Resistance is not futile : exploring user resistance in technical communication

Despite ongoing investments to technology and usability in technical communication—and despite ongoing commitments to humanistic perspectives concerning those two domains—scholars of technical communication have yet to explore the topic of “user resistance” explicitly. User resistance gained prominence in fields like Information Technology (IT), Management Information Systems (MIS), and related fields and has traditionally been conceptualized as oppositional, hostile, or adversarial—a phenomenon meant to be avoided before it occurs. Because of this, traditional definitions of user resistance value the systems with which users engage, with little work theorizing the contexts, behaviors, and agencies of actual users. My dissertation responds to this lack of a user-centered approach by offering a thick literature review that examines how resistance is defined and situated across a range of scholarship. From this literature review, I offer a theory of user resistance that draws on the concept of “everyday resistance” (Vinthagen & Johanssen, 2012) to value users and their contexts. By situating the work done on resistance and providing a theoretical concept of user resistance, I then rhetorically analyze two examples of user resistance on the social networking site, Tumblr to illustrate how and why users resist in dynamic online spaces. The first example demonstrates how users resist within a system to design changes and the second illustrates the how users resist systems of power and oppression created and upheld (implicitly and explicitly) by the site developers and designers. Through an analysis and discussion of these examples, my dissertation seeks to start conversations about user resistance in the domain of technical communication and pivot existing conversations outside the field from a negative phenomenon meant to be avoided before it occurs, to a productive area of inquiry for technology design. Ultimately, I argue that attending to user resistance allows for a more nuanced and engaged approach to user-centered, participatory, and ethical design principles. By examining user resistance, technical communication researchers and practitioners can attend to the local, contextual, and most importantly dissonant needs of users.