Blackboxing
Definition
“Blackbox” first comes up for descriptions of mechanical processes where the relationship between the front end and the final products is unknown. The term springs from the mechanical sciences, where it can refer to transistors, algorithms, even abstract technology, such as the human language. However, its meaning has broadened after use incorporation from the fields of rhetoric and sociology of science, as well as the field of technical communication. It now characterizes the mental social habits that shape both how we make things and how we make others do things. Theorist Bruno Latour, attributed with coining the term, sees black-boxing as a downstream effect from a cognitive culture of science and technical work built for production and certification. Latour defines it as “the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need to only focus on inputs and outputs and not on it’s internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.” (1)
A broad definition of black-boxing: the process of coalescing information into a final product of inputs and outputs, without regard to either the internal mechanics or the circumstances of the conditions that created the information. This occurs when handling anything with unwieldy complexity or uncertainty, such as machinery or a set of commands. In effect, practitioners are given access to a system without requiring full comprehension of how or why it works.
Image courtesy of Haunted Machines an Origin Story (Long). Occasional blog of Tobias Revell Web. http://blog.tobiasrevell.com/2015/07/haunted-machines-origin-story-long.html Accessed October 30, 2021.
Black-boxes aren’t by-products of uncritical thought or thoughtful considerations for the audience's time. Rather, black-boxes are a provisional solution for a specific need for abstraction and condensation. For technical communicators, black-boxing often fills more of a quotidian purpose than a specialized one. The passive scrolling of this webpage, for example, relies on a litany of complex technical procedures needed to put words on the screen. These processes have histories, designs, and an organizational complexity that take lifetimes to fully understand. Take the content of the page as well— an effective understanding of the term “black-box” would mean a long exegesis on all eight books of a french continental philosopher. Language itself, a process with an unknown internal mechanism, means operating inside a black-box. None of this knowledge is needed for the (hopefully) ordinary act of reading these words.
History
Consumption
Technical writers should consider how black-boxing fills a need for the consumer side as well. The consumer, with little time to wonder how produce arrives at a grocery store, prefers “a simple interface for a complex and messy sociotechnical system.” (2) Part of the role of TC's should be writing that works to keep this illusion going. For example, when writing about fruit transportation for the consumer, a supply chain that provides unseasonable mangos should black-boxed. What's important to the shopper is that it arrives when demanded and tastes as they remember it tasting. Writing about fruit transportation for the supplier would require black-boxing as well. The assemblage of transporter, grower, and supplier should all be treated as having similar enough management structures. They should be Black-boxed as a whole.
Theorist Clay Spinnuzi, using the example of a black-boxed telephone network, expounds on this, writing “The black box is maintained through thousands of daily, localized, typically ad hoc acts of self-regulation: checklists, electronic notes, and immense stacks of printouts inscrutably marked up and highlighted. Such self-regulative acts usually work quite well—but not always.” (3) The creation of these documents is another key role for TC's. This is true even when the only communication is the illusion of a basic interface.
Black-boxing is an indirect result of technical communication. Spinuzzi points out that black-boxes can't be formed until workers have “shared tricks, habits, and lore.” (3) Another term for this sharing could be called technical communication.
Production
There's a link between the demand for technical writing and the increase in black-boxing. Both processes developed as technology grew more complicated and bureaucratic. Totally mastery of a subject grew beyond a single expert as information accumulated. This coincided with advancements in industrial production, such as the Post-Fordist model and computer planning (4), which allows for a more complex production system built around a compartmentalized assembly. This understanding of work involves separating activities into production down a network, creating a spatial and temporal movement to develop the product in increments as it travels down a network (Think of an assembly line). Workers focus on the specific task laid in front of them. They particularize when “encouraged not to work too far outside their organizational boundaries.” (5) Black-boxing became necessary.
Economist Donald MacKenzie points out that "technical artifacts are part of institutions, mobilizing faraway lands and people, not knowing if they... are a black-box counting as one or a labyrinth concealing multitudes." (6)
It's the role of technical communicators to write narratives that appear to hold across whatever number of organizations are in play. While writing about supply chains, for example, make it clear that freight containers don't voyage overseas. Shipping companies do.
An international shipping container. Black-boxing of supply chains is a key role in the modern economy. Technical writers, created in part to moblizing stable communication between groups, work to create a single fluid and solid interface.
Image courtesy of https://cgiccontainersales.com/buy-shipping-containers-portland-oregon/ Accessed October 30, 2021.
A diagram describing the role of black-boxing in the assembly of economic artifacts. Let’s take the role of writers and those of solar mechanics as an example. Objects or practices begin with parallel goals. Think of the twin goals of clear interpretation and monetary compensation all writers have. The other object in play is the solar panel's telos of electrical production Then, an interest or beneficial partnership begins between them. A new goal is created— the dispersal and popular incorporation of solar electricity into the grid. As a passage point, TC’s are hired into the company to write manuals. The interests of the mechanical (the production of electricity) and the writers (clear interpretation) are treated with equal weight and now work in conjunction with one another.
Here’s where black-boxing comes in. The work of the TC is rendered invisible behind the interface of the whole company. The original interests of the writers are hidden as work becomes symbiotic with the project. Most consumers of solar panels won’t think of the work that was done by the writers. It’s now seen as part of a whole interface. The original goals of the project are hidden, in part by TC work, as the joint efforts black-box the original interests of the once separate actors.
Practical Applications
Working Backwards
Assemblages of actors can be black-boxed as a way to turn a network into a single entity. But if the settlement breaks down, the black box needs to open for examination. It can be difficult to tell which node along a network is causing breakdown if the network has been formed into a singular unknown whole. Often, the composition can spill out as easily as it was boxed up. In his essay Who Killed Rex, Spinuzzi shows, for example, how labor is constructed to transform a telephone line, a transmission medium, a set of minimum wage employees, and countless other technologies and workers into a public telephone system. If black-boxing works, you can call your friend without any light shed on the system. If the black box needs to open, e.g. a broken call, investigations need to be made into which part is causing the breakdown. Spinuzzi insists that seemingly settled technical and scientific arrangements should go through the same degree of arbitration and scrutiny as politics. (7)
The black-boxes inherited from TC work, such as divisions of power alluded to in an email, office culture dictated by managers, and habits and knowledge bases, are constantly being opened in Technical writing work. If proprietors try to lock these black boxes, the boxes will spill out, or else work will lock up. Keep in mind when creating a black box that it should be easy to open in case of emergency. Technical writers should consider how a black box should open for scrutiny after any crisis. Clear, delineating writing allows for once melded actors to fall into distinct categories for investigation.
Latour makes note of the relationship between black-boxing and film projectors. When a film projector is working, we watch a film as a whole interface with a single entertaining front. When it breaks apart, however, we are reminded "....that the projector is made of several parts, each with its role and function and its relatively independent goals." (6)
A moment before a crisis, the projector barely exists, but now even its parts have individual "existence" and a corresponding black box.
Image courtesy of https://canyoncinema.com/clients/projection-standards/ Accessed October 30, 2021.
Tone and Genre
A genre in itself can be black-boxed. As Charles Bazerman reminds us “If each individual writer does not think originally and creatively about how to master recalcitrant language in order to create such powerful stories, it is only because the genre [the scientific article] already embodies the linguistic achievement of the three hundred years since the invention of the scientific journal necessitated the invention of the scientific article.” (8)
One of the main applications of black-boxing for technical communicators is in the conscious determination of what should be black-boxed. Making effective use of this requires more than simple delimiting. By following or mimicking widely held linguistic practices, such as the friendly and officious tone of a chain email, the output will result in a successful deliverable, despite a great deal of genre complexity or effort being unknown to either party. Latour even points out that black-boxing the operations of writing can successfully convince audiences of your paper's veracity.
“There is, then, an essential congruence between a “fact” and the successful operation of the various processes of literary inscription. A text or statement can thus be read as “containing” or “being about a fact” when the readers are sufficiently convinced that there is no debate about it and the processes of literary inscription are forgotten. Conversely, one way of undercutting the “facticity” of a statement is by drawing attention to the mere processes of literary inscription which make the fact possible.” (9)
By keeping language plain and evident, the concealing of inner literary workings can help a TC create a more convincing document.
Keep in mind the adjective form of technical when you consider technical writing. The adjective isn't designative of technology, but rather of a chain of knowledge and practices that we need to communicate. It's more akin to how we would describe a technique for picking the ripest mango, for example. When a technical writer makes a technical point in the noun sense, they deviate slightly from the main goal of TC. A black-box is briefly opened and, just as suddenly, closed again as the writer continues onto a larger goal.
Citations
Latour, Bruno. Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard university press, 1987.
Spinuzzi, Clay. "Guest editor's introduction: Technical communication in the age of distributed work." Technical Communication Quarterly 16.3 (2007): 265-277.
Spinuzzi, C. (2007). Who killed Rex? Tracing a message through three kinds of networks. Communicative practices in workplaces and the professions: Cultural perspectives on the regulation of discourse and organizations, 45-66.
Esser, Josef, and Joachim Hirsch. "Dimensions of a ‘Post-Fordist’Regional and Urban Structure." Post-Fordism (1994): 71.
Alberts, David S., and Richard E. Hayes. Power to the edge: Command... control... in the information age. Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense Washington DC Command and Control Research Program (CCRP), 2003.
MacKenzie, Donald A. Inventing accuracy: A historical sociology of nuclear missile guidance. MIT press, 1993.
Spinuzzi, Clay. "Guest editor's introduction: Technical communication in the age of distributed work." Technical Communication Quarterly 16.3 (2007): 265-277.
Bazerman, C. (1988). “Reporting the experiment the changing account of scientific doings in the philosophical transactions of the royal society, 1665-1800,” Chapter 3 in Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science (Vol. 356). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, p. 59.
Shapin, Steven. "Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory life. The social construction of scientific facts, Beverly Hills, Calif., and London, Sage Publications, 1979. 8vo, pp. 272, illus.,£ 1 1.25 (£ 5.50 paperback)." Medical History 25.3 (1981): 341-342.
Latour, Bruno. Pandora's hope: essays on the reality of science studies. Harvard university press, 1999.
Last edited by Lucas Schaumberg on November 7, 2021