Urgently needed: more tech storytellers
By Jennifer Riggins
Technology has become inherently intimate. It’s in our pockets, our homes, our bodies, our cars, our work. It’s omnipresent and increasingly omniscient. Everyone is a user, whether you’ve consented to be or not.
Yet so much of it is kept in a locked box or obscured behind jargon and buzzwords. We spend so much time talking about code, tools and mechanisms that we forget to talk about impact. Not just upon releasing a new tool or feature but, from ideation to deprecation, there are consequences to our work.
We move fast and break things, not often stopping to ask: If we are building the future, what kind of future are we building? Who are we building it for? Who isn’t being considered or included? What consequences are being forgotten? Is it working as it should? What are the implications for health, wealth, privacy and joy? For the environment?
If tech is the future and everyone is a user, it has to be for everyone. And so it must be understood by everyone. That’s where the role of tech storyteller becomes essential. We are the ones who build communities around technology, and we are the ones who attempt to translate the value, purpose and risks of it. We are the ones who take that computerese and translate it into the common human tongue of stories and memories.
Jennifer Riggins
We help people understand technology.
The roles of tech journalists, technical writers, bloggers, developer advocates, social media managers and customer support are becoming increasingly urgent as technology becomes increasingly complicated and we are further removed from increasingly abstracted architecture. When machines are making more and more decisions on our behalf, yet we don’t know who trained them and with what data.
Tech storytellers are interpreters. We explain the usually unexplained or not understood. Clarifying “Just what is tech anyway?” is an important step toward making it finally by and for everyone. Or at least in closing the distance between the pedestalled tech industry and the rest of the world.
Tech storytellers also act as the tour guides to the future. People can still choose to wander around, and the more tech native you are, the more comfortable you’ll feel there. We just add the signposts, the points of clarifications, the historical and current context, and ask the questions that keep us from moving too fast, too soon, without looking both ways and pausing to think about how we even got here.
“Finally, we’re the pains in the ass.
And we need to be even more often.”
As collectors of stories, we are also the builders of communities. Just like a common language or sport, a love of and contribution to a technical project is an important shared experience. Through planning events, hosting meetups, and facilitating social media, Slack channels and forums, we are helping people connect over their passions. And we are working to make those spaces safer, where people can ask questions, find answers, and exchange stories. We then curate those experiences and, with permission, share them with broader audiences, attracting and welcoming new members to our communities.
And we are the doubters. We buy into the opportunity of technology, but we are skeptical of its consequences. When playing an internal customer-facing role like support, documentation or advocacy, we most often sit between the tech teams and their users. We liaise between product teams, business and marketing. We are helping often less verbose colleagues explain their vision and value. The decisions they make. We are the bridge crossing that chasm. We are the ones interacting with users regularly and are expected to feed back into projects. We’re the zeroth user and guinea pig.
A different role is played by the external observer and journalist. From the outside, we are helping individuals share their never-neutral experiences interacting with the technology. And we can provide that service to folks on the inside who are often silenced from sharing their experience working in high-pressure tech companies.
Finally, we’re the pains in the ass. And we need to be even more often. We’re the pushers of truth.
Storytellers also have a responsibility because shaping narratives can have a big influence on the direction of technology. We must work to use clean language instead of gatekeeping jargon and leet speak. Our work is interrogative, explanatory and discriminatory. And it must balance advocating for the organizations we represent as much as advocating for our end users.
Tech needs more storytellers. What’s your story?
Jennifer is the tech culture correspondent for The New Stack, co-organizer of the Aginext tech culture event series, and co-host of the podcast What We Talk About When We Talk About Tech, which features long-form interviews with tech storytellers and community builders.