President's Column
"Technical Information" and the PCS Field of Interest Statement
by Mark Haselkorn
The field of interest statement of the IEEE Professional Communication Society (PCS) says that "PCS includes the study, development, improvement, and promotion of effective techniques for preparing, organizing, processing, editing, collecting, conserving, teaching, and disseminating any form of technical information by and to individuals and groups by any method of communication." For me, the key phrase here (obscured a bit by the long lists of activities and processes) is "any form of technical information." Are we defined by "technical information" and if so, what exactly makes information "technical?"
A common view is that "technical" is about "facts;" it is about the "real world," not a fictional one. "Technical" writing is precise and reflective of reality, unlike "literary" writing which is emotive and reflective of a subjective perspective. I'm afraid this distinction doesn't work for me, and that I find the limitation of PCS to "technical information" both unclear and overly confining. In fact, I think narrative and storytelling are essential elements of our field.
The general tendency is to see "fiction" as something strange and exotic and "fact" as something that is clear and ever-present. Facts are verifiable measures of the reality that is all around us. Fiction is not verifiable and exists in relatively rare artistic outbursts. For me, it is quite the opposite.
Aldous Huxley compared the brain to a "reducing valve." In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin… (Tom Wolfe)
As T.S. Eliot tells us, "human kind cannot bear very much reality." In this sense, our usual place is within a reduced fiction, and it is reality that is extremely rare.
Perhaps engineers and scientists can relate better to words from Herb Simon, the celebrated computer science researcher. "The elaborate organizations that human beings have constructed in the modern world to carry out the work of production and government can only be understood as machinery for coping with the limits of man's abilities to comprehend and compute in the face of complexity and uncertainty." (1979)
The technical organizations we have constructed are themselves "reducing valves." A technical manager, faced with a complex choice of possible future directions and presented with conflicting "factual" input from expert analysts, will generally choose based on which analyst tells the better story, not which has the stronger access to facts.
What do you think about the PCS field of interest statement and its focus on "technical information?" It would be great to hear your thoughts on this or any other PCS issue.
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Mark Haselkorn is the current President of IEEE-PCS, and works as Professor and Founding Chair, Department of Technical Communication; Director, Pacific Rim Visualization and Analytics Center; Director, Interdisciplinary Program on Humanitarian Relief at the University of Washington.