Online documentation is caught in a paradox: Online help "works," as Wood would put it, when it "get things done." Currently, that work is most successful when it occurs without our notice. I don't have a problem with this (in fact, I relied on such devices in writing this presentation). The difficulty, after all, is not that machines are easy to use but in the way ease of use sometimes becomes an overriding concern. Current trends seem to be in the direction toward increased automation. We must work to expand and complicate this idea, while continually situating our arguments in realistic terms.
The computer is a tool in one articulation, something we use as the means to another end. But in another articulation, the computer offers a sort of ecology, where communicating in the context of this technology requires us to sometimes reconsider our ends, to question the idea that there even are always simple "ends."
When the operations of the interface become invisible, we are subjected to the logic of the technological system. We need to engage ourselves in not only writing with but rewriting those systems.
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