Lee Sherlock: “Genre, Activity, and Collaborative Work and Play in World of Warcraft”
These two articles give a good overview of “open” and “closed” systems, using the concept of a genre ecology. I thought the Spinuzzi and Zachry article was exceptionally clear and informative, especially since I took Usability Testing this past spring. Many of their examples had a familiar ring, thanks to the experiences of that class. Most notably, the idea that usability testing should test any system as a whole: I can’t tell you how many times the participants in our website test told us that they get certain information from co-workers, from Google or from dated written manuals because they didn’t know it was on the website, or didn’t have immediate web access, or thought the website took too long. Not to mention the number of times participants used the website in ways we didn’t anticipate and did so in a way that made it clear that this particular use was habitual from them.
Of course, we considered this and noted it in our final report, but I’m sure it was frustrating for our clients to learn that their users interacted with their product so creatively. Still it seems that is to be expected as “the longevity of [unofficial genres of documentation] and the relative stability of their role…suggest[s] that such spurious genres are as likely to become staples of an open documentation system as are the more traditional genres” (S&Z 176). If I had taken this class before Usability Testing, perhaps I would have been inclined to consider more of the genre ecology in our test design, though the ecology did present itself in our pre- and post-test interviews of participants when they told us about their roles within the activity system of their workplace, whether they worked at a desk or in the field, how regularly they use the internet, and so on.
I also appreciate the heuristic tools Spinuzzi and Zachry provide and it seems that these tools will help with both my genre analysis and with the activity system analysis Evan and I will be doing with Dr. Rivlin and The Upstart Crow. I had already considered using diagrams as a way of keeping track of documents and interactions, but hadn’t yet considered the degree to which such diagrams could play a role in determining the relationships between documents, people, and physical and virtual space. Applying categories of contingency, decentralization and stability to exploratory questions is also helpful in determining roles and relationships within the genre or activity system.
The final tool is probably more related to recommendations for a system, but will be helpful for any future responsibilities I might have in technical writing or workflow organization. Allowing for “user interfaces that include space (or spaces) that users can fill with their own ideas” (S&Z 179) is a suggestion that can apply to any number of systems and technologies, as Sherlock demonstrated with his discussion of the World of Warcraft AddOns and the WoWWiki, where users were allowed to participate outside of the single genre of the game.
What is becoming less clear is the terminology of activity theory and genre. Spinuzzi and Zachry describe genre ecologies as “dynamic and unpredictable clusters of communication artifacts and activities” which are “ruled by contingency, decentralization, and relative stability” (171), a definition that overlaps with David Russell’s assertion that the rules of an activity system are what “allow the system to be ‘stabilised-for-now’” (71). I don’t have a problem with this overlap, because I understand that genre theory and activity theory are interrelated. However, I am starting to envision a sort of genre and activity theory family tree. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of divorce, incest and intermarriage in this particular family tree. I don’t know if I’ll be able to document it, but I’m planning to try. I’ll share if I can figure something out.
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