This is a semi-philosophical speculative piece on the role that tools have in workers’ relationships to their work, its results, and themselves as those doing it. Because our company delivers writing tools such as the DoX CMS system for structured authoring, my perspective will be colored by this conflict of interest. As a result, I will mostly focus on the benefits of such tools. I also repeatedly use writing as an example for the same reason.
Framework
My starting point is Karl Marx’s outline on the nature of work in Capital (Part 3, Chapter 7, Section 1). My choice is motivated by how Marx focuses on the involves parts’ relationships which work mediates in observable ways. Besides the workers’ relationships to the world, he also accounts for differences in their relationships to themselves. Based on this framework, I can divide this discussion on the role of tools into three main sections:
- Workers’ relationships to work,
- Workers’ relationships to the world, and
- Workers’ relationships to themselves.
To summarize Marx, he proposes that work is a process between a person and their environment, in which that person spontaneously interacts with that environment in ways that they control.
Marx emphasizes how conscious intentionality separates work done by humans and its products from how other animals change their environments. Such activity being managed with the help of this kind of attention makes possible results of vastly varying quality and form. A bee, a spider, or a robin cannot choose to fail to build its nest or to consciously change its overall design. According to this model, the components of work then become the world, human activity, the worker responsible, and their choice of tools.
Workers’ relationships to work
The used tools form a part of the work to which workers relate when the participate in it. The use of these tools also shapes the activities that constitute related work. For example, digging with your hands, a shovel, or with an excavator are three rather different activities. The same holds true for direct document editing and structured authoring. Thus, the used tools determine the kinds of work in which a worker partakes.
Relationship towards tools
Each tool has its characteristic feel. Such immediate sensations mediate a wider spectrum of human experience than you might expect. In this respect, my perspective is informed mostly by Antonio Damasio’s findings and models for emotions, feelings, and interpretations. He outlines the details for this overall framework in his book The Strange Order of Things (Damasio, 2017) among others.
Damasio’s embodiment-based perspective distinguishes between emotions which are related to feedback on an organism’s feedback own state, and feelings which the organism forms when it relates its emotions to other available information. At least for humans, this kind of relating also often involves reasoning. This results in an interpretation that can express the experience with words.
A set of observed stimuli can, for example, generate an adrenaline rush that comes with a characteristic emotional state. Other situational factors determine whether the feeling associated with this bodily state takes the form of nervous excitement or anxiety: prior memories of similar situations and associated emotional charges, other external factors such as an approaching manager, and other observed internal states such as low blood sugar or current level of caffeination.
When it comes to tools, I will primarily focus on two types of difference in feel and their consequences: fluency and preference.
Fluency
A sense of fluency comes from a feel that consists of the work with the tool having as few disturbances as possible, and proceeding at a satisfying pace. Disturbances include interruptions and precarious situations.
The feelings which such fluency can engender include ease, familiarity, immediacy, and security. Each of them involves a slightly different manifestation of fluency: the ease of learning and remembering correct procedures, their effortless application, the speed at which you get results, and a minimal need to hesitate.
Each such nice sensation has its opposite: difficulty, clumsiness, sluggishness and lack of feedback, as well as insecurity. Even though my focus is mainly on how tools improve the work experience, I cannot ignore such detracting factors. The default tool for a job is oftentimes not neutral in such respects. It can even be horrendous in some respects. Besides, even the otherwise best tools may involve such flipsides. In such cases, evaluating those tools must account for these factors’ importance to said tools’ actual users.
To suggest that such experiences can easily generalize to define how the worker feels about the work itself should hardly be controversial. A tool which is excellent or lacking in these respects contributes to whether you feel like your work is worth your time. Even tasks that would otherwise be satisfying, and in which you can reach the flow state that Mihaly Csikszentmihaly originally described, require a suitable work environment. An important aspect of such work environments is the absence of a need to stop the primary activity to attend to distracting factors. Fluent to use tools prevent such disturbances such as insecurity about the correct procedure.
As such, a sense of fluency or lack thereof associated with the use of a tool has a significant impact on the relationship between a worker and their work. Experienced flow states build up a worker’s overall understanding of their ability to complete such tasks and thus whether they consider themselves suitable for such tasks.
Mind that I do not want to overstate people’s need to find their place in society specifically through work. I do not even claim that it is a uniquely significant form of belonging. Regardless, work provides one means to obtain a sense of belonging as part of a larger whole. This has an effect on whether you experience said work as meaningful, unless there are other factors which make it appear vacuous. David Graeber discusses such other challenges in his book Bullshit Jobs (Graeber, 2018), for example.
Systems of structured authoring, for example, mostly allow writers to focus only on documents’ contents when it comes to writing. This core task is not regularly disrupted by considerations of layout, for example, within such environments. Problems in this respect may arise, though, if a writer has not been provided with sufficient guidance on how to use the system, or on the proper, precedent-based procedures for their environment. Such problems are not limited to structured authoring software. Feelings of insecurity that come from an unfamiliar workspace can accentuate them, though. When content is published, an insufficiently prepared style sheet can also result in interruptions that feel hard to manage for most users. As long as the act of writing itself remains fluent, though, these are exceptions that can be resolved.
Preference
Have you ever held a tool which made you glad or proud to handle? This sensation need not involve a sense of fluency, even though that certainly helps. It is instead a matter of preference towards tools such as a beautiful chef’s knife or a gratuitously powerful computer. Personal appreciation forms its core. Evaluating fluency is not necessarily personal like this. When the worker personally observes fluency of use and it holds value as part of their use experience, such fluency becomes a part of the sense of preference.
Preference can be either rational or sensual. For example, preference derived from fluency of use is rational when it is consciously recognized: you can express in words the benefits and their value to yourself. Yet there remains a sensual side to it as well. This is an emotional reaction where to express it in words is to only either describe the sensation itself or to try and find some justification for it beyond itself. Ultimately, the nature of this experience is aesthetic, however.
The significance of preferring a tool and to use it is both fully obvious and less than obvious. It is obvious because everyone would prefer to operate with tools that produce positive sensations in them. Such circumstances associate positive emotions with the worker’s relationship with their work. Their interpretations of the related feelings should in turn develop their own their sense of doing something worthwhile, at least.
The relations involved become less obvious for tools which are unsatisfactory in this respect.
Tools that others provide in part reflect how those responsible value the tools’ users and their work. Say, for example, that a writer’s work is not supported through access to specialized tools. This is often a sign of the value assigned to such writing. It may be seen as a necessary evil. Perhaps management simply does not bother to understand such work beyond reasoning that a good writer is able to write well. Thus, if the writer is denied specialized tools when their price is reasonable, it informs them of others’ attitudes. As I will discuss when I address workers’ sense of their own value, a writer then learns how much their expertise is appreciated.
How nice the available tools feel thus tells a story about how associated work and those who handle it are valued. Tools are an extension of the work, and preferred tools improve the work experience. A minimal investment in tools can thus deteriorate trust towards those responsible for such choices having proper appreciation towards the work and the person responsible for it.
Writing appears to often be in an unfortunate position in this respect. Those responsible for acquisitions often recognize nothing but writing proper as part of such work, and that writing can be done with any text editor. This fact anchors their expectations in ways which make the pricing of specialized systems often seem unreasonable. If a writer feels that they have no power to choose their tools to meet their preferences to the same extent as others, it can poison their attitude towards their work.
Relationship towards new forms of work
The tools in use in part determine which tasks constitute their use. They thus change the types of work to which the worker forms a relationship. Such differences include both the methods used and related goals.
Methods
Methods consist of actions which advance the done labor’s goals such as salespeople contacting potential customers, writers writing, or mechanics doing repairs. To compare differences between available methods within a field, though, you should focus on more specific distinctions such as the variety of ways in which writers can produce written content.
At this level of specificity, the methods that a tool enables can differ in relation to details such as what is done, the allowed and required numbers of participants, the required time and effort, and what kind of effort is involved, for example. For the purposes of this discussion, the most important considerations involve the effects that such differences have on the workers and their relationship to their work. Among such effects, I focus on the unfolding of the horizon of possibilities in terms of methods, and self-development as an option that reduced required time and effort enable.
The horizon of possibilities for this unfolds when a worker comes to understand how the methods available for their tasks also cover the new alternatives that a tool affords. For example, structured authoring presents for consideration specialized methods that help with content reuse. They include how such content is formulated, other components for single-sourcing content, content conditioning, and suitable style sheets.
To the worker themselves, the significance of all this includes at least a wider selection for finding a suitable operating model, and comprehending how open their options really are. Moving past the familiar and the expected leaves the door open for further alternatives that the worker can explore themselves with the help of their more comprehensive view on available approaches. This lets them, for example, find even better means of fulfilling specific needs. Considerations similar to those involved with the fluent use of tools become involved in assessing how suitable specific methods are. Though, the focus is on how easily goals are reached, and on accounting for the effects of personal needs and capacities on that. Good methods still also involve a relative lack of disturbances and a suitable pace towards the specified goals within the boundaries of the worker’s abilities and limitations.
When the selected methods are effective and this boost in effectiveness allows the worker to reach set goals with less effort or in less time, they will have a chance to also do other things with their time. Usually, such opportunities do not result in you being allowed to use the available time and energy freely. This is especially true when goals scale up to fill all available time. Ideally, such freed space allows the worker to develop their skills instead. Developing your skills is a part of mapping available possibilities as well as strengthening your grip on familiar operating models. Usually, such opportunities to develop themselves improve workers’ well-being and cultivate their relationship to the type of work in question. This makes room to form a healthier and more meaningful relationship to your tasks.
The choice of tools thus also carries available and required methods to use them for related work. If the worker was not previously aware of said methods, access to those methods can develop their view of the available means, and open their imagination to new ways to achieve their goals. This helps them find whichever methods are best-suited for them. More effective methods also require less time and effort, which leaves room for things like further learning. This way the tools which enable said methods also help develop their users’ relationship to their work.
Goals
Goals are objectives or ideals towards which work is directed. The difference between objectives and ideals is that objectives can be achieved. Ideals are directing principles, relative to which a threshold for satisfaction must be drawn on an otherwise endless continuum.
In the case of tools, the new goals made available to their users generally match their designers’ intentions. They have designed the tools in ways which encourage or require users to respect said goals. For example, software for structured authoring limits direct control over layouts in a text editor. When such systems allow it, this is a choice made by their providers between such functionality and factors that oppose its inclusion. In practice, controlling layouts like this requires either a novel content format or unique identifiers for each affected element, with associated rules for styling.
On top of the goals set by the designers, the tool’s user can conceive other compatible goals or new goals not supported by said tool themselves. Such realizations are exceptional but they are a normal part of cultural evolution over the long term. Because such situations are exceptional, I will instead focus on the users’ relationships with the goals presented by their tools’ designers.
Understanding a worker’s relationship to such goals starts with the distinction that ideals reflect values and objectives embody them. Such values are generally not themselves ethical core values. However, they are also never independent of such deeply held values. They include principles which define what the priorities for the results are, such as well-being, reputation, or profit. Often various secondary factors derived from these principles also get emphasized, such as how product quality affects its maker’s or their employer’s reputation. A worker who recognizes such values hidden in the intended ways to use their tools may then assess those values.
These workers then respond in their own ways to the values presented to them through their tools. Even though their reaction is in part informed by other features of the tool in question such as how flexible it is about said goals, the most important factors here are the workers’ experiences and the resulting attitudes. Experiences of externally set expectations or attempted manipulation can readily result in bitterness or rebellion. When values are presented more as suggestions or conversation starters, the act of doing so is often easier to digest. This then results in a mixture of the desires of the tool’s designer and the personal ideals of its user. Their responses also affect how workers conceive their own roles within the frameworks provided by the values that they recognize.
For example, structured authoring and thus the systems that implement it express reusability of content as a key value. At the same time, this involves generalized content where its uniqueness has been minimized. Reusability requires formulations which avoid unnecessary references to details which may differ between publications. Generality as a goal can cause friction with ideals that a writer may hold, such as comprehensiveness and specificity. The tools for structured authoring that I am aware of, including our own, do not force their users to formulate their content in reusable ways, though. It is a goal enabled by these systems and thus presented for their users to judge. I have not encountered complaints in response. However, separate style sheets are also a part of enabling reusability, especially when different publication formats are involved. Their use is not negotiable and expectations about content order and layout must account for related limitations. As you might expect, my experience shows that complaints about the use of style sheets and the need to account for their use are considerably more frequent from new users in particular.
The meaning of the relationship between a worker and the goals connected to their tools differs based on whether the worker recognizes such goals as separate from the requirements of their work or not. When the worker recognizes that the goals connected to their tools are options among alternatives, they can relate them to familiar ideals and objectives for their work. This expands their understanding about the nature of such work. In this way, this alternative allows them to consciously re-evaluate previously obvious goals and to split their tasks based on such evaluations.
When the worker does not consciously differentiate between the goals build into a tool and the requirements of their work, the significance of their relationship to these goals involves how that relationship becomes mixed with their relationship to the work itself. Namely, their attitude towards the goals that their tools express is easily generalized beyond them. This can result from a lack of consciously recognized alternatives, particularly because of factors such as a lack of experience. Under such circumstances, these goals form that person’s baseline to which they relate other goals which they observe later. When they become aware of alternatives, they often also become more cognizant of the principles which had previously directed their activity. Alternatives to those goals force them to the surface because such alternatives create a contrast within a previously uniform understanding. Thus, these new goals also carry the potential to transition workers into the type of conscious relationship described above.
Workers’ relationships to the world
The effects of tools on the relationship between a worker and the world around them include both concrete and cognitive differences. Concrete differences are connected to the relations that constitute interactions between the worker and their environment. Such relations include how they operate together with others and how the work they do changes their environment, for example. Cognitive differences, on the other hand, concern the relationships between the world and a person’s conceptions of it. This includes how they experience and understand the things in their environment.
Concrete differences
Tools directly affect the relationships which occur through the use of those tools. The most obvious such relations involve those with other people who participate in the same projects and the products of tool use. This includes both desired results and by-products.
Personal relations
A vast number of personal relations may intersect within the sphere of work. Here, I will focus only on the relationships between participants in all the work, even though work often affects their relationships with people outside work as well. Examples include relationships with the workers’ family and friends, as well as relationships with customers and other beneficiaries of the work done.
Differences in relationships between participants may involve details such as forms of cooperation, level of separation between roles, and the degree to which their contributions are acknowledged.
Forms of cooperation can differ at least in relation to how tight the cooperation is, points of contact between different people’s shares of the work, the number of participants, and the effects of cooperating on them. It is thus a matter of practical arrangements which directly affect who does what in relation to the other participants. As such, a simple example of the role that a tool can have in this respect would be a two-man saw which requires exactly two simultaneous users to cut down a tree. A more complex example would be a content management system with a workflow feature, which allows writers, translators, engineers, testers, and managers to each contribute to the published content in their respective roles.
The level of separation between roles involves factors such as overlap between related tasks, and hierarchies or other principles for organizing the participants. The use of a two-man saw mentioned above requires both participants to contribute to the same task in identical ways. At times, such overlap is a sign of badly differentiated responsibilities which can be corrected by weaving role-specific responsibilities together with less direct overlap. At other times, specific tasks under set circumstances require more leeway.
Meanwhile, hierarchies vary from different kinds of vertical hierarchies to almost flat ones. In principle, how much special expertise a tool demands affects such relations of power. A rise in the the relative position of a more demanding tool’s user can either increase discrepancy between participants or level prior inequalities. Systems used by groups in particular can also contain innate hierarchies, or solutions which deconstruct hierarchies such as extended approval checks and anonymous votes.
Acknowledging someone’s degree of participation, meanwhile, involves details such as liability and personal credit for the products of labor. Unless how liability is determined gets addressed directly, this tends to rely on side effects of the kinds of differences that I discussed above. For example, the number of participant in each task affects responsibility for the results of those tasks. Lone workers are the most obvious example of this. Software and similar management tools can also include methods to distribute responsibility with approvals and records. Though, practices do not always reflect such factors. For its part, personal credit involves acknowledging the participants’ contributions. This can be done formally, or it may mostly be supported emotionally. Tools’ effects on this is mostly evident through how tools can destroy such sense of ownership. Ideally, such destruction can be avoided. Unfortunately, mass production and other forms of highly managed work in particular, such as the construction of public spaces, do not generally leave workers with opportunities to see their personal contributions in the products of their labor.
The meaning of differences in these respects lies in their effects. There are at least two axes on which you can evaluate such effects. The first axis is whether workers become alienated from each other or more connected. The second axis is the resulting level of organization among workers versus the destruction of such structures. The usual ideal in these respects is a connected and well-organized work community. Sacrifices to that ideal mostly involve other goals. There are also situations in which redundant organizational structures being deconstructed will benefit the workers.
Alienation from other participants weakens everyone’s experience of their own value in relation to their work. Such alienation from others starts with the deterioration of their humanity being recognized. This deterioration manifests as the treatment of others increasingly becoming based on only their utility to your own goals. Such treatment includes, for example, a lack of understanding towards others’ needs, and interactions becoming more instrumental as they reduce to just task-related exchange of information. As everyone involved shares a community, such treatment goes both ways. At that point, the treatment that they receive makes all workers feel like their value in the context of work is purely instrumental.
A true sense of community requires that everyone’s humanity be recognized more comprehensively than this. Recognizing someone’s humanity involves, for example, understanding how the demands of their body and mind must be met for them to stay functional. Such deeper connections require more than the right tool, even though different tools can hamper, encourage, or enable them in various ways. For example, the channels used for meetings can support participation outside your desk when workers are empowered to do so. This is one way to consciously support their overall well-being and to express respect for their own judgement in this respect. This also applies to tools for writing when they require no local installations on devices which information security requires to only be used on traditional work stations either at home or at the office. A novelist at the café is a cliché but I am sure that there are days when that option would feel refreshing to other writers as well.
The level of organization or lack thereof affects not only efficiency but also the participants’ impression of whether work-related situations are under control. The ideal for efficiency is likely a golden mean. Insufficient organization entails problems such as overlapping labor, but too much focus on tasks that contribute to organizing work distract from productive work itself. The sense of control related to this is not only about a sense of personal control over a situation. A high level of organization in the wider work environment can hinder the workers’ sense of control over their situations when the result is that they have no elbow room to assess situations and make choices accordingly. A similar feeling can also result from the lack of any wider sense of organization. Such circumstances make people either be exposed or feel exposed to unpredictable conditions which exceed their ability to control their own situations. A sense of security founded on trust and a sense of predictability can be provided by the feeling that your circumstances are based on someone’s view on proper procedure or other principles. Of course, the worker must also not consider those people or principles opposed to their own interests for this to apply.
Environmental effects
According to the Marxian definition being applied, work is ultimately about the worker changing their environment in various ways. The tools used thus clearly have an effect here. I divide my observations about environmental effects to environmental control and environmental change.
Environmental control involves factors such as time use, ability to relocate, and space to act. Time use consists of the time required for different tasks. The ability to relocate is defined by the worker’s freedom to determine where they do the work. Space to act denotes the level of freedom to do the work in divergent ways. All these factors have in common how they involve the worker’s ability to control the details of their immediate work environment. The clearest example of this is the ability to work remotely without the need for locally installed software. This is one of the most liberated forms of labor in relation to location, but the tool used must also be a piece of software suited for this. Environmental control also includes how you use the available time. This detail defines what portion of the time spent on work takes place in environments related to a specific tasks or even doing work at all.
Environmental change, on the other hand, consist of the transformations that labor produces in the material environment and its parts. Such change can be further divided into intended changes and by-products. Intended changes are the differences produced based on the purpose of the work, such as its products. A writer produces text which becomes a part of the world, which was thus changed by the act of writing. By-products, on the other hand, consist of all the other changes made to the environment. Even though most of these results are detrimental such as pollution, they can also include fortunate accidents.
The significance of environmental control is intimately tied to the significance of many of the factors discussed above. It is a matter of both a sense of control over your own situation and the ability to find alternatives suited for your needs. Besides such familiar factors, it also relates to opportunities for self-development, and the ability to expand on familiar procedures within the observed boundaries.
More efficient use of time provides opportunities for self-development. The less time a worker must spend on their primary tasks, the more time they will have for other activities. Especially in situations where you must spend a set number of hours at work, using such surplus time to develop your skills will improve future results. Time savings can come from structured authoring, for example, whenever you must update recurring parts or build new publications from prior pieces of content. These procedures help writers avoid repetitive and largely mechanical work. That then leaves more time for self-development, and the parts of writing which benefit from planning.
A tool that provides elbow room from environmental constraints also can also help you find new procedures suited for your needs. For example, many have more freedom to choose where they do their work because the disruption in routines that the covid pandemic caused was addressed with suitable tools, many of which remain in use. Such operating models do not only meet immediate needs, either. Their effects on recruitment, for example, can also result in wider organizational restructuring. The option to work remotely, in particular, expands the number of available experts in many fields.
Environmental change’s significance comes from the availability of desirable changes and the avoidability of undesirable changes. Availability also includes what a tool makes possible to achieve. The products of structured authoring and direct text editing are very different, for example. The products of structured authoring also include all the related components and arrangements that can both be used outside related initial documents, after all. Of course, direct text editing instead allows for more situational layouts. To try and avoid undesirable results, you should account at least for risks that endanger the worker or the products, and environmental impact. Such risks include the lack of backups and the absence of revisions as a feature.
Cognitive differences
The affected ways of thinking contain a distinction between differences in parsing and processing. Differences in parsing determine what constitutes your experience of the world. Differences in processing, on the other hand, relate to the means used to handle information when a task requires it.
Parsing
Your personal representation of your environment is based both on the available stimuli and on the ways in which you parse those stimuli. Any conscious parsing is preceded by a default parsing which remains unique to the individual. Such ways of parsing are composed of a combination of innate tendencies and distinctions based on individual experience. The effects of tools come in the form of such experiences, of course.
Essential forms of such parsing include itemization, classification, personal boundaries, and expectations.
Itemization consists of the ways in which entities are distinguished from one another. Everyone shares some of the same distinctions. However, boundaries that are not derived from directly observable shapes leave more room for variation between people. Such boundaries include those of locations and institutions, for example. If an institution’s boundaries are in part determined by which people it encompasses, the periphery will include borderline cases such as rental workers and alumni. At least those tools that generate involvement, such as various platforms, can affect how you parse such participation-based boundaries as part of your environment. Even more interesting situations in your directly observable environment involve tools which are either susceptible to various forms of interference or which let you measure interference. Under such circumstances, you can experience the sources of interference as larger than their apparent dimensions because you must also account for the distance of that interference. In addition to extremely sensitive scientific instruments, a familiar example of tools susceptible to interference would be sound reproduction systems.
In principle, itemization is merely classification where each class consists of a specific entity’s parts. However, classification proper as a form of parsing instead involves dividing distinct entities into classes based on their features. The same entities can be members in several classes. As such, novel classifications need not affect prior ones. For example, a new classifications like that can concern suitability to be processed with the help of a specific tool. This classification has its uses, and it does not require adjusting prior classifications around the same entities. Such classifications can also be more subtle, such as classifying the parts of text that you read according to a structured authoring schema which would let you recreate the current layout. For example, an old manual can have images positioned in relation to other content in ways which structured authoring can only recreate with either identifiers with complex sets of related rules in a style sheet, or the use of other elements as scaffolding.
Defining your own boundaries involves a distinction between the self and the rest. Even though the limits of your body can initially seem like the one true distinction for this, the boundaries of the self are surprisingly flexible. Eyeglasses and other aids, as well as decorations such as piercings or hair dyes, can meld into a person’s sense of being complete. In place of such extensions, others can feel alienated from some of their body parts, or even only see themselves as a consciousness which controls a body. Maurice Merleau-Ponty discusses this relationship between a body and extensions of it in works such as Phenomenology of Perception (1962). Mind how such self-perceptions need not be permanent. They can also be situational. For example, tools can thus temporarily be assimilated in their user’s sense of self as a worker.
Expectations are models which complete partially observed chains of events. Such completion is largely dependent on generalizations. As a result, the limited availability of situational experiences for such generalizations entails that people must complement missing parts with experiences and models from other contexts. The expectations that you can form also vary in terms of their specificity and accuracy. More specific expectations are more intimately tied to situational details. Sadly, an expectation can also be partly or completely inaccurate.
Tools’ effects on expectations largely involve their own use. The resulting familiar models can result in those expectations becoming generalized into other situations as well, though. For example, the ability to position images relatively freely within DOCX files does not also apply to text editors for structured content without intense effort to add a framework that supports this feature. Such expectations derived from habituation can make a transition to structured authoring be tinged by disappointment, though.
The significance of tool-related differences in cognitive parsing is subsumed into their part in the the wider field of observable relations. In the absence of related misunderstandings, even the less obvious relations remain a part of the world. This is simply a matter of the diversity of divisions that the facts support. Some such relations can only be observed with proper aid. I take it that everyone recognizes the awareness that comes with age on how others possess social roles beyond your personal interactions with them as an illustration of such differences. To children, people like teachers and parents are fully defined by those roles. Growing up tends to entail the ability to understand how those people also live their lives outside such roles. A part of this change is how your experience of these people gets parsed and the resulting classifications, as your awareness of adult realities increases.
The effects of tools in this respect derive from their presence as part of the workers’ environments and even more strongly from the changes in that environment made with them. The presence of tools affects parsing through models expressed by their design, and their relationship with the rest of your environment. My example above of how a worker’s sense of self may extend to include their tools is a case of such a relation between them and a tool.
However, the changes to the environment done with a tool have a greater impact here. Andy Clark, for example, addresses the effects on how conceptions develop as a result of such changes to your environments in his book Being There (1997). Different tools are a necessary part of the construction of encompassing human environments through architecture and technology. As Clark emphasizes, such processed environments to no small degree determine the cognitive models available to their inhabitants. For example, smart devices which provide constant mutual availability change how their users conceive distance, being present, and appropriate research. The results can be contrasted with conceptions from eras before such devices became common. Only now distant things can always be present, and many are sated by search results as a form of knowledge. Before, we had to rely on rumors, instead.
At a smaller scale, systems for structured authoring can shape how both their users and users of these systems’ products conceive the available forms for manuals and similar documents. Web manuals, where users can control the shown content, and manuals based on the various forms of extended reality require structured content. Them becoming commonplace enough could change the default expectations that people have for manuals’ features. I have previously discussed user-controlled web manuals here. Structured authoring and extended reality can combine through DoX VAD and our collaboration with ZEA, who provide browser-friendly 3D models.
Processing
Thinking is also doing. Tasks for such cognitive work include remembering, relating, and expressing. Tools can both change related habits and be used as part of such cognitive work.
In a broad sense, remembering means preserving and returning to mind prior perceptions and products of thought. However, it is not a matter of storing such things and then retrieving them later. Remembering is dissecting, prioritizing, and reconstructing. As such, support for it can consist of improvements to how memorable the relevant parts are, and to how reliably what is recalled resembles the source. External memory aids from notepads to hard drives are obvious examples of the latter kind of support.
Relating covers a wide variety of forms of thinking such as inferences and reframing. Such forms of processing involve connecting pieces of mental content to one another using the means available for it. For example, inferences are ultimately conceptions derived from relations between states of affairs. To do so, you relate presumed facts to each other with inferential methods. Such inferential methods can be valid and reliable, only reliable, or neither. Thus, support for inferences consists of making better, situationally appropriate inferential methods available, and of help in recognizing which states of affairs are relevant. Fact checkers and statistical calculations, for example, help you relate facts in ways which improve the reliability of the available inferences.
Expressing things does not commonly get seen as a form of mental processing. However, it is a matter of translating those mental contents to public messages that others can comprehend. Such messages are not limited to statements, queries, and commands worded to other people. They also include messages to animals and computers that you intend them to process in set ways, for example. You can assist expressing things with, for example, technologies which let you reach your target audiences more easily, as well as clear user interfaces. In this respect, a user interface is a language with which the user conveys their requests to the system.
The difference between adjusting habits and being used as part of thinking lies in whether the involved forms of processing generalize beyond the use of the tool.
Habits become adjusted when the ways in which a tool functions become available as models that affect other thinking. For example, Daniel Dennett calls such models, when they are available to apply consciously, tools for thinking. Examples of such tools for thinking, such as structuring other selection processes as parallels to natural selection, are the focus of his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (Dennett, 2014). Unlike tools for thinking, not all such models need to be consciously applied or even be available for conscious examination.
Narratives have several such uses. This includes the use of narrative devices to make other mental content easier to remember, to relate it in various ways, and to express it in an easy to understand manner. For example, many mnemonics are based on building connections between details in the form of a narrative continuum. For purposes of relating, narratives and their plot frameworks let you construct parallels to help process otherwise difficult or currently only partially understood events and actions. Like this, you can characterize details such as how current passes though resistors and other components as a story from a beginning to an end. The effects associated with each component then become parallels to different story events such as paths diverging at a parallel circuit, or an exhausting challenge at a resistor.
The use of tools as a part of thinking, on the other hand, means doing a part of the thinking with said tools. The contacts list of a mobile phone replaces your brains as the place where phone numbers are stored. A phone also lets you express your thoughts better with the help of prepared corrections and recommended additions to your writing. This is a matter of letting the tool or other aid do the processing. The difference with just similar support lies in how the primary task for that form of thinking is allotted to the tool: Finding phone numbers and word search happen outside the head, even though the final word choice, for example, lies with the user. An example of just aid would be questions or tips which help recall such as a list of recognizable events and other things related to number values which correspond to parts of a phone number. This can include years, placements, and the like. Word searches are aided by dictionaries which let you check how well words that you consider fit the situation.
Both David Chalmers (2011) and Andy Clark (2019) have discussed the kind of thinking which extends to include tools in their TEDx-presentations. Despite how this conception of the role of aids has connections to the extensions to your sense of self that I discussed above, neither position requires that the other be adopted as well. The user of a tool can apply aids as cognitive extensions without viewing them as parts of themselves. Likewise, external things seen as extensions of yourself need not be cognitive aids. Piercings, for example, are not generally considered aids, unless you redefine aid just to include them. Oftentimes, such extensions do also lead to an extended sense of self, though. In the case of smartphones, such changes in your sense of self tend to only become evident when the cognitive aids that they offer are inoperable or unavailable.
Processing mental content is processing the world at its source. This relationship between the mind and the world forces order on the world as you understand it. The world itself contains more than anyone may remember, understand, or express. Boundaries must be set to make sense of that world. Otherwise, you would only have access to a continuous, drowning tidal wave of stimuli.
In the same vein, writing and technical writing in particular are forms of further organizing this bounded set of mental content into situationally appropriate forms. They are procedures which deepen this default relationship to the world, especially in terms of expressing knowledge in useful ways. Besides tool-agnostic methods, the tools used for writing also provide ways to develop new ways to remember, relate, and express things. For example, the use of identifiers to designate the positions for recurring content with references, that structured authoring involves, is a form of remembering. Such relations are saved as part of the content format. When this content changes, the user need not remember or otherwise track where all the recurring portions lie inside the documents to be updated. The system remembers in their stead what its users have told it about this.
Workers’ relationships to themselves
I have discussed above how tools can become incorporated in their user’s sense of self. This relation is not quite the one which determines their part of workers’ relationships to themselves, though. Regardless of whether the user sees their tool as an extension of themselves, they will see themselves reflected in their tools. This is a matter of seeing the person who handles a specific tool. In this case, that person is the worker themselves but they see themselves from that external perspective.
This relationship consists of both a description of yourself from this angle, and an evalutation of the described details.
Self-image
The person who uses a tool may focus their attention on the specifics of their tool and from there, to themselves as someone who handles that specific tool. When you are in that position, you can then derive other observations about yourself from the tool used. You are the kind of person who knows how to handle that tool. You are the kind of person who does the tasks that that tool is suited for. You are the person in whose hands that tool has found its way. Either you or someone else may be behind that choice of tool. Each alternative carries different meanings.
To use a specific tool, you usually must know how to do so. Such expertise is an aspect of the user. At the same time, users are often also aware of gaps in their expertise which indicate avenues for further development. I do not claim that being a better worker holds intrinsic value. However, such awareness still lets you set related goals. For example, the correct use of structured authoring software requires you to understand both its features and the greater whole that the relations between those features constitute. An otherwise exceptional technical writer who uses such a system for the first time often finds themselves conscious of both the promises that it holds and their need to learn how to implement that potential. Such awareness means that you must confront the need to learn such things that will make itself known when you handle any tool that requires special expertise.
The use of a specific tool entails that the person who uses it works in ways for which the tool is suited. Since different tools let you reach shared tasks’ goals in different ways, a specific way of doing tells you in more detail about that worker’s role. Ultimately, the task of a writer is to write, for example. However, a writer who writes using a structured authoring system must also act as an information architect to some extent, unless their organization is large enough to leave designing those structures to only some users. Besides just writing the content, their tasks would then include differentiating content, and designing the required identifiers. Structured authoring may also require that some of the writers involved can manage style sheets. These different job descriptions determine each participant’s role as part of a greater whole. As such, to recognize your current role based on your tools means being able to focus more effectively on your responsibilities. When a worker recognizes their own role, it can also help them understand what other tasks require attention from them or from others.
Additionally, to use a specific tool is a sign of alternatives to it having been excluded for whatever reason. These reasons are why the worker uses this specific tool. Outside inevitable circumstances, such reasons involve choices that someone made. It can be a matter of price, ideas about the tool’s value, or how the power to make such decisions is divided between them and others, for example. When the choice is the worker’s own, handling the resulting tool can teach them more about the values that guide their decision-making, and possibly the need to reconsider those values. When others made the decision, it tells the worker about those people’s values instead, and thus of their own position relative to said values. Such awareness of others’ evaluations is a part of your self-image regardless of whether or not you accept their conclusions. If, for example, an expert is denied specialized tools despite their expert opinion that those tools would improve results, this tells them how much their expertise weighs on the scales relative to whichever other factors matter to those responsible for the decision.
Self-image can be divided between at least your self-conception, a second person perspective on yourself, and your ideal self. A second person perspective on yourself observes you from the outside, and an ideal self expresses what you want to be. The overlap and differences between these forms of self-image constitute a person’s conception on how well the reality of their situation matches up with their true sense of self and ideals for themselves. They thus determine in part whether that person feels alienated from their reality, or that it expresses their true self and related values.
The effects of tools on their user’s self-image that I discussed above thus provide a means to assess how well their conception of themselves in the role of a worker fits these expressions of their self-image. Tools are both external to the self and become extensions of the self in that context. This makes them an easily observable sign for otherwise invisible aspects of the self. Unlike others’ assessments of you, the tools that they designate for you can be observed directly, and they reflect the same values.
Self-evaluation
In addition to the descriptions that form your self-image, a complete self-conception also includes a variety of evaluations. Do note how such evaluations do not necessarily match reality, though. Even when such conceptions are truthful, they can never be comprehensive. They thus never fully determine your value as a person.
Here, I will discuss a person’s own sense of their value, and their conceptions of how others value them. Both cases only involve the value experienced in relation to your role as a worker.
A person’s conception of their own value comes from the relationship between their self-image and their values. Despite how such self-evaluations are crucial for how you experience your value, even such personal assessments should not be treated as definitive of your value. They only tell of the degree of overlap between your current self-conception and current ideal self. Details which affect this degree of overlap are generally within personal control to some extent, at least. As such, such evaluations are never absolute. Rather, they occur in relation to your present perspective. When your self-conception and ideal self are not matched, that can itself encourage change.
Tools’ part in self-evaluations includes their symbolic and practical significance, respectively. Their symbolic significance as part of self-evaluations comes from those tools as extensions of the self. Both the tool and its user often become symbolically seen as cut from the same cloth regardless of any complicating factors. When the tool was selected by another, it reflects the value given to the worker. Practical significance, on the other hand, consists of factors which affect how usable the tool is. Limited tool usability can easily make the user devalue a role that involves the use of said tool, and they will likely want to escape that role. Whereas greater usability may make a tool’s user appreciate access to that tool as part of their life.
Symbolic significance includes the factors related to the tool which express appreciation or lack thereof to the person who uses it. I will mainly focus on others’ evaluations here, even if everyone also participates in such assessing of themselves. Such appreciation can be based on, for example, a recognition of your expertise and its value. It can be expressed in various ways. For current purposes, the most important among them is accounting for and respecting requests for tools during acquisitions. To ignore such requests when they do not involve unreasonable expenditures signals that the related expertise is devalued. For most organizations, 50 000 euros each year, for example, is not an easy investment in writing tools. Such expenditure is justified when the value gained through writing would be comparable to the value added by heavy machinery such as front loaders in their use contexts. A ten percent investment on top of a lone writer’s salary for specialized tools suited for their tasks is a closer parallel to the necessary maintenance costs for field workers’ gear, though. Minimal investments in tools are often not the most reasonable alternative. Rather, such treatment expresses that the task is treated as a necessary evil. In this case, the worker responsible for that task gets an equal amount of respect in relation to their role. Their minimum necessary tool for the task acts as a reminder of how the value of their work is seen.
The effect that a tool’s practical significance has on its user’s dignity comes from the feel of using the tool. Even though pleasant to use tools can also possess derivative symbolic significance, these sensations relate to the user experience itself. It is hard to feel dignified doing a task when the tool provided for it is clumsy or otherwise unpleasant. Meanwhile, fluent to use or even just beautiful tools can improve how you experience the associated work. Such positive experiences of that type of work can make the task feel right for you in the long term as well. This is an expression of the value given to that work as part of your life.
Summary
A worker’s tools are an extension of them, with the help of which their labor changes their environment. The role of tools in work’s overall significance is not central but it manifests in numerous ways. You can divide such effects to their significance in relation to the work, the world, and the workers themselves, respectively.
The relationship between tools and the work itself expresses itself through the worker’s relationship with the tools, and the new forms of work that they enable. Their relationship to tools is about how the worker feels when they use the tools, and how they perceive them otherwise. In other words, it is a matter of how well the tools are suited for them, and their feelings of preference towards those tools. Suitability leads to fluency which in turn affects how rewarding the work feels. A preference for your tools or lack thereof easily generalizes to the work itself.
New available methods and goals define the new forms of work that a tool enables. New methods allow both the worker’s perception of available approaches to their work to expand, and for them to do the work more effectively. Improved efficiency leaves them with more time for recovery and self-development. Newly presented goals can fit or clash with the worker’s previously held related values. Regardless, such a more encompassing understanding of the nature of the task itself also provides the grounds for developments in novel directions because that work can no longer appear as supporting no alternatives in those respects.
Workers relationships to the world include both concrete and cognitive differences induced by tools. Concrete differences relate to personal relationships and environmental effects. These effects consists of the changes in the world that the tools either allow or require. Personal relationships are a matter of organizing everyone’s responsibilities among a group of workers. A specific tool could, for example, allow more people to participate in distinct roles. Such innate means to organize participants affect the work’s level of organization and connections between workers. Environmental effects, on the other hand, consist of environmental control and environmental change. Environmental control is defined by your ability to decide on details such as your own location during work. Changes in the environment can be intended changes, such as the work’s expected products, or unintended changes such as pollution. Some tools for a given task can generate obviously distinct results, such as the independently managed components from structured authoring.
Cognitive differences concern changes in thinking that come from means of parsing and processing available to workers. Parsing involves the ways in which a worker divides their environment into entities and categories. The availability of new parsing principles in part helps processing because you can then consciously decide which classifications to apply. Other types of processing related to tools are further forms of relating, remembering, and expressing mental content. Tools allow you to, for example, shift the strain of remembering to aids, and to expand the available means of expressing your thoughts to new formats.
Finally, the relationship that tools have on how a worker relates to themselves contains produced differences in their self-image, and in how valued they feel. This is a matter of how you perceive yourself as a user of the tool in question. Such perceptions include the ways in which you understand your role and position relative to your environment, and how well this understanding appears to match your ideals. For example, others’ decisions on which tools a worker has access to convey in part of how those others view the value that worker’s contributions. Your sense of your own worth can in part depend on such observations on how others value you. This is primarily a matter of the symbolic significance that the provided tools convey. For example, a cheap tool can be a sign that related types of work are not seen as worth investing in. Additionally, the practical significance of the tool and thus, how usable it is, affects how the worker values their position as its user. This influences their choices about their future, such as how readily they will continue in their current role.
All this also applies to writers. It is easy to assume that the default tools for writing are suited for any of the tasks that they face when everyone has a keyboard, and most white-collar workers also possess licenses for default office software suites. There is a wide variety of tools available specifically to writers, though. This includes both specialized keyboards with macro buttons, ergonomic shapes, or appropriate mechanical switches, and specialized software such as systems for structured authoring, or proofreaders. Writers deserve tools that meet their actual needs. As writers, they are best-suited to assess what those needs are, and the benefits to their work from different tools. Hopefully, the observations that I discussed have indicated how important the correct choice of tools is, and how it is appropriate to expect access to them.