less computer

write about it

For groups

Writing about your conversations about computer use is a way to share them. Sharing your conversations about computer use is an invitation to others. It's an invitation to be seen or heard, it's a signal out to others, it's a way to build collective action opportunities. One of the most powerful things that writing about computer use can do is find a reader that sees it and says hey, yes, same, same.

Writing about your conversations does not have to take the formal format of report, though if that's the case, here are some tips:

  1. If you are doing notes at a meeting, practice being selective in what you write down in the first place. This helps tune your listening skills, and it cuts down on things that really don't need to live on beyond the meeting.
  2. If you're in a physical room, see if you can find a way to take the notes on a wall or on a projector, allowing people to see what you're doing.
  3. Try to build a one-page summary of your report before you leave the room or call. What are the top 3-5 things to make note of? Can you write this part of your report verbally before you end your conversation by asking the group - here are the main things I heard, is that right?
  4. You don't need to do attribution in your reports, spending time on who said what may be counterproductive.
  5. Tell people that you'll be circulating a short set of notes after the conversation, and tell them those notes are draft - they are free to add, fix, update the notes when they receive them for review.
  6. Encourage people to continually share their thoughts with you in a period after the conversation (say two weeks) and then include these as "written feedback" in your notes/report.
  7. Practice making the report or notes something that everyone who was there and part of the conversation would recognize.
  8. Rather than quantifying in specifics, remember you can use groups such as "many people thoughts, a few thoughts, one person said... etc."

Reports and notes are writing that can help in a process-oriented way, in terms of being used as inputs to future decisions. There are also other reasons to write, and in some cases, this writing has less of an explicitly known or productive purpose.

The specific contexts and consequences of computer use make for many potential angles in writing. Writing about how something was purchased, writing about the consequences of its use, writing about the feelings it creates. Without worrying about your writing, and without making it an academic or journalistic exercise, practice sharing your stories, documenting your processes, inviting others to get in touch with you about them. Writing to share experience is a form of conversation, sometimes a message in a bottle, sometimes a story that travels through people that see themselves in it.

Many of the strategies and tactics in this handbook relate to telling stories and shaping narratives. While we already have a lot of this advice in the abstract, this suggestion gets truly powerful in the specific. Some of the work of writing it down is pulling the marketing or public relations story from the sky and pinning it down using geography, history, and specific people's experiences. When you write, you are writing back. Biting back at the idea that software can eat the world.