I’ll return to my analysis of Kairos as a project identity later. But first I’d like to consider one other aspect of Jerz’s critique–attention to audience. Kairos’s design (referring to Issue 5.1), Jerz says tongue-in-cheek, “has drastically improved,” making it “no longer an easy target.” The only mention of audience in Jerz’s critique is when he mentions his technical writing students, whom he asked to critique Kairos’s design. While he concedes that they are “not the primary audience” for Kairos, he affords their comments ample room as support for his argument. His instructions to students didn’t seem to include analyzing design, let alone content, with Kairos’s actual audience in mind–writing studies scholars who teach with technology. Through his application of Jakob Nielsen’s laws of web-user experience, Jerz does speak indirectly of an audience, the ubiquitous “users” (see also useit.com). These users, it would seem, include all people with access to the World Wide Web, suggesting that anyone and everyone is a potential audience for the journal just because a page exists in cyberspace. —Tracy Bridgeford —”Kairotically Speaking”: Kairos and the Power of Identity (Kairos)
Bridgeford offers an excellent, thoughtful response to my rather blistering 1999 critique of the journal Kairos, which Kairos was brave enough to publish. My main point was that design choices interfered with the journal’s ability to get its content in front of its audience.
Even as I was working on that article, the navigation of Kairos developed and improved, so that my critique was out-of-date before it was even published. And the invention of KairosNews addressed several of the points that I raised in my Kairos review.
My essay did focus on the design and user experience, and I did report what I observed after asking several classes of undergraduates to use the site. While their motivation for reading a Kairos article would differ from the motivation a scholar would have, I don’t think that a student’s frustration in not being able to find a search engine and not being able to find where to click in order to read the whole article would be substantially much different from the frustration a hypertext theorist would feel while trying to carry out the same operations.
In my defense about the audience issue Bridgeford mentions above, I did acknowledge the academic audience obliquely, in subordinate clauses such as “If the purpose of Kairos is to distribute scholarly information…” And elsewhere I argued that the use of consciously “clever” and obscure navigation techniques perpetuates the mythology that hypertext has to be difficult and challenging in order to be effective. Even in 1999, when I wrote the article, hypertext had been around for long enough that hypertext authors who were not consciously informed by hypertext theorists had discovered a separate set of expectations and methods for communication in hypertext, and that that set of techniques was quickly becoming a standard that Kairos was not reflecting. But none of that really affects the value of Bridgeford’s points.
From time to time, I have thought about possibly revising that original review, but Bridgeford’s thoughtful essay does an excellent job following up on the issues I raised, and reflecting further on Kairos’s accomplishments in the 10 years it has been pushing the boundaries of online scholarship.
Mike Arnzen wrote: “As new generations move into those committees, and as more technorhetoricians get tenure, I think it’s fairly obvious that this problem will evaporate.”
Yes, I agree that this particular problem will evaporate. And to some extent I’d like to think that, since my understanding of the medium of scholarship is that it is and should always be changing, I hope that when I’m eventually a position of power, I’ll be sensitized to the differences between the medium where I find my comfort zone, and the medium that scholars who come along after me are exploring.
In the past year, several times I’ve been working with scholars who are my age or younger, and they have asked me to join them in an IM session. While I study IM, I don’t use it socially, so I have balked.
While I don’t see myself ever sitting on a Ph.D. committee with a candidate who wants to do it all in IM, I am conscious of my own reluctance to move out of my comfort zone.
But it’s the challenge, and the responsibility, of the early adopters to communicate the value of the new medium to the rest of society that looks on without yet having chosen to join in. (I’ve learned that the hard way in the past.)
The deeper I got into Bridgford’s article, the more I liked it. I learned some new things and I was persuaded by the author. Maybe I’m no technorhetorician, but it seems to me that this (perhaps too) self-conscious identity issue all boils down to a “practice what we preach” sort of debate. She’s raising the question, “Who are we really writing for?” and “Should an academic journal explore the medium of the message at risk of alienating outsiders and tenure boards, or should it send its messages as directly and invisibly to its audience as possible?” (My answer would be to try to live by the motto “words first” in your scholarship, but that’s just me).
I found Bridgford’s discussion of the “project identity” of an online journal and its relationship to tenure EXTREMELY illuminating, particularly in terms of the rhetorical appeal of an online journal. I thought that perhaps it was just a bit counter-intuitive to suggest one should try to “dismantle” the implicit methods of tenure at the same time that one is appealing to a tenure committee for tenure but I do like the radical idea that an online document can subtly alter how tenure boards think about their praxis in a “reflective” manner.
But scholars — especially young ones — need to face fact: tenure will always be a process of assimilation into a dominant community (of tenured faculty), no matter how accepting and open-minded that community might be to alternative forms of communication. That’s the POLITICAL ECONOMY of the process. So the power will always be in the tenure review board’s hands and one must bend to it to some degree, if only to turn on their printer and print out their writing for goodness sake. Once one gets tenure, they’re on the other side of the fence and can perhaps better effect change. Kairos itself has less power than the faculty member who embodies their discipline. As new generations move into those committees, and as more technorhetoricians get tenure, I think it’s fairly obvious that this problem will evaporate.
Bridgford’s argument would be stronger, too, I think, if she took more time to look outside the limits of Kairos, because EVERY DISCIPLINE must struggle to win over a diverse board, composed of non-insiders to a specialized field. Every discourse community has an impenatrable element about it to outsiders, whether it’s the jargon used in that community or the way its framed. So the mission of the tenure portfolio is to bridge differences, not just highlight and problematize them. I think she did address this to some degree. But perhaps tenure boards ARE those ubiquitous “users” that Jerz first innocently suggested they are. They’re more “users” than they are technical writers, anyway.
Kairos can and should publish whatever they want, however they want. The problem for scholars, though, remains, “Who are we writing for?” And anyone seeking tenure probably ought not just write exclusively for the tenure board OR just for Karios’ community, but for diverse audiences. The ability to appeal to multiple audiences is a treasured skill by educational institutions, because it lies at the heart of education. Just my two cents.