Important to note where Johnson is mentioned as a foil to authors being reviewed.
Ronda Wery's List: 5369Carter
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Oct 12, 09
"Haraway, Donna J. (2004). A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and
Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. In The Haraway Reader
(1-45). New York: Routledge.
In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism
1980s,” Donna Haraway argues that the emergence of cyborgs in human culture has
merged the differences between man/woman God/man, mind/body and forced both
people in general and scholars to reconsider what we mean by gender. Indeed,
Cyborgs have forced us to reconsider what gender is. Her writing style is very
abstract and poetic and juxtaposes various metaphors together, just as she
claims humans have been combined with computers. Her claim is not that the 20th
and 21st centuries have begun the tradition of the cyborg, but that it has taken
on new importance with the emergence of new technology.
She writes that “by the late twentieth century. . . we
are all chimeras”
(8), and this shift means that humans behave in different ways.
These
differences force us to reconsider male heterosexual dominance in two different
ways: first, cyborgs are by definition “unnatural” and therefore the terminology
we use to discuss them forces us
to consider that our conceptions of
humanity are arbitrary – or at least culturally constructed (20-21). By seeing
how gender constructions are just that . . . constructions, we can provide a new
viewpoint on gender and sexuality. Second, they force us to reconsider feminism,
itself, Feminism should not try to replace one all-encompassing philosophy about
humanity with another, but instead
feminists should avoid an “essentialist”
theory, even in opposition to more dominant ideologies. One should use cyborgs
as a way of articulating resistence against the idea of compartmentalization
itself. Cyborgs make us reconsider both individualism and social determinism.
Instead, the concept of the monsterous – much as in the medieval period and
before – can be used as a lens to talk about what is on the “borderl -
Johnson, Robert
Items to help with presentation for 5369
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Not many folks in my field (rhetoric, digital communication, technical writing) have examined the relationship between system design and writing. Two notable exceptions are Robert Johnson in his book User-Centered Technology (1998) and Johndan Johnson-Eilola in Nostalgic Angels (1997). If it weren't so disgustingly self serving, I would mention my co-authored book with Patricia Sullivan, Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices (1997).
These works make connections between computer-based writing (or computer-based writing research or computer documentation) and the design of computer interfaces. Bob Johnson's book is particularly relevant to this review, as it provides a counterpoint to Grønbæk & Trigg. Johnson articulates the difference between "system-based design" and "user-centered design" (a more rhetorically alert approach, which a growing body of technical writing researchers, like Johnson, favor).
What is this distinction and why is it important? According to Johnson, system-centered design focuses on "the system's features removed from any context of use" (Johnson 122). In contrast, user-centered design begins with and focuses on "the localized situation within which the user resides" (Johnson 128). A user-centered approach to design does not assume that all users fit the same generic mold. User-centered design views audience diversity as central and significant (not as accidental or as derivative or as too complicated to address). It also views analysis of user context as the first, or at least concurrent, step in the design process. This difference between a user-centered (rhetorical) approach to design and a predominantly system-centered approach such as Grønbæk & Trigg's is significant in terms of our ability to design systems to meet users' (or writers') needs.
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