---
title: "Presentation recording: Specialization myopia syndrome and the content journey"
date: 2023-03-07
description: "Video recording Audio only Presentation description Slides Video recording <iframe width="
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/specialization-myopia-and-content-journey
---

> For AI agents: a documentation index is available at https://idratherbewriting.com/llms.txt. Markdown versions of all pages are available by appending .md to any page URL.

# Presentation recording: Specialization myopia syndrome and the content journey

> This is a recording of a presentation called *Specialization myopia syndrome and the content journey*, which I gave to a company's private tech comm event. With their permission, I'm posting it here. You can watch the recording via YouTube or listen the audio file as a podcast.

## Video recording

[Video: YouTube video player](https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y-59SEsm07o)

(I edited out the discussion segments.)

## Audio only

If you just want to listen to the audio only, here it is:

**Listen here:**

[Audio](https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/podcasts/tcs_medidata_preso_edited.mp3)

[![](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/apple_podcasts.png)](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id-rather-be-writing-podcast/id277365275) [![](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/watchonyoutubeblack.png)](https://www.youtube.com/@idratherbewriting) [![](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/spotify.png)](https://open.spotify.com/show/4HeOZfPGMMfViOhVS40QBD)

## Presentation description

Here’s the presentation title and description:

> **Specialization myopia syndrome and the content journey**
>
> Technology’s trajectories include an ever-increasing acceleration towards complexity and specialization. As a result, documentation portals begin to mirror this same specialized focus, with a lot of niches and deep knowledge into single lines of tech. What gets lost in this world of hyper-specialization is the broad view of products and how they fit and flow together. The broad view — what the product is, what it’s used for, what are all the pieces involved, who is the intended audience, how does it fit within the larger landscape — gets traded for a hundred tiny micro-views of each part and how to implement them. The larger developer journey, if there is one, gets muffled by micro-paths leading everywhere and nowhere.
>
> Because technical writers are generalists (who help shape docs across many different product groups, platforms, and services), we are the last hope for some semblance of higher-level stories and journeys in documentation. As technical writers, we can “specialize” in big-picture thinking, in shaping the developer’s journey through a systems-level product landscape. We can try to connect all the fragments together into a coherent whole. But moving in this direction runs against the flow of specialization, in part because much of what is developed is still searching for shape and form even as the code itself is being written.

## Slides

[![](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/spec-myopia-title-slide.png)](https://idbwrtng.com/tcs_preso)