blizzard of “official genres”—e.g., letters, contracts, emails, maps—that are developed and authorized by wind power companies in order to inform and persuade. However, the construction of a wind farm presents the possibility of significant disruption of local values and identities, economies and aesthetics. Citing research from rhetorical genre studies and interviews with landowners and stakeholders in a rural Midwestern rural community, this chapter outlines a sampling of the official discourse utilized by wind energy companies to secure wind farm siting agreements and explores the pressures this rhetoric places upon local stakeholders. I then use interview data to illustrate how these official forms of documentation exist within a broader ecology of unofficial communication that includes citizen-curated sites of what Miles Kimball has called “tactical technical communication.” These sites, including informal meetings, citizen-initiated research, and local leadership activity, accommodate official wind energy discourse into the local rhetorical ecology, highlighting, in part, the scope of rhetorical activity needed to integrate wind into a local economy of values and beliefs.

“Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom”: Jihadist Tactical Technical Communication and the Everyday Practice of Cooking

ABSTRACTSince the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Jihadist organizations such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have focused increasingly on motivating unaffiliated individuals in the United States and Western countries to carry out lone-wolf attacks in their home countries. To this end, many Jihadist organizations produce what is known as tactical technical communication. Jihadist tactical technical communication persuades individuals to act by creating identification between individuals and audiences, and by associating terrorist tactics with everyday practices such as cooking.

Classified Conversations: Psychiatry and Tactical Technical Communication in Online Spaces

ABSTRACTThis article examines the practices of writers in online discussion board conversations as they interpret technical documents related to a psychiatric diagnosis. Drawing from interviews with 15 participants, the author argues that writers in this context interpret and manipulate medical knowledge in unique ways that benefit the community. The author concludes that studies in technical communication should take into account all groups affected by specialized knowledge, including those with little expertise or social power.

Tactical Technical Communication

A decade ago, I was struck by the realization that almost all of the scholarship in our field focuses on the technical communication that happens within organizations, or that is produced by organi...

From NoobGuides to #OpKKK: Ethics of Anonymous’ Tactical Technical Communication

ABSTRACTTactical technical communication research suggests its application to social justice. However, beyond a general advocacy of anti-institutional activity, de Certeau’s notion of tactics provides no detailed ethical framework for ethically justifying tactics. In acknowledgement of this gap, this article foregrounds the ethical thought of feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, particularly her concept of vulnerability, as a supplement for those employing tactics for social justice causes. The authors examine the technical documents produced by the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

The Golden Age of Technical Communication

This article uses a historical perspective to describe the development of the profession of technical communication through three ages: Brass, Beige, and Glass. I compare this development to the growth of the academic discipline and both to the explosion of noninstitutional technical communication—the growing body of tactical technical communication that happens outside of organizations and institutions. This leads me to describe today as the Golden Age of technical communication. I conclude that we should broaden the scope of technical communication and spread it as a set of skills valuable for everyone to learn.

Cars, Culture, and Tactical Technical Communication

This article examines two cases of technical documentation occurring outside of institutions. Using a framework derived from de Certeau's (1984) distinction between strategies and tactics and Johnson's (1998) concept of the user-as-producer, I analyze communities surrounding Muir's (1969) How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive! A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot and Champion's (2000) Build Your Own Sports Car for as Little as £250. These communities engage in tactical technical communication, especially in the form of technological narratives that participate in broader cultural narratives about technology.