Reaching the Finish Line

I realized the other day that I have focused much of my life on this research. But it's only a beginning. The questions I feel that I've answered only lead to more questions, which makes it hard to think that this will be consequential in the long run.


I've started the process of learning to conduct research. It's far more rigorous than I first imagined. I had high hopes to discover things that matter to the public. Most of my time though, has been adapting a research question. In hindsight, the question could have been formed much sooner with much more clarity. Then again, there's value to discovering this the hard way. I've read close to 40 scholarly articles  if not more, six books, and a lot of newspaper articles. I've written over 120 pages of research, conducted three one-hour interviews, and listened to each twice. 


Now I need to hear back from my advisor so I can submit it tomorrow. 


After that, I'll do a presentation on July 24th at 4 p.m. and I can be officially finished with my graduate degree.

Content and Purpose: Which Drives the Other?

Schugel, James. 2012. “Ash Pest Returns Early; Residents Told to Delay Pruning.” WCCO.com. CBS Local Media. April 18. http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2012/04/18/ash-pest-returns-early-residents-told-to-delay-pruning/ 

Sometimes the purpose behind a message produces construed content. Let me explain.

A recent local WCCO news report carried the message that Minneapolis residents should not prune ash trees during the time the emerald ash borer is emerging. The purpose of the suggestion (not law) is to keep the emerald ash borer population from spreading in the Twin Cities metro. However, the content misleads, or doesn’t provide enough reasoning for the suggestion.

For trees such as the Red Oak, pruning times are limited due to the method of infestation. Beatles that spread oak wilt navigate to fresh cuts (the scent of the fresh cut guides them). But the emerald ash borer has not been proven to navigate to the smell of fresh cuts. Instead, studies have found that they favor dying ash trees over healthy ones.

The main reason the department of agriculture is concerned is because they don’t want people moving wood. It actually seems pretty simple. “Don’t move wood.” They’ve established laws to enforce this (no one can move hardwood outside of Hennepin or Ramsey county), and they’ve done media campaigns. But still, the danger resides in a resident pruning an infested tree and bringing the wood camping, thus spreading the borer to the northwoods. That is the real danger. And the Minnesota Department of Agriculture has already sent this message. But they know the stakes are high, so apparently they aren’t stressing why pruning shouldn’t be done. This could take business from tree companies who only chip branches and never move them with trailers. The real danger is not having fresh cuts dripping spring sap on the lawn and attracting the bug. I think that could be lost in the quick presentation given on news channels.

Also in this broadcast, a graphic made me jump. “No more trees should die from this disease” the reporter quotes a woman as saying. Right after, a graphic zooms in on the screen. The graphic showed red and green dots all throughout the state of Minnesota.  The implication here is that eab has been found in all these spots! The spots are everywhere in Minnesota! What are they saying???

I watched the video clip again and paused it when the graphic zoomed in on the screen. This graphic wasn’t of dead or infested trees; it was a map of all the eab traps set throughout the state. Now why would they include this graphic instead of a more reasonable graphic such as a map of infested trees in Minneapolis? Could it be simple video miscue? Or was it an attempt to be sensational? I’m not sure, but I found it misleading.

Carp and Rhetoric

Sepic, Matt. 2012. "Critics of War on Invasive Carp Decry Cost, Environmental Impact." MPRnews. Minnesota Public Radio. May 7. http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/05/07/asian-carp/

Today I heard a report on Minnesota Public Radio about the carp problem. Many people in the land of 10,000 lakes are concerned about a particular carp. This fish is a You Tube sensation for its hilarious antics on the rivers of Illinois. When a loud sound disturbs the carp, it jumps out of the water. Because the fish can reach upwards of 100 pounds, they can really knock a fisherman for a loop, especially if her or she is traveling at high speeds on the river.

The MPR report didn’t mention much new information, just that someone at the U of M was “waging war” to prevent the carp from reaching the Upper Mississippi River. One carp has been found in the St. Croix river, another in the Mississippi down by Iowa. They could be moved by swimming upstream or by hitching a ride in boat ballast. Most agree that the carp could devastate the river ecology because they eat so much food, there is little left for the native fish.

However, one of the interviewees pointed to the rhetoric and suggested we reframe it. This is what he said:

And Greg Breining says all this war rhetoric reinforces the myth that humans can control nature. “It's just not very effective. It's like a war on terrorism or a war on drugs. It's just a way to spend a lot of money to no particularly beneficial end,” he said.

Terms like war provide strong reactions, but they end up sustaining “money pits,” where the government recognized the immediate emergency and dumps money into the problem without ample benchmarks to evaluate success—or without doing enough research before hand to ensure success.

Even the term “invasive” was called into question. What is invasive; what is native? This interviewee suggested that more research was called for in order to make better understand how the dynamics are changing underwater for the native species. They might not be suffering as much as first expected.

The language used in the fight against invasive species apparently does matter. 

Cold Warrior Battles Pipeline

Walsh, Bryan. 2012. "Cold Warrior." Time. 12 March.


This morning I read a profile on Bill McKibben, a climate change activist who was arrested this year for protesting the Keystone Oil pipeline. McKibben is the mind behind 350.org, a website calling people to do something about the growing carbon problem in the atmosphere.


I've heard much of what was said in the article before, here are some of the often repeated facts about the global warming debate:

• The global climate has warmed by one degree Celsius (44).
• Poor countries (such as Bangladesh) suffer more from climate change than the rich countries (45).
• The atmosphere is in a dangerous state of change after it passed 350 carbon parts per million (ppm) (47).
• If the United States rejects Canadian oil sands pipelines, the oil will just travel to China (47).

What really strikes me in this article is the clearly divided tone. The last image shows McKibben leading a group of protesters with a sign that says "Big Oil Bought Congress." His hand is up in the air and it looks like he's yelling. In the article, the government and oil companies are clearly ignoring the factual claims of the scientists. McKibben, in the first quote, states "While the scientists were talking patiently into our leaders' ear, the fossil fuel industry has been screaming into the other" (46). The rest of the article circles Obama's political decisions to reject the Keystone pipeline—which happened after McKibben lead protests against it.

McKibben's last quote continues the us-them theme, saying "the only way to win is to spend our bodies on this, and we'll do that" making him the environmental martyr (47). At the end, I recognize the significance of such a large political vote against a jobs-creating opportunity. It seems that Obama is not willing to risk the environmental toll taken that the oil sand industry. But the article divides the sides too clearly and ignores the millions of Americans who still only here McKibben's yelling as another wacko who things the apocalypse will begin in our backyard tomorrow.

 

Defining Genres

Spinuzzi, Clay. 2004. "Four Ways to Investigate Assemblages of Texts: Genre Sets, Systems, Repertoires, and Ecologies." SIGDOC. AMC 10–13 Oct. Memphis, Tennessee.


How should we assemble genres? Spinuzzi, in this head-spinning article, suggests four ways to group genres:

1. Sets
2. Systems
3. Repertoire
4. Ecology (110)

Showing the difference in each definition proves tricky—there are so many abstract concepts at work. So Spinuzzi runs a helpful illustration to develop concrete examples of the differences. He presents "Ralph," a fictional character at a telecommunications company. He described all the genres that Ralph used in a simple phone conversation. The illustration bothered me at first, because I'm used to a more firm definition of what a genre can and can't be, provided by Carolyn Miller. But Spinuzzi accepts every post-it note, scribbled pencil mark, and calendar annotation as a separate genre (111). After reading his definitions, though, it made more sense.

It seems as though he builds a framework for understanding "unofficial" genres like those notes. To find the layers of genre definition, he suggests looking through several lenses:

• Model of Action
• Agency
• Foregrounded Genres
• Perspective
• Relationship between Genres (111)

Through these prisms, the genre sets focus only on the product of the work from an individual perspective (111–112); the genre systems work along textual pathways to comprise social activity (here Yates and Orlikowski are cited—I recognize them!); the genre repertoires (again Yates and Orlikowski) "emphasize individual and group communicative performances," but the emphasis is still on communication. Spinuzzi gets to the genre ecologies, which seems to be his preferred assemblage. 

Genre ecologies "emphasize genre as collective achievements that act just as much as they are acted upon" (114). This is based in a theory of distributed cognition. Genre ecologies take into account what Spinuzzi calls "mediating artifacts" such as checklists, calendars, and notes. In this assemblage of genres, none of the artifacts or genres stand alone, they interact (114). The framework seems much more like biology—it's messy and not easily defined. Spinuzzi mentions "The emphasis is on how several genres are simultaneously (or nearly simultaneously) brought to bear on a problem" (115). Together, the genres and artifact something unique together—not as one piece of communication.

Pretty wild, but pretty messy.

The Methodology of Participatory Design

Spinuzzi, Clay. 2005. "The Methodology of Participatory Design." Technical Communication. 52 (2): 163–174. 


Researchers take different approaches in designing computer interfaces. I haven't thought about it too much before until I entered this program. But I've read great articles from a researcher at the University of Washington who conducts in-depth studies gauging how people use new computer software, how they interact with the options, and how they read the web pages. 


As I read this Spinuzzi article, I found myself wondering more about our interaction with technology. How much of that interaction could be more fluid if the design would have been approached with the user in mind? I'm sure this is a constant question for web designers, but as Spinuzzi discusses in this reading, the meaning goes much deeper than just website design. In the industrial area, for instance, entire systems are created for a task, and those systems are operated by workers pressing buttons and pulling levers—interacting with interfaces.


Many designers of these large systems talk about creating them with a participatory design. Technical communication researchers, too (maybe even more often), use about this approach when creating systems. But the term means a much different thing to many who use it. Spinuzzi states:

The terms participatory design and user-centered design are being broadly applied in the philosophical and pedagogical work of technical communication; methods associated with those terms are being applied in technical communications research; and prototypes in particular are often presented as a vital part of iterative usability (163). 

The problem for Spinuzzi is that there is no set guide for the methodology of participatory design. What is it? How do you go about it? What isn't it? In the article, he answers these questions.


Participatory design research is a way to understand knowledge by doing (163). "Participatory design is research" Spinuzzi says (163). This distinguishes it from just another type of design research. Spinuzzi makes the claim that is turns out to be a good match technical communicators (164). The goal of the research method is to shape the interface in ways that the workers will find to be positive, not just productive from the managerial point of view.


The research came about after large computer systems were replacing people's jobs in Scandinavia. the workplace had to adapt to technological changes, the workers wanted to keep a democratic-oriented workplace. It's easy to see how a large automated system would take power away from the employees by reducing the choices they could make. Instead of controlling the system and making quick, competent decisions regarding the work, they were harnessed and unable to reject changes made by management or the designers of the computer systems. 


Spinuzzi mentions this new computer-designed workplace as a rationalist approach to design, which goes hand-in-hand with Taylorism, a theory which took discretion and decisions away from workers. 


Taylorists believed all human knowledge was discoverable and categorizable. Rationalists built off of this idea and said if all the knowledge was collected and categorized, then designers could create correct design.


But participatory design, on the other hand, "is founded on constructivism, a theory that explicitly resists the notion that knowledge can be completely formalized and classified" (165).


As a research design, this can be confusing. Don't we need to believe that knowledge can be formalized? Not necessarily. Spinuzzi describes the idea of tacit knowledge. Tacit means unseen; tacit knowledge is hiding between the written down answer on a test and an automated action. That is, someone might unconsciously act without thinking much about it. But if they were to train someone else in on the same procedure, they may have a hard time explaining just what it is they do, or how they know when to do it. As Spinuzzi describes it, "tacit knowledge is implicit rather than explicit, holistic rather than bounded and systemized; it is what people know without being able to articulate" (165).


I imagine that a research might ask a question and get a response similar to "I'm not sure, I just know how to do it." Such a response might lead to a discovery of tacit knowledge. 


As I read, I wondered if some bungled government processes do a similar thing. Assume there is one best approach for something, then impose that approach on all. Could there be a link between this rational and environmental risks? I know in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, she expresses frustration with the government's lack of interest in exploring ways of dealing with environmental risks besides pesticides. In the final chapters of her book, she outlines biological approaches to dealing with environmental risks. One of her main concerns was that the government was approaching such a large-scale problem with one answer: which is also something we deal with on an agricultural plane. Problem: There's not enough food. Answer: Create one answer to the problem and replicate it over and over (genetically modified food). This is a simplified connection, but I'm hoping something similar will apply to the research I'm conducting.


In Scandinavia, researchers took action research to the workplaces. Instead of just observing from the outside, the researchers took part, becoming directly involved in the studies with a desire to create a direct outcome—giving more power back to the workers (165). The participatory design first attempted to discover tacit knowledge, and then it set about to reflect on the found knowledge (165). Then instead of bypassing this tacit knowledge, the system can be fit into what already exists.

Spinuzzi lists three criterions for participatory design: 

1. Quality of life for workers;
2. Collaborative development; and
3. Iterative process (in other words, continual study). (169–171)

As a downside, this type of research is never quite done. All tacit knowledge cannot be found, so the research is never exhaustive. It takes intensive time, money and resources to complete (169), which might make it impractical in many scenarios. 


So to recap, participatory design finds tacit knowledge. Researchers may do this through "organizational games (citations), role-playing games (citations), organizational toolkits (citations), future workshops (citations), storyboarding (citations), and workflow models and interpreting sessions (citations)" (167).


This research takes partnership approach. The designers aren't dictators, they are partners who help empower the workers in their workplace environment (167).

Neuzil's View of Environmental Journalism

Neuzil, Mark. The Environment and the Press: From Adventure Writing to Advocacy. 2008. Evenston: Northwestern University Press.

In this book, Neuzil offers a creative take on the relationship between journalism and environmental subjects. I say creative because he starts further back in the past they I would have expected. But more on that later.

The majority of the book traces our American history of environmental journalism. As Neuzil says, “environmental journalism, as a routine component of the mainstream American press, emerged as a consequential factor in how citizens and their governments view, manage, preserve, and exploit their natural surroundings” (184-185). The status today? The environment is a legitimate beat in many of the American newspapers for about 40 years. However, the beat is still fairly young comparative to many of journalistic areas (204). And often environmental reporting in mass media is lacks "depth and context" (206).

However, the chapter on outdoor adventure writing seemed to focus more on the formation of different groups, as did the chapter about early environmental concerns. I do see the connection, though, between the need for an audience for the environmental reporting, and these groups not only make a great audience but also provide a lot of content for stories.

My idea of outdoor adventure writing has more to do with John Krakauer and Outside magazine. Neuzil writes beyond adventure enthusiast activities of backpackers today, and more about organizational development of early hunting and fishing groups. On his chapter on nature writing, he sought to inform the reader about the past writers of nature in American history—although he did write significantly about Isaac Walton, who I didn’t know of. Then he covered basic outdoor writers such as the Thoreau, Borroughs (who I didn’t know much about), and John Muir.

I greatly appreciated Neuzil’s writing about Sigurd Olson. I’ve read The Singing Wilderness and I knew of Olson’s advocacy work. I didn’t know that he had/has a national following. Because of his relationship with the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, I expected his fanbase to be more localized. I was wrong—he was voted one of the most popular nature writers by the Sierra Club magazine. When I read that Olson died with his snowshoes on, I teared up. If only all of us can find that place in life to do what we love until the moment of our death, I thought.

With Neuzil’s take, it was easy to see how environmental writing, or nature writing, changed as society progresses. And its impact depends on proximity to population. As Neuzil mentions, “Small newspapers are more likely to be consensus oriented rather than conflict oriented” (174).

Objective journalism in America did not show up until the 1890s (131). Around that time, people advocated against the use of birds in fashion. During this time it's estimated that 5 million birds were killed annually for their use in the fashion industry—although no one's really sure of an accurate count (134). The outraged bird lovers formed a new movement, the Audubon movement. It gained steam as they fought the women's fashion industry, which had plenty of it’s own ammunition to protect it’s causes. The press attempted to cover both sides getting information from the industry and the group’s spokespersons in local areas. The debate got so heated that volunteer Audubon wardens were killed trying to protect the birds (144) which is hard to imagine happening today. It does remind me Jnathan Franzen’s piece in The New Yorker called “Emptying the Skies.” It describes a similar problem around Italy and Cyprus. The area is a hotspot for migrating birds and many meet their fate from hunters who blast them out of the sky illegally. Even songbirds are prey; they are caught on poles covered in glue so they can be sold to restaurants. These practices are illegal, but the enforcement is light, so few have any fear of reprimand. Franzen tags along with rangers and finds real challenges to their authority—they have reason to fear for their life if they push enforcement too far.

As Neuzil observed, the pattern that forms with environmental conservation is this: a threat attempts to disturb the natural environment; then a social coalition forms to protect the environment from the threat. He describes a similar situation with dam building forces out west. The coalitions were key to pushing back a dam in Dinosaur National Monument. He states, "As in the movement against the Millners, the formation of coalitions is critical to any success of the anti-damn forces” (147).

This book was full of great stories from times past. For instance, when the industrial revolution was in full swing, he public held a fascination with the “back to nature” movement. One journalist in Boston ran into the Maine woods with only his undies on, and supposedly survived for several weeks, emerging a hero. Neuzil makes a daft point about the whole matter.

In journalism history one common assumption is that the content of the press tells the something about the audience, even if, in the end, the nature man stories were more like the moon hoax of 1835 – which claim the existence of intelligent life on the moon – then Nellie Bly's adventures and 1880s. (173)

That was a sensationalistic story. Another story represented the theme of the media as the government watchdog. It dealt with Taft, a reclusive president. The office of the president has held regular press briefings since the Administration in the early 1900s. Taft did not hold press briefings because he didn't believe in bringing information to the public media. As a result, the press got information from critics (including Gifford Pinchot, the founder of the National Forest Service). Eventually, Taft was implicated in the press for a land grab in Alaska, due to the muckraking press (165).

Although the trend is been moving away from superficial environmental reporting from the early 1900s (like the sensational “nature man” story), national attention is paid to the reactionary stories like that of the Sago mine disaster in 2006. Today in modern journalism, environmental writing is institutionalized with a few professional associations, such as the Society of Environmental Journalists.

In modern journalism, the real trouble with environmental writing and media is that it can be difficult to tell where advocacy begins in fact reporting ends. Michael Frome, an advocacy journalist, urges environmental journalists to follow Rachel Carson and write with “a desire to advance the cause of a better world” (130). The debate continues today, although the SEJ keeps advocates out of the primary membership of the group. Still, even the more objective national media plays a critical role in drawing attention to environmental concerns, especially when policy is about to be made (194-195). It seems that the idea of objectivity does drift further from us (in Neuzil’s view) and journalism moves closer to the advocacy of some early journalism. However, today’s writing is much more steeped in peer-mediated science (232). Several modern examples were given.

Living on Earth was an environmental radio show that ran on National Public Radio in the 1990s. It was hosted by Steve Kerwood and provided more in-depth reporting on environmental matters (207-208).

The book describes Discovery Channel and Outdoors Life Network channel's growth and development but later diversification into various programming not concentrated on animal or environmental or conservation areas. In fact, OLN network grew and became versus in 2006 (218).

The complexity of environmental reporting can be difficult to report and broadcast news because it's time and advertising constraints. One researcher Andrew Kendall found that the coverage of environmental reporting consisted of only 2% of all broadcast networks newscasts from 1998 to 2005 (220).

Neuzil also listed some websites I’d like to explore more: Environmental Health News, worldchanging.com, dateline.com, earth.com, gristmill.com.