Is there room for imagination in professional communication?
The idea of critical technological awareness may or may not have sunken in just yet, but critical thinking (or having a critical awareness) means attempting to look at the big picture of something or looking at something from an unfamiliar point of view. I’m convinced racism exists to this day not simply because people have closed mindsmeaning they don’t accept differencesbut because approaching topics from unfamiliar (and possibly uncomfortable) positions is much harder than continuing through life with blinders on. Call not being critical whatever you’d likeignorance is bliss, being comfortably numb, burying your head in the sandbut critical thinking isn’t the easiest route to take in life.
Now that I’m done editorializing, I’ll give you your prompt. You may or may not be familiar with the 9/11 Commission Report that came out in the summer of 2003 (It’s nearly 600 pages, so I wouldn’t recommend trying to get through it, but I wanted you to know it exists). As with other disasters, such as the Space Shuttle Challenger and the Space Shuttle Columbia, communication leading up to an event is one area the government investigates. Most of the time they must sift through pages and pages of documents looking for clues as to what went wrong and, of course, who’s to blame. Then a panel of experts gets together and attempts to sort things out and produces a final report (often written collaboratively)
What struck me about the report was what one of the CNN talking heads, commenting on the report, said about the evidence the FBI, CIA, and other agencies had before 9/11: he claimed that “[the government agencies in charge of surveillance] knew about terrorist activities in the US and knew about suspected terrorists in the US training to be pilots since the early 90s, but we didn’t have enough imagination to foresee the type of attack that happened on 9/11.”
Well, there were people who did have the imagination to envision a group of terrorists hijacking a plane and flying it into a building, but that’s another issue. For your journal entry, I want you to think about the role (if any) imagination plays in technical communication.** Is a critical mind important for technical communication, or is technical communication simply about standard operating (communicating) procedures?
write your own word and 300 words.
