WRTC Visiting Scholar Presents: Writing Networks on Mobile Devices

Dr. Jason Swarts

Dr. Jason Swarts, Professor of Technical Communication at North Carolina State University, was invited to give a presentation to WRTC faculty and graduate students on his current research, focused on mobility and networking.  His central concern was about the ways in which new technologies of communication are (re)shaping the traditional genres of technical communication.  

His presentation, entitled Composing Practices: Writing Networks on Mobile Devices, investigated those composing practices through which people create networks via mobile phones. By looking through the lens of Actor-Network Theory, Jason identified the networking activity of mobile phone users as “translation,” what Bruno Latour described as an “infralanguage,” to which different disciplinary perspectives can be appended.  Much mobile phone use is information-based; as such, Jason’s research described how five people composed on mobile phones to create coordinated, information-rich networks of professional and domestic activity. His study also addressed the objectives of mobile networking, which included creating a sense of place and coordination within that space. From a description of those practices, he was able to outline some of the key composing practices that the mobile users developed.