The WritersUA annual conference is quickly approaching. One of its tracks is Emerging technologies, and this year six of its ten sessions have a web 2.0 theme. (You’ll be seeing me in most of these sessions.)
In one year, web 2.0 has moved to mainstream. I heard my first web 2.0 & technical communication presentations in the IEEE PCS conference in Seattle in 2007. There have been others before that but these were the “firsts” for me.
I’ve been teaching a web design course at the University of Tampere for several years, so moving from web 1.0 (HTML + people as readers) to web 1.5 (XHTML + people as contributors) to web 2.0 (people as content creators) has all been part of a natural growth process for me. Because of my background, it feels very natural for me to upgrade technical communication to technical communication 2.0 as well.
This may not be the case for all technical communicators. Web 2.0 applied to technical communication may make technical communicators fear of losing control – something very natural for us humans (just think how people behave on the web and how hypertext works). If technical communicators have spent their career hunting bits and pieces of information from specifications, software, hardware and various reluctant SMEs and putting that together as a complete information product, relinquishing that control to someone else may be hard.
Should we fear the users taking over our jobs? Are we all becoming editors and moderators of user-generated content? Who are really the experts, technical communicators or the users ? (For an interesting discussion on this matter, see the User-Generated Content vs Experts thread at Slashdot.)
Filed under: web 2.0
