"Are you even TC?"

Has been my most existential question since starting my graduate career. It's less straddling the line than existing well outside while pulling the methods of TC and rhetoric over to my interests.

The issue being that technical communication is so universal in its application online that the object of study has indeed broadened to areas more aligned traditionally with comm studies and the general humanities. That leads to reactionary traditionalism at times.

That traditionalism manifests as a desire to see the TC object of study grounded directly in industry or industry-like organizations. It then tries to push the rest out into rhetoric and adjacent fields, but that overlooks how embedded principles of tech comm are in online comm.