Investigating the Media Preferences of Technical Communicators (4)

Applicability to Professional Practice

The findings of the 2006 survey were fully correspondent with the author’s expectations, and offer little new information or useful insight. Although of minimal import to my current workplace practice, the results of the 2006 survey provide representative data from which longstanding beliefs of English-language technical authors in Japan might be supported and future studies into technical communication practices within the Japanese workplace might draw.

Since the various claims of MRT and McGee’s findings corresponded only partially with the results of the 2006 survey, I conclude that McGee’s results are not worthy bases for extrapolation beyond the cultural boundaries in which that study was conducted, this due mainly to the inherently “digital” (Bennett, 1998) nature of its format and its (presumably) monocultural setting. MRT is similarly limited: both in its extensibility into multicultural scenarios and in its usefulness in technical communication processes within monolingual environments; the former because it was in all likelihood never formulated to be cross-culturally relevant, and the latter due principally to its management theory pedigree.

The above notwithstanding, MRT and both surveys raise an issue whose potential importance merits investigation: MRT proposes that media are not simply sources – they represent wholly different information transmission processes whose effectiveness is directly related to the content of the message they are conveying. Although examination of these processes and their effects might be productive to studies of behaviour, rather than the question of which media is chosen, it is the question of how communication media influence the end product that is of potentially greater importance to the concerns of technical authors. This question prompts theorizing on how the cultures in which information is created influence the form that information assumes.