Does Technology Enable or Determine Communication?

Communication technologies, especially those that are participatory, clearly do both, determine and enable communication. They determine communication by function of display possibilities, editing capabilities, information-chunk size allowances, access affordances, cost implications, communicative capabilities (one-to-one, one-to-many, etc.). Clearly, however, these communication technologies enable communication that otherwise would not be possible.

Brown, Konstanze Alex. Konjektures (2009). Articles>Technology>Communication>Theory

Subjectivism vs. Empiricism―How Does the Conflict Play Out in Technical Communication?

A large number of scholars in technical communication advocate stances that rely more on qualitative methods often associated with more subjectivist research paradigms that seem to acknowledge Foucault’s notion of the episteme with its inherent social and power relations as determining factors in epistemology. Fewer scholars, mostly in textbooks, embrace the scientific method or a variation thereof. However, several scholars attempt to alert us to the benefits of a more varied approach that takes advantage of methods within empiricism to give our field credence and add validity to our research. In summary, I found a continuum of approaches. This continuum, however, is not evenly populated; it appears slanted towards more subjectivist theory and methodology and much more sparsely populated in the realm of empiricist theory.

Brown, Konstanze Alex. Konjektures (2009). Articles>TC>Theory