Swarts,+Jason+and+Kim,+Loel.+New+Technological+Spaces

=**Swarts, Jason and Kim, Loel. "'Guest Editors' Introduction: New Technological Spaces."**= //Technical Communication Quarterly//, Volume 18: Number 3, pp. 211-223. Online Resource.

= Abstract = = ** No abstract. ** =

**Argument**

Kim and Swarts explore the facets of genre as it pertains to technological space.  The structure/platform where a rhetorical situation occurs helps to shape the space. Structured by genre, modularity, and "literate action in hybrid spaces," the guest editors reveal the importance of recognizing institutional boundaries in which rhetorical genres participate. Furthermore, "The articles in this special issue examine the spaces through which writers and readers move and consider the complexities that arise when different kinds of spaces for rhetorical action (e.g., material and discursive) collide and mix."

=Key Passages=

"This is the layer of “stuff” (p. 12), such as furniture, pictures, appliances, and books that give a place its character and with which people engage most directly. The layer we encounter and attend to most frequently is both the fastest changing and one of the most influential on how we interpret the meaning of a place. Especially today, this layer of stuff consists, in large part, of many information and communication technologies that, like lamps and furniture, also characterize a place by providing information about how to accomplish tasks or otherwise inhabit that place. When our stuff serves the function of guiding our perceptions of the places we inhabit, and as that layer of stuff changes our perceptions, we have reached a point at which the place and the information about it are inseparable."

"We often speak of information as if it had substance to it, as if it behaved like brick-and-mortar architecture. In doing so, we reveal how real information is to our lived experience of space while also pointing to the difficulty of living and working in that space."

"The more designed a space is—that is, the more it is altered by the human hand—the more apparent and the more rhetorical that space is. However, settings less shaped by humans also create information: In a spot in the woods, the sounds of birds and animals and the traces of their passage through the space signify and inform the space to a person experiencing it."

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