While the above multimedia installation by Nam June Paik called TV Rodin is a work of art, we can conceive of a large swath of Technical Communication involving communicating through technology–computers, telecommunications, video, etc. The art installation above encapsulates this Rodin’s The Thinker “seeing” himself on an opposite television monitor displaying a constant video feed from a CCD camera pointed at The Thinker. We can extend this to some of the most popular forms of online, video communication now–streaming. The technologies of streaming facilitate interactive communication that goes far beyond a one-to-many broadcast paradigm, and those technologies simplify how video streams are combined and displayed as well as how the streamer may interact with her audience. In effect, streaming communicates a great deal of technical information in a streamlined manner, and the technologies of communication mark streaming as a kind of technical communication.

For this week’s class:

• Weekly Reading Report Exercise
• Perform Peer Review on last week’s deliverable
• Discuss this week’s readings.
• Introduce this week’s deliverable: Memos
• Review syllabus about next week’s readings and work (and note the upcoming Thursday class meeting changes).

Signage is a type of technical communication. Its purpose is to quickly and succinctly communicate important information to a potentially broad audience. But, in order to achieve brevity, there might be issues around language or culture that confuse some audiences. Let’s talk about some of these British examples of signage above during today’s class.

For this week’s class:

• Weekly Reading Report Exercise
• My Professional Work, Our Sandbox Exercise
• Perform Peer Review on last week’s deliverable
• Discuss this week’s readings (and this Axios report from last week that we didn’t have time to discuss last week)
• Introduce this week’s deliverable: Letter
• Review syllabus about next week’s readings and work.

Sharing Our Intellectual Traces book for Sandbox Exercise