Discursive analysis of two elements of IT discourse reveals features that allow one to be classified as ‘professional’ and the other as relatively ‘non-professional’. The question is then raised as to whether the movement from one discourse to the other might be characterized as ‘humanizing’, or at least in tune with some concept of humanism. Discussion of this possibility in terms of Renaissance humanism, Bernstein’s sociolinguistics and Buber’s metaphysics concludes that, in many respects, the apparent humanization of technical discourse is in fact segmenting social readerships, separating production from end-consumption. Such segmentation, and the mediation that supports it, is seen as a general problem confronting the reigning ideologies of localization.