I assume that educators would have less ethical issues, compared to someone actually working in the industry. Being a professor at a university provides access and permissions to use someone else's works for educational exercises, even if that includes slight alterations or even just making up random figures and charts displaying data. This is the opposite from someone actually working in the field as a technical communicator, who could easily lose their job for doing something like that.

It makes the job of technical communicator tougher when there is no clear line drawn in regards to ethics in design. However, I think a good idea would be consider how they would display the information if it was only in text. Would you be okay with altering percentages in a corporate memo or newsletter? Probably not. Therefore, technical communicators should stick with their current practices and apply that to the new medium because the only thing that is changing is the method of delivery.

I believe that this could be a good and bad thing. It's good because it will hopefully prevent people from making bad ethical decisions. It could also be perceived as a bad tactic if we think about the previous unit, as far as fair use. An example we discussed would be academia and plagiarism. Plagiarism is always used as a tool of threatening students to make ethical decisions, but fair use is never talked about thoroughly. If we are going to emphasize consequences, we have to pay equal attention to teaching communicators how to do things the proper way.

I completely agree. As a journalism major, we are told that everything we do is for the audience's benefit. This is similar to philosophy to what is taught in technical communication. The audience is always the first priority.

Using typography to decrease readability serves no purpose to anyone. In technical communication, the point of your job is to share information with the audience. Purposely counteracting with that is unethical and irresponsible as a content creator. Why create something no one will be able to interpret?

I don't believe that more information is necessary to manage this new rhetorical power. This is all about judgement. Technical communicators, or anyone in any profession, should have good enough judgement to determine if they're designing documents responsibly, displaying truthful and accurate data and information.

As a technical communicator, you should take the lessons you've learned about ethics in your field and carry that into the area of document design. Because there is not a lot of information concerning this topic, it's the creators job to create content responsibly. If they are unsure if something they've created is ethical, they should ask.

Airbrushing photographs has been a huge issue in journalism over the past ten years. Recent feminist movements are against it because it indirectly body shames the person whose picture is altered. This is an unethical act because you are misrepresenting that person to the public.

This is an important issue to bring up. Correctly displaying data is an ethical issue because you would never want your audience to be intentionally mislead, especially when displaying controversial information such as voter turnout and community crime reports.

I like to credit this crossover and the consolidation of multiple duties to the technical revolution. Because of the current ease of accessing the necessary tools and programs, it's easier for technical communicators to create all of their own visual content rathe than outsourcing.