Broadening our view of audience awareness: Writing for posthuman audiences

Abstract

Posthuman theory encourages scholars and practitioners to look at human and nonhuman actors with equal weight, acknowledging that as humans and technology have become less distinguishable from each other, the boundaries between bodies, objects, and contexts blur. Though usability has long been dominated by human centered needs, non-human agents interact with digital content as well. This paper includes strategies to strengthen our pedagogy around non-human centric writing in a way that both assists technology in its job and strengthens the applicability of content for the human users that interact with it. It encourages teaching students to write with a multimodal perspective that accommodates alternate forms of reading, machine translation, and search engines.