Time spent on social networking sites, for example, increased 277% in 2010 according to. Nielsen's Media Industry Fact S
TCQ Special Issue: Social Media and the Role of the Technical Communicator Social media participation is growing rapidly. Users increasingly create, share, and transform content through a range of social media including blogs; microblogs; social networks; wikis; social bookmarking and tagging sites; photo, video, and presentation sharing sites; live casting; and virtual worlds. Time spent on social networking sites, for example, increased 277% in 2010 according to Nielsen’s Media Industry Fact Sheet. Leveraging the potentials of Web 2.0 technologies, social media approach interaction as a both a means and a primary end. They frame participation in relation to connection, conversation, and community membership. The goal of establishing and maintaining relationships is foregrounded as Image credit: Frédéric Cavazza users share information and complete tasks. These patterns of communication and participation shift users’ expectations for how they engage information, technology, and each other. Social media facilitate instantaneous interactions among users and enable relatively low-cost, adaptable responses to user concerns. As a result, users are finding traditional forms of technical support less appealing and increasingly turning to each other for information and support. Technical communicators need to develop effective strategies for understanding and responding to these shifting rhetorical situations. Social media are at the intersection of key professional and cultural issues impacting technical communication. Recent scholarship has suggested that changes in economy, technology, and organizations have rendered social interaction and interpersonal communication increasingly important to the work of technical communicators. Professional trends emphasize collaborative knowledge and content creation and distributed work and information spaces. Further, new definitions of writing highlight the building of information environments which allow for the production of portable content that can be easily retrieved and repurposed by a range of users across a range of formats. Social media, with their emphasis on interpersonal relationships and mutable, user-generated content, resonate with and extend these tendencies. In this special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly, we will discuss how issues related to social media design and use influence the changing role of the technical communicator. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following: What does the phrase “social media” mean, and where does it intersect with the various definitions of “technical communication”? What can the field contribute to social media based on our existing expertise?
How do social media potentially enhance ways in which technical communicators can serve as user advocates and facilitators of in-company communication? How might social media challenge the professional status and expertise of technical communicators? How might social media and social business models impact relationships among technical communication and other areas such as marketing, customer service, public relations, product design, legal, research and development, etc? How can we adapt our approaches to connect with users’ changing experiences and expectations? What theories and frameworks can inform these adaptations? What metrics and methods can we use to measure the success of social media in/as technical communication? What current social media practices in industry, government, entertainment, or other contexts could we draw upon to inform the evolving work of the technical communicator? What specific skills and methods do technical communicators need to succeed in social media contexts? How can we prepare technical communicators to develop and apply these skills? Submission procedures and schedule: Please email 500-750 word proposals in doc, pdf, or html format to Amy C. Kimme Hea (
[email protected]). Please contact me if you have questions about your proposal or would like to be a reviewer for this special issue. Proposal Deadline: November 1, 2011 Notification of acceptance: November 30, 2011 Completed manuscript deadline for accepted proposals: May 31, 2012
