RE: (no subject)

["Mark Baker" <mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com>]

John Cornellier wrote:

> Are you saying we'll never see the likes of this "microprocessor
> revolution" again?

No. But the social impact of the microprocessor revolution has been
enormous. Social shifts of that magnitude do not happen every day, or even
every decade. And it is not a given that another revolution of similar
general impact would have the same impact on the demand for technical
writers as the microprocessor did.

It is important to appreciate the importance of the social context of
information. People learn first from experience, second from neighbors,
third from books. When you have a situation in which many ordinary people
(as opposed to experts) are suddenly exposed to products for which their
experience does not prepare them, and of which their neighbors have no
knowledge and experience, you get a sudden and extreme demand for books.

It takes a lot of factors coming together in a very short time to create
those conditions, and I would be surprised to see it happen again in my life
time. The agricultural revolution spread socially, from farmer to farmer. In
the railway revolution, information spread mostly from engineer to engineer.
The public was profoundly affected but did not have to do a lot of technical
learning to catch a train. Like the pharmaceutical revolution before it, the
bio-tech revolution, if and when it comes, will likely impose little acute
learning pressure on the population as a whole.

> Aren't there many other technologies coming into play which will
> put more "immature technologies in front of a public"? I'm
> thinking: networking, storage, displays, the media distribution
> revolution that is starting....

But these are all part of the microprocessor revolution, and they are all
pretty much mature in terms of their user-facing attributes. In fact, they
all continue to get more seamless and easy to use. The need for docs is
already in steep decline in these areas.

> Is there any evidence that the market for generic technical
> writers has been any harder hit than that for generic programmers?

I'm not sure. Nor do I see how it is really relevant to the question. So
much of the software environment has been commodized that the number of
programmers required to sustain the normal growth of the industry may well
be far lower than at the height of the boom, but what of it?

> Besides, even "mature" consumer appliances are often just as
> difficult to use as they always were. In the last twenty years or
> so we've seen VCRs come and go, and mine is still blinking "12:00".

Which really only says that either people do not care enough about the clock
on their VCR to bother to learn how to set it, or that home/office tech
writing is so abysmal that we still can't teach people this simple task
after all these years.

And since this documentation defect did not seem to slow the sales of VCR's,
we have to think that the maybe all those executive who keep hearing tech
writers bleat about how important good docs are for consumer products have
begun to realize that it just ain't so.

Lets face it, if you can't work whatever new do-dad you just bought, what do
you do? Read the manual? No. You ask a 10 year old boy. How did he learn? By
reading the manual? Not hardly. Information on common consumer and office
electronics is now communicated socially. Documentation is less and less
important. Home/office tech writing jobs will get cut and the salaries
lowered.

---
Mark Baker
Senior Technical Writer
Stilo Corporation
1900 City Park Drive, Suite 504 , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1J 1A3
Phone: 613-745-4242, Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com
Web: http://www.stilo.com

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