TC Talk

Nazi Germany systematically identified, relocated, and murdered millions of Jewish people during the Holocaust. But how were they able to kill so many so efficiently? IBM equipment played a key role. Meanwhile, IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson got rich off of Nazi Germany and strategically escaped scrutiny for his collaboration. In this episode, drawing on Edwin Black's book IBM and the Holocaust, Abi explains how intertwined IBM and Nazi Germany were by tracing their paths through the Hitler years.

More jokes, ChatGPT-generated and otherwise, cut from the recording for the "AI is a joke" episode

We reflect on AI text generators, creativity, technical communication, writing instruction, algorithmic literacy, magic, and more. Importantly, we reveal the results of our Twitter experiment: Are we funnier than a robot? (Results were mixed.) Also, find out what happens when we drink an AI-generated cocktail recipe and ask ChatGPT to write a stand-up routine about the ethics of artificial intelligence. 

This is the last of our 3-part series in which we discuss The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disaster, by Juliette Kayyem. In this episode, we talk about the importance of continually examining your systems, and learning from mini disasters instead of brushing them off.  Finally, we put our newfound knowledge to the test when a baking attempt goes awry. Content warning: Gun violence.

This is part 2 of our 3-part series on disaster communication, where we are discussing the book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disaster, by Juliette Kayyem. Last time, we talked about the barriers that make comprehending and communicating about crisis challenging. This time, using cases such as Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon explosion, we address how to overcome those barriers and get quality info to the people who need it. The first step is listening downward, or gathering info from people who are closest to disaster.

Many organizations focus on preventing disaster from happening, but don't have plans in place for when disaster inevitably does happen. And as climate change worsens, we need to buckle up for living in an age of disaster. What does this mean for communicating about risk, crisis, and disaster? To answer this question, Benton shares insights from the book The Devil Never Sleeps by Juliette Kayyem. Benton and Abi also discuss their own very different reactions to disaster in their own lives, as well as their favorite zombie media.

We sat down with our friends Lindsey and David to talk about medical misinformation and its effects on relationships, the challenge of choosing what to trust in the swirl of constantly changing pandemic info, and the role that communication can play in increasing access to vaccines and clinical trials.  Lindsey and David also tell the story of their family's participation in clinical trials for the COVID vaccines, and the surprising ways it changed their views on social media and the medical research process.

In this final part of the UX series, we share some ways instructors can help students to see user experience and usability as the rhetorical, human, and messy processes that they are. We also celebrate the season finale of TC Talk with a game show, Wheel of Exigencies, during which you will meet the new celebrity spokesperson for Course Hero!

Last episode, we focused on UX (user experience) and usability as a discipline; in this episode, we focus on UX as a practice. We discuss various stages of the UX process,  from "empathize" to "ideate" to "prototype." Abi describes typical methods in UX research and testing and when to use them. To demonstrate, she springs a (poorly conducted) usability test on Benton.  Finally, they discuss the typical skills and traits required of UX professionals.

What comes to mind when you think of racist medical experimentation in the United States? For most people, it's the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis study, during which doctors allowed Black men to die from syphilis in order to study "the natural progression of the disease," even though effective treatment existed. In her book Medical Apartheid, medical journalist Harriet Washington argues that this is just one example in a long history of racism against Black people in medical research, and that we need to face this history if we are to build trust with Black communities.

We discuss key points from her book, starting in the age of chattel slavery in the United States up through Americans' collaboration with South African apartheid doctors aiming to develop racially-targeted biological warfare.

This topic has implications for health communicators who are writing and designing for marginalized audiences. More broadly, awareness of this history is necessary to make sense of current health disparities by race, most recently made evident with COVID-19.

Abi & Benton try to come to terms with the fact that information technology has not lived up to our greatest moral hopes for it. We compare our optimistic initial experiences with the internet to our pessimistic outlooks about it today. We discuss Ridolfo & Hart-Davidson's book RhetOps: Rhetoric and Information Warfare, which reveals new ways that rhetorical knowledge can be weaponized by bad actors.

Content warning: suicide. Drawing on the book Cultish by Amanda Montell, we discuss the rhetorical strategies used by cult leaders such as Jim Jones (People's Temple) and L. Ron Hubbard (Scientology), and how we see similar strategies used today in less extreme but still potentially dangerous contexts like multi-level marketing and fitness crazes. We hope you come away from the episode with a better understanding of why people join cults and how to recognize your own weak spots when it comes to cultish rhetoric.

What can conspiracy theories teach us about how arguments work? Plus, Benton demonstrates that the U.S. did in fact land on the moon, Abi invents a conspiracy theory, and Benton aces a quiz on Trump’s campaign rhetoric. Books discussed include Awful Archives by Jenny Rice and Demagogue for President by Jennifer Mercieca.

Short answer: Not entirely. But there is still a role for rhetoric. We talk about the book Vaccine Rhetorics by Heidi Lawrence, and how her theory of material exigence might apply to the COVID vaccine situation. We also discuss the potential of gamifying and "pre-bunking" to counteract medical misinformation. Stay to the end for bonus Schwarzenegger and Picard impressions by Benton.

We pick up our last vax comm chat by addressing historical reasons for vaccine skepticism, the split between personal experience and scientific data as evidence, and Andrew Wakefield's infamous journal article. We discuss highlights of the book The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin. 

In general, what works and doesn't work when it comes to vaccine communication? How does the COVID vaccine controversy compare to past vaccine controversies?

Through a tour of Andy Weir's books (The Martian, Artemis, Project Hail Mary), Abi & Benton discuss how science fiction can enhance our understanding of tech comm.

Abi & Benton discuss their favorite strategies for getting more reading done, whether for work or for fun. Don't miss Benton's epic Gandalf impression at 8 minutes.