Reading Reponse #11

I think the reason this article bothered me so much is that it just seemed as though the authors were a little sensitive towards gendered views of technology. There are so many women in technical fields (and in technical writing) that at this point in time the point Gurak and Bayer seemed to be trying to make seems a little moot. I honestly thought the article was a little too opinionated, but maybe that’s because I’m still having a little bit of a hard time trying to get my head around the idea that technology isn’t as neutral as I thought.

The keyboards were a good example of this. I hadn’t really thought that they were geared towards a specific, Arabic-alphabet using audience, but they definitely are. Keyboards are just one of those things you think of as being pretty standard worldwide. But if that’s not the case, then there is a lot of room to argue that technology can also pander to gender—either for good or bad.

That’s not to say I can entirely dismiss the article, either. It does raise some interesting points, especially when it looks at technology through different feminist lenses. Because there is a huge difference between, say, radical feminism and liberal feminism, ideas about femininity and technology in these two camps are going to be very diverse.

When compared to the book, I don’t really see a lot of room for feminism. As was said in class, the textbook is really just meant to be an overview of what technical communication is, what it encompasses, and how to approach while being both socially and culturally sensitive. In the case of this last element, though, there might be room for feminism. I’m also taking a grammar class this semester, and during one class it was mentioned that it’s more appropriate now to use “he/she” rather than the historically used “he” to be more gender-neutral and all-encompassing; it’s a common thing to see in most textbooks now.

It all seems to hinge on knowing your audience. If you know your audience, it usually isn’t too hard to figure out how to word things specifically for them, or how to write something so that it’s easy to understand.