The Orange Journal is poised at the edge of a renaissance. As one of Orange’s editors, I am excited to be a part of the journal at such a time of growth and change. Orange has a new editorial staff comprised entirely of graduate students in technical and professional communication, a new vision of the journal’s place in the disciplinary conversation, and a new Content Management System (CMS) to replace the flat HTML files previously employed. We are also working to create a new design and interface which we hope will facilitate a new type of conversation in the discipline, one which combines the best elements of both print and electronic journals.

Of course, Orange is already a successful journal in many respects. Its previous editors have published eight issues in four volumes since 2001. Further, Orange currently boasts over 3,000 readers monthly, which is more than the combined subscriptions of both Technical Communication Quarterly and The Journal of Business and Technical Communication, arguably two of the most well-read and oft-cited journals in the technical communication discipline. As such, our goal is not to dismiss Orange’s already successful past, but to build upon that history in order to present the discipline a new type of conversation.

Orange’s rebirth requires that the editors take several practical, theoretical, and technical elements into careful consideration in order to provide the best knowledge-building community possible. On the practical end, we need to consider which elements of print and electronic journals we wish to incorporate into our redesign. On a theoretical level, we ought to consider Orange’s position as a remediation, a new genre, or something else altogether. And on a technical level, we must consider our design decisions carefully, because as Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen so poignantly observe, the design of a system can affect the sort of discourse it facilitates (128).

Two Means of Conversation

The vast majority of the conversations in our discipline take place in one of two venues. Publication in print journals such as Technical Communication Quarterly or The Journal of Business and Technical Communication is the traditional means by which scholars participate in discourse. Conversation, in this scenario, refers to the idea of a rhetorical or disciplinary conversation, which takes place over years, decades, and—in the more established disciplines such as the natural sciences—even centuries. This conversation is the establishmentarian’s mode of communication within the discourse community, as print journals are the “locus of communication” within these communities, to borrow a term from James P. Zappen (1).

Technical communication scholars also enjoy an active electronic community (and resultant conversation) in the form of both scholarly and nonacademic weblogs. While some weblogs attempt to engage in the disciplinary conversation by emulating the conventions of traditional print journals, most also offer the opportunity for conversation in the sense that they allow for rapid bidirectional discourse among peers. In short, these two means of communication in our discipline represent two extremes in a communication spectrum. This disparity is discussed in further detail below.

Traditional Print Journals

Traditional print journals are the de facto standard by which all other conversations in the discipline are measured. In large part, they have maintained this pristine position in the disciplinary discourse by providing an effective disciplinary knowledge-building community. To use guidelines recently described by Jennifer Turns et al., print journals are a quintessential model of a knowledge-building community in that:

• They maintain a high standard of quality,
• Members of the community contribute in different functions,
• Those members benefit from the interaction, and
• The quantity of knowledge the community possess grows over time (54-55).

Print journals fulfill the first of these guidelines, a strong standard of quality, through the peer-review process. Authors submit articles to editors—members of the same community performing different functions—who assign the articles to reviewers, and so on. This process exacts a high standard of quality in that only the articles that the author’s peers consider an important addition to the conversation are admitted to the journal. The members of the community benefit from this interaction in that they are assured by the peer review process that the conversation taking place is of high quality. In this way, the discourse community increases its quantity of knowledge.

This form of community conversation is an effective means of generating knowledge, but the process (and thus the conversation) is intrinsically slow. First, because the peer review process is exacting, scholars spend months (and sometimes years) developing their arguments, sifting through contemporary and historical knowledge, and gathering sufficient support from the existing conversation to warrant their addition to it. Furthermore, once the article has been written and submitted, the review process itself is a time-consuming endeavor. Most scholarly articles are published anywhere from ten to eighteen months after the author first conceived of the idea according to Dorothy Winsor, who served for several years as the editor of JBTC.

To offer a recent example of the plodding conversation this system produces, Robert R. Johnson published an article in issue 7.1 (1998) of TCQ entitled “Complicating Technology.” The piece, which contains 44 citations from such widely varying disciplines as history, sociology, and philosophy (in addition to rhetoric) must have taken a substantial period of time to develop. Presuming the article took Johnson a year to write, and TCQ took several months to publish the fruits of his labor, Johnson must have begun writing the piece sometime in 1996.

Within the piece, Johnson attacks the tenets of instrumental discourse, and singles out Patrick Moore in particular as an antagonist. Moore, after reading Johnson’s article, wrote an article in response, entitled “Myths about Instrumental Discourse.” The article, which is a nearly point-for-point refutation of Johnson’s arguments against instrumental discourse, was published in TCQ 8.2 in 1999, over a year after Johnson’s piece was published. In other words, Robert Johnson conceived of an idea sometime in 1996, which was published in early 1998, and responded to in 1999. One round of this conversation between scholars, relying on the traditional print method of publication, took three years to complete. The fact that this conversation took place between two well-known scholars raises another important point regarding traditional print journals: their high barrier to entry.

By nature of the peer review process and the speed of the conversation, traditional print journals naturally pose a high barrier of entry to new members of the community. Print journals such as TCQ and JBTC typically have an acceptance rate of around 25% (Lay 112). In other words, three out of every four submissions—many of which come from tenured or tenure-track faculty members already constituting active members of the discourse community—are rejected by prestigious journals in the field. In order for graduate students to compete with such odds, they must first complete an enormous amount of research before beginning to develop their arguments in order to discover the knowledge tacit in the conversation—the nuances of the discourse which the members of the community, according to Michael Polanyi, “know but cannot tell” (qtd. in Wick 518). This tacit knowledge would include, among other things, the major theories driving the discipline, an understanding of the evolution of the discipline over time, and the specific conventions used when participating in the conversation.

The print journal system’s selectivity and the prerequisites to conversation may pose an insurmountable barrier to many graduate students. Individuals pursuing master’s degrees in order to obtain jobs outside academia, for instance, may not have sufficient time during their studies to contribute knowledge to the discourse community operating under this model of publication. Admittedly, were those individuals to pursue doctorates and scholarly careers, they would undoubtedly contribute articles to the disciplinary conversation in due time. However, their decision to leave the academic world should not suggest their ideas are any less essential to the discipline’s knowledge base. To assume so would be to contribute to the already problematic gulf of understanding between technical communication practitioners and scholars (e.g. Moore “Instrumental” 102).

Weblogs

Weblogs occupy the opposite end of the communicative spectrum. Whereas traditional print journals are highly esteemed, facilitate deliberate yet slow communication, and present a high barrier to entry, weblogs are generally considered less scholarly, facilitate rapid conversation, and present a low barrier to entry. This creates unique problems and offers distinctive benefits for the genre.

Most weblogs are not held in high regard by scholars. In large part, this could be attributed to a fundamental difference in the publication processes of print journals and weblogs. While articles submitted to traditional print journals are reviewed and edited by several of the author’s peers prior to publication, the vast majority of weblogs do not engage in any peer review (or editing) process. This means that the contributions to the discourse community are not necessarily considered important to the community’s knowledge base, which reduces the publication’s ethos within the discipline. However, by eliminating the system of checks and balances from the publication process, weblogs can offer a much more rapid conversation than traditional print publications.

Lacking a peer review process, weblogs allow authors to contribute new ideas to the conversation at a comparatively faster rate. Scholars still have the option to spend months or years developing detailed arguments, but once the argument is crafted, publication takes a matter of moments, eliminating the ten to eighteen month wait inherent in the print journal process. Furthermore, because weblog publishing has been facilitated the introduction of CMSes, the predilection in the blogosphere is to craft arguments in days or even hours instead of months, further increasing the rate of discourse.

CMSes also facilitate conversations within the discipline in another important way. Most systems have some sort of user feedback system built-in, most often in the form of a commenting system, allowing readers to offer the author feedback. If the author of a technical communication weblog elects to enable comments, she is thus facilitating bilateral communication within the discourse community. The weblog becomes a writing space not only for the author, but for the reader as well. This is a different sort of conversation than the form facilitated by print journals. As mentioned previously, print journals do offer two-way communication in a sense, but the conversation takes place over years as opposed to hours.

The simplicity of publication and feedback within weblogs and the omission of a peer review process have dramatically lowered the barrier to entry to the community conversation. Anyone with an internet connection and an interest in technical communication—be they scholars, practitioners, or even hobbyists—can create a technical communication weblog and begin contributing to the disciplinary conversation. This low barrier to entry offers many more opportunities for graduate students to participate within the discourse community. Of course, the low barrier to entry also makes it quite difficult to maintain any standard of quality within the conversation, thus violating the first tenet of a successful knowledge building community, according to Turns et al. (54). I would argue that knowledge is still being built up within the weblog community, but the rapid rate of growth and the varying quality of materials makes searching for pertinent knowledge an arduous task. In other words, the knowledge created in a weblog community is valuable, but difficult to assimilate. Research in the blogosphere is often an exercise in separating wheat from chaff, which is rarely as much of a problem when conducting research in traditional print journals.

Orange

The editors of Orange seek to create something that occupies the middle ground between these two extremes. By borrowing from the conventions of both traditional print journals and weblogs, we hope to offer something that combines the best of both worlds, so to speak. We want to create something that has much of the ethos of a traditional print journal by establishing a sort of peer review process, but that also fosters a much more rapid conversation than print journals allow. This combining of forms from multiple genres raises interesting questions as to the true nature of Orange.

Defining the Middle Ground

As mentioned in the previous section, we seek to make Orange a middle ground in the academic conversation. On a theoretical level, it becomes enticing to apply Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s terminology to our endeavors and label Orange a remediation of both print journals and weblogs. However, I do not believe remediation to be the proper term to describe what Orange and journals like it represent.

The Limitations of Remediation

It is tempting to call Orange a remediation. Remediation is defined by Dictionary.com as “the act or process of correcting a fault or deficiency” (“Remediate”); similarly, the Latin root, remederi, suggests a restoration to health (Bolter and Grusin 59). Orange, by incorporating elements of both print journals and weblogs, does seem poised to offer a remediation in the dictionary sense of the word. After all, we hope Orange “remedies” a problem we see in the discipline—the notable lack of a forum simultaneously offering peer review and rapid discourse. By providing a middle ground on the communicative spectrum, we are providing a remedy to a perceived problem in the discipline’s conversation.

However, the term remediation is a double entendre of sorts in new media studies. Bolter and Grusin popularized the term in their 1999 book Remediation, within which the word serves two purposes. First, the word serves as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the “newer is better” phenomenon so prevalent in contemporary society. New technologies are seen as a remediation—a remedy—for every problem imaginable (or yet to be imagined). The newest hardware, software, tool, or technology is always seen as an improvement on the previous generation; they are often portrayed as similar to their contemporaries… “only better” (Bolter and Grusin 3).

Second, Bolter and Grusin use the term to note that all forms of contemporary media are “continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other” in what they refer to as “the mediation of mediation” (55). In this sense, remediation is not simply a remedy but a re-mediation, a borrowing from and between media. Console videogames are a remediation of television, for example, which is a remediation of the cinema, which in turn is a remediation of the theater, and so on.

The precise discussion of the transference of properties or tendencies between media requires a relatively stable, homogenous medium with an established set of conventions. Television, for example, has evolved over the last half-century, but nonetheless contains a set of conventions which have remained relatively stable. News programs tend to utilize camera angles that focus on the head and shoulders of the news correspondents while framing the newsroom in such a way as to portray the space as larger than it is. Talk shows tend to feature a small group of guests with chairs facing each other (for groups of two) or arranged in a semicircular pattern (for groups of three or more). Commercials tend to be louder than the programming they bookend.

These examples, as well as the examples Bolter and Grusin supply, suggest that remediation occurs not between media, but between established genres of media. The Internet as a genre may borrow conventions from television as a genre (or vice-versa), for example. Orange, however, does not belong to the genre of traditional print journals or of weblogs. It is neither a print journal borrowing from a weblog nor a weblog relying on the conventions of a print journal. It instead seeks to borrow conventions from each to establish a third category. As such, it seems inappropriate to define Orange, or journals like it, as a remediation.

Genres and Hybrids

A genre, according to the theorists Campbell and Jamieson, “is composed of a constellation of recognizable forms bound together by an internal dynamic” (qtd. in Miller 152) that acts as a constraint on the sorts of responses appropriate in a given rhetorical situation (Miller 152). Further, Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd suggest that “[w]hen a type of discourse or communicative action acquires a common name within a given context or community, that’s a good sign that it’s functioning as a genre” (Miller and Shepherd).

Using these criteria, I would argue that Orange does not yet constitute a genre. Although Orange may consist of several recognizable forms, these forms are recognizable as elements of other genres, not as forms unique to a genre which Orange typifies. Further, these forms do not act as a constraint upon the things which we may call, for the purposes of discussion and the attribution of a common name, electronic journals. One of the earliest forms of electronic journals is Project MUSE, which was launched in 1995 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Project MUSE is a collection of over 250 journals in electronic form (“Information”). Subscribers have the ability to access hypertextual versions as well as PDF versions of articles. However, Project MUSE is a direct remediation of the traditional print journal format. To consider another example, Kairos has also been acting as an electronic journal since 1995, and its content is certainly not a remediation of a traditional print journal’s. Regardless, Kairos’ lack of a means of rapid bidirectional conversation makes it dissimilar to our developing vision of Orange. Thus, although Orange may be described as an electronic journal, it almost certainly does not belong to the same genre as Kairos or Project MUSE.

An alternative definition for Orange can be derived from Carolyn R. Miller’s description of a hybrid in “Genre as Social Action”. Miller defines a hybrid as “a transient combination of forms based in a nonrecurrent (or not yet recurrent) situation” that borrows from the conventions of genres to meet its own needs (164). This definition is beneficial in two ways. First, it recognizes Orange’s status as a novel production. As mentioned previously, although electronic journals have been in existence for more than a decade, the variety of forms contained under this umbrella term suggests it does not constitute a genre. These forms are “based not on all the recurrent aspects of situation but on the unique ones” which comprise their specific rhetorical contexts and purposes (163); they are not genres, but hybrids.

Second, Miller’s definition of a hybrid recognizes that a hybrid borrows from (re-mediates) the forms and conventions of established genres. In that sense, this definition of a hybrid is quite similar to Bolter and Grusin’s description of a remediation, but without the additional semiotic baggage the term carries. In other words, as a hybrid, Orange can select from the established conventions of traditional print journals and weblogs, without constituting a new genre in its own right.

Mutability of Established Conventions

By arguing that Orange as a hybrid relies on the established conventions of weblogs and print journals, I am not suggesting that the design conventions of these two genres are in any way immutable. That is, I am not using the word “established” to describe conventions that have obtained a fixed permanence within the genre, but instead those conventions which the discourse community operating around that genre recognize as the status quo. Conventions are rarely permanent. As described by Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassettt in Shaping Conventions, conventions

constantly change—emerging, evolving, mutating, metamorphosing, receding—sometimes very slowly, with minute variations over long stretches of time, sometimes rapidly, as new technology becomes available, a new aesthetic or trend in taste develops, or a new genre or discipline appears. (119)

This is neither surprising nor troubling, for, as Miller argues, “genres change, evolve, and decay; the number of genres in any society is indeterminate and depends upon the complexity and diversity of the society” (163). Kostelnick and Hassett are also quick to point out that a genre’s conventions do not develop in isolation, but are instead derived or transplanted from other genres (130-131). It is the fluid nature of genres and conventions that allows hybrids such as Orange to eventually evolve into genres with established conventions of their own.

Although we have determined, on a theoretical level, a way in which we can describe Orange’s appropriation of the conventions of established genres, we are still left with the question of how to apply those conventions in creating a design that facilitates the sort of conversation—valuable, yet rapid—we wish to establish.

Design Shaping Discourse

Technical communicators have long understood that discourse affects design; that is, that the author, audience, context, purpose, and motivation of a communication act affects the sort of conventions the communicator employs. This notion of a certain design meeting the needs of a certain discourse is the very essence of genre. However, what technical communicators often overlook is that the antithesis of this idea is equally true: “discourse affects choice of design, but choice of design in turn affects discourse” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 128).

The idea that the design of a website’s interface affects the sort of conversation that website facilitates is of crucial importance to Orange’s redesign, and should concern anyone developing a website which seeks to facilitate discourse. It suggests that minor, seemingly inconsequential nuances of design could alter the sort of conversation the website is capable of producing, for better or worse. To employ a practical and more obvious example, allowing the reader of a website to leave comments for the author (or other readers) fosters a different sort of conversation than websites that offer the reader no immediate way to interact with the author or text. However, the designer has more options to consider than just adding or removing the ability to comment from a website.

An Attempt at Hybridization

Traditional print journals do offer bidirectional communication in a sense. If one scholar wishes to respond to something said by another, she need only write an article or editorial in response, successfully solicit a print venue, and wait for her response to be published. This system of conversation, though valuable, is unnecessarily cumbersome. The number of such responses an author could ever hope to receive in such a system is quite small, due in large part to the high barrier of entry to the conversation and the extremely asynchronous nature of the discussion.

The publishers of Technical Communication Quarterly, the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW), recognize this problem as such and have attempted to provide a remedy. Subscribers to TCQ have the option to log in to the ATTW website and leave comments on any article published in the print journal. This solution seems to circumnavigate the slow rate of discourse inherent to print journals. The journal’s subscribers, however, rarely take advantage of this opportunity. This could probably be attributed to the inconvenience of the interface. Obviously, people reading a print journal cannot simply click a hyperlink within an article that automatically directs them to the appropriate website. Instead, readers must complete a series of steps in order to participate in the conversation. The interface isn’t integrated with the journal, and therefore, it is rarely used.

Integrated Comments and Discourse

Electronic journals such as Orange have an advantage over traditional print journals in this respect—comments literally can be a click away. CMSes such as the one behind Orange often make allowing or disallowing comments as simple as choosing a radio button on a form. However, this isn’t the only decision a designer has to make. Minor differences in the way comments are designed can have a major affect on the sort of discourse the website fosters. For example, the decision between simple inline and threaded comments will have an effect on the resultant conversation.

Simple inline—often called “flat”—comments are the most common form of comments among weblogs and CMSes. The comments are listed in either chronological or reverse chronological order, with the first or most recent comment listed first, respectively. Although readers in this scenario can respond to the text, they cannot easily respond to one another, as the system makes no visual distinction between comments responding to articles and those responding to other comments. Of course, readers always have the option to quote one another in order to maintain a sense of continuity, much in the same way that replies in email messages by default contain the original text, but the feasibility of this practice diminishes with the size of the community. A reader can easily hold a conversation with another reader if they are the only two commenting, but what if theirs are only two voices among dozens or even hundreds? Their responses would likely be lost in the clamor of voices. A savvy internet user, aware of this problem, would likely avoid replying to other readers. This scenario is not inherently negative or positive; it simply establishes a certain sort of discourse within the community.

Threaded—sometimes called “nested”—comments establish a different sort of conversation. Threaded comments visually represent in some way, often by indentation, the relationship between comments. Comments are organized according to their relationship with the text and with one another, allowing readers to easily participate in dialogues within the comments of an article. This arrangement would facilitate a more bidirectional conversation within the community, but it may also lead to a large quantity of irrelevant (from the perspective of a knowledge-building community) conversations within the comments—thereby increasing the ratio of chaff to wheat, so to speak.

These are not the only questions a designer should ask, even in regards to something as simple as comments. There is also the question of authority: who should be allowed to comment? Should only the authors of Orange’s articles be allowed to comment on one another’s work? This would encourage visitors to contribute to the conversation by submitting articles, but would also stifle conversation in another respect. Should readers be allowed to create an account and leave comments on articles? This would further lower the barrier to entry, but may also lower the motivation for submission. Should restrictions be removed altogether, to the point that people can leave comments anonymously? Such a system would encourage all members of the community to contribute, but would also almost certainly reduce the overall quality of submissions.

This example has dealt specifically with comments, but obviously this is not the only area wherein design has the ability to affect discourse. The possibility exists at any point at which a reader is required to interact with the design of a communication system. Technical communicators should take special care to consider the ways users interact with the system, understanding that seemingly insignificant elements of design can have an affect on the sort of communication the system allows.

Final Comments

I realize that I raise many questions in this article without offering many answers in return. This is deliberate. I do not claim to have determined the one correct technique for facilitating conversation in an electronic journal, nor do I believe such a technique exists. Orange seeks to fill one niche in the disciplinary conversation; as such, its editors will make certain decisions about the sort of conversation they wish to facilitate. Other editorial teams, developing journals to occupy other niches, will make other decisions. Conscious decisions are almost always better than those made in ignorance, however, and this article seeks to alleviate that ignorance by providing a means of understanding the sort of questions that should be asked when developing a new means of communication.

Works Cited

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——. “Instrumental Discourse Is as Humanistic as Rhetoric.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 10.1 (1996): 100-117.

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