ABSTRACT
The technological landscape that we inhabit is becoming increasingly complex, yet citizens and government officials are often uninformed concerning the intri - cacies of these technologies. Ellul (1992) asks, “How can people who are incom - petent make important decisions with regard to technique? Here, of course, ordinary citizens are in exactly the same place as the politicians, who are also perfectly incompetent” (p. 43). Without an understanding of how technology works, citizens and government officials are ill-equipped to make rational, well-informed decisions concerning its implementation and governance. This situation can lead to poor policy at best and complete miscarriages of justice at worst. Because of the difficulty in explaining complex technological systems to laypersons, technologies are often reduced to simplistic explanations and slogans. The problem here is that in the case of network neutrality, technical communi - cators have largely chosen to reinforce such oversimplification by jumping onto one bandwagon or another instead of working to clarify the issues. This chapter examines the current debate surrounding network neutrality-a situation in which the technical details have been largely ignored and slogans and arguments that appeal to heuristics have come to dominate public perceptions. Despite the complexity of the issues surrounding Internet traffic in international contexts, proponents of network neutrality have centered the debate on the master term of neutrality. Such an argument implies that the issue here is fairness, and herein is the problem. The argument is no longer a technical question; it has become a moral issue bound up with emotion, and Cicero’s (1942 version) observation that “men decide far more problems by hate, or love, or lust, or rage, or sorrow, or joy, or hope, or fear, or illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, or authority, or any legal standard, or judicial precedent, or statute” is
just as valid in the modern public sphere as it was in the Roman assembly (p. 325). The technical communicator must serve as a logically grounded counterpoint to the rhetoric of doom and fear that is often prevalent in the public sphere. For technical communicators, the situation has become one in which it is easy to be led away by flowery speech and seductive metaphors. As a result, technical communicators need to understand how language shapes our per - ceptions of technologies. After all, network neutrality is a complex issue that encompasses packet management, bandwidth allocation, and the right to manage one’s network, rather than simply a black-and-white case of freedom versus oppression. Moreover, one must recognize that the term technical communicator encompasses not only traditional roles such as technical writers and editors, but also those who create, market, and distribute technologies and the policies that surround them. In short, anyone who interprets technologies to the public is a technical communicator; including technology scholars, journalists, intellectual property attorneys, inventors, and anyone else who has a vested interest in technology adoption and policy. For the purposes of this chapter, I will proceed with this broad conception of the technical communicator. The case of network neutrality provides a case study in which to consider how technology issues are rhetorically constructed in the public sphere. These constructions can have severe implications for law and public policy. That is, when public policy is created out of emotion rather than a clear understanding of the technology in question, it is the citizenry as a whole that will lose. As such, the technical communicator plays a vital role in helping society understand technologies and their impact. Moreover, such legislation may also have global consequences, especially in the case of communication technologies that span the globe. For example, in an age of widely available, easy to use digital repro duction, copyright law would mean little without international copyright treaties. This essay examines these issues and then concludes with suggestions for how technical communication professionals can help to clarify debates surrounding technologies and their implications for laypersons, legislators, and legal practitioners.
