Hocutt presents at symposium on communicating complexity

Daniel L. Hocutt, SPCS web manager and adjunct professor of liberal arts, presented “Shifting Rhetorical Agency in Complex Information Deployment with AI” at the 14th annual Symposium on Communicating Complex Information (SCCI) held at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota. The presentation shared case studies from research conducted with Dr. Nupoor Ranade, assistant professor of technincal communication in Carnegie Mellon University’s department of English.

The abstract of the presentation follows:

In this presentation, we share findings from analyzing three different technology platforms: 1) Meta Ad Manager, a platform where advertisers reach users on Facebook and Instagram; 2) Google Ads, a platform where advertisers impact search engine result pages (SERP) based on keyword relevance; and 3) Google Knowledge Panels, algorithmically generated information products built around relevant keywords in SERPs to help users learn more.

These cases enable us to learn more about the roles of audiences and authors in content development, and also focus attention on content design and assumptions about designing content for single sourcing (Meta Ad Manager), conditional information design and component content management (Google Ads), and designing for algorithms that create on-the-fly content blocks (Google Knowledge Panels). We discuss how these findings alter rhetorical ecologies and how technical communicators can be prepared for the impact on their audience analysis tasks and genre considerations.