Increasingly, technical communicators are being asked to publish more material on the Web, edit information from other groups, respond to email, chat with users online, and create a process for the delivery of information we have never before been responsible for. We may still be responsible for writing manuals and online help systems, but more and more we are also being asked to create web sites, act as gatekeepers for the information coming from many departments to be published on the web, and perform the roles of host and chief conversationalist for our organization, bringing together subject matter experts and users, facilitating a process rather than creating distinct products such as books and CD-ROMs [1], [2].

In talking with other technical communicators, I hear several interrelated questions coming up with increasing intensity:

• What are we going to have to do to keep up with our competitors on the Web?
• Why do Web conventions, tools, and links keep changing so often?
• How can we hope to organize and control the developing hurricane of material we are asked to put up on our organization’s Web site?
• Is anyone really in charge of the Web—or our own Web site?

Complexity theory offers some surprising perspectives on this situation. Complexity theory is not yet a single, unified approach, but rather a set of ideas developed in such disparate fields as economics, biology, neurosurgery, anthropology, and artificial life [3]-[9]. Individual researchers in each of these fields have begun developing theories specifically to cope with situations that are too complex to explain by earlier principles. Perhaps complexity theory can help us, as technical communicators, understand the Web world in which we find ourselves.

In this paper, I pinpoint a few key concepts in the evolving theory of complex, interactive systems, showing how I think they may clarify what is happening as we create Web sites, update them, transform them, and link to hundreds of other web sites around the world.

In a complex interactive system, agents perform relatively simple actions for their own purposes. In this scenario, we are agents, creating our corporate or department site, filling it with content, and then constantly changing the interface and content. From these activities, performed by agents like us around the world, the Web evolves.

We assemble the building blocks of our site-what I call rhetorical objects such as pages, image maps, paragraphs, and links. Each of these chunks resembles an object as seen by object-oriented programmers [10]-[15], because each:

Complex interactive systems like the Web give evidence of following the law of increasing returns, the tendency in such systems for a trend to accelerate, and dominate the entire system, instead of settling back into a corner, as in traditional economic theory, which predicts gradually decreasing returns [16]-[18]. This accelerating tendency leads to path dependence, that is, an eventual lock-in to a particular technology, approach, or system, even if that is not the most efficient or productive. For example, in creating our Web sites, we may find similar tendencies pressuring us to follow the latest trends in Web design just because so many of our users have gotten used to them.

Phase transitions take place when the objects within a system multiply exponentially, moving the system from one phase to another. Clearly we are witnessing an enormous growth in the number of rhetorical objects on the Web, and that growth has taken us to a new level, in which we see emergent behaviors, that is, behavior we did not see before, when we faced less volume. Examples include building chat systems into our documentation, regarding email as a way to develop new materials for our users, changing our role from sole creator to editor, or facilitator.

In such an emerging, complex, interactive system, our roles are changing, as we adapt to this new environment:

• We may still be creating some individual packages of information, but increasingly we will be orchestrating the flow of information, pulling it from many new sources (such as users, subject matter experts, and even our own Information Technology group).
• Our writing moves toward shorter pieces, created on the spur of the moment, pulling together prepared chunks (reusable objects) for purposes we could not have imagined five years ago, such as running email exchanges with users, hosting newsgroups, adding to databases not documents.
• Our focus turns away from delivering a product (the document) by a particular date to managing a constant process of updates.
• When we edit, we may find we are focusing on Level Three editing (larger issues of structure and purpose), less on Level Two (consistency and coherence within the prose), and just skimming for Level One accuracy and correctness [19]-[21].

In turn, managers are going to need to reconsider the way they assign staff to projects, and monitor work. For example, you may need to assign one person to a particular subject area, and make that person responsible not just for updating the information online, but also for communicating with users, subject matter experts, and other staff such as salespeople; the "writer" is now a hub for information about that topic. Similarly, you may have to measure productivity by the number of emails responded to, number of postings to the bulletin board, number of updates, rather than on-time delivery of a particular manual. Time frames shrink from months to weeks.

(1) Price, J.R. "Introduction: Special issue on Structuring Complex Information for Electronic Publication," IEEE Transactions in Professional Communication, 40:2 (1997), 1-9.

(2) Price, J. R. "Using Complexity Theory to Understand What’s Happening to Technical Communication," 1997 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference Proceedings, 17-27.

(3) Bak, P. How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996.

(4) Casti, J. L. Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World Through the Science of Surprise. New York: Harper, 1994.

(5) Coveney, P. & Highfield, R. Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World. New York: Fawcett, 1995.

(6) Cowan, G. A., Pines, D., & Meltzer, D. (Eds.). Complexity: Metaphors, Models, and Reality. Volume XIX in the Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Reading, MA: Addison -Wesley. 1994.

(7) Holland, J. H. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.

(8) Lewin, R. Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

(9) Waldrop, M.M., Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

(10) Fingar, P. The Blueprint for Business Objects. New York: SIGS, 1996.

(11) Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., and Vlissides, J. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1995.

(12) Jacobson, I. The Object Advantage: Business Process Re-Engineering with Object Technology. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994.

(13) Martin, J. and Odell, J.J., Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992.

(14) Taylor, D., Object-Oriented Information Systems: Planning and Implementation. New York: Wiley, 1992.

(15) Yourdon, E., Object-Oriented Systems Design: An Integrated Approach. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994.

(16) Arthur, W.B., "Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns, and Lock-in by Historical Events." Economic Journal, 99 (1989), 116-131.

(17) Arthur, W. B. "Positive Feedbacks in the Economy," Scientific American (February, 1990), 92-99.

(18) Arthur, W. B. "Increasing Returns and the Two Worlds of Business." Santa Fe, NM: Santa Fe Institute, 1996. (Reprinted in Harvard Business Review, July 1996).

(19) Buehler, M.F., "Defining terms in technical editing: The levels of edit as a model," Technical Communication, 28: 4 (1981), 10-14, 1981.

(20) Bush, D.W., and Campbell, C.P., How to Edit Technical Documents. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx, 1995.

(21) Anderson, S., Campbell, C.P., Hindle, N., Price, J. R., Scasny, R. "How Editing a Website Differs from Editing a Printed Document." IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, in press.