• Montana Journalism Review: Ethical Issues Between Blogging and Journalism

• University of Minnesota: Into the Blogosphere: The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution

• ACM Hypertext 2000: Making a Successful Case for a Hypertextual Doctoral Dissertation

• The Virtual Locker Room in Classroom Electronic Chat Spaces: The Politics of Men as Other: (1999)

• First “Born Digital” dissertation to be accepted in U.S.: 1998 (as cted in Chronicle of Higher Ed: 2005)
  

Here’s the full bib citation:

Boese, C. (2006) “Challenging the Power Structure.” Montana Journalism Review. Summer 2006, Number 35. pp. 8-10.

Challenging the Power Structure

 

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

By Christine Boese

Picture the prototypical American “town square,” the idealistic vision of Jeffersonian democracy: gathering places that people used to pass through almost every day, places that were the center of community life. Announcements and ideas were disseminated in these spaces. Anyone could set up a soapbox and start talking, although, as Clem Work has found in his research into the enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Act in Missoula in the early 20th century, there were very real attempts to squelch certain kinds of talk in some public squares.

Where do people gather to participate in their communities now? Aside from street festivals and parades, the few civic gatherings that remain take place in restricted or private spaces, in schools, churches, shopping malls, sports arenas. We have protections in the Constitution not only for speech, but also for the right to assemble. Activists of many stripes are bemoaning the loss of the true “commons,” spaces that are set aside as the public domain, shared spaces that belong to all.

Journalists often have an explicit goal to cover community activities, and as such, they monitor and report on what happens in the “commons.” But as the commons disappear, more often than not, journalists seek entry into the private spaces where decisions that affect communities are made. One unintended result of this shift is that journalists focus less on their communities and instead become willing satellites circling a class of power brokers, somewhat like the courtiers during Shakespeare’s time.

A journalist has an ethical obligation to go where people are exercising their right to assemble, to monitor and cover the community, even if that community is a “global village.” While face-to-face commons are disappearing, there still are places where people gather, discussing the events that affect their lives, participating in democracy in a most direct way.

And in the online “blogosphere,” people are gathering. They’re writing and editing their own customized interactive “newspapers” with headline readers and research they’ve done on their own, weighing and analyzing, making up their own minds instead of letting some editor they never voted for in the employ of some mass media conglomerate tell them what to think.

While the term “blog” was accepted into the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2004,1 few people profess to know very much about weblogs or the blog movement. If they do have an impression, it’s often of self-obsessed teenagers putting too much private information online, or of anonymous and irresponsible talk radio-style ranting of the far right and left.

The problem is that blog software and the blog movement are two very different things. Blog software is a tool that can be used for a wide range of purposes. The “blog movement” is a social phenomenon having a very real impact at this moment in history.

The vast majority of what’s being put online using blog software has very little to do with the “blog movement” per se. There are cooking recipe group blogs. About.com was converted to blog software several years ago. The University of Minnesota library is giving students blog space for learning, a project called UThink.2 Harvard Law School is using blogs to supplement teaching and discussions on legal issues.3 I have a poetry blog, my own idiosyncratic Norton Anthology, if you will.4

I often tell people that blog software is a poor person’s content management system. It’s like an empty coffee cup. What you pour into the cup is only bound by the limits of your imagination.

The database behind blog software is a terrific tool to hold all kinds of information for collaborative interactive access. I believe blog software will gobble up the entire Web because of the power of syndication (RSS) and headline feed readers.5

The “blog movement” is another thing altogether, and it’s having considerable impact on journalism and journalistic ethics.

What the blog movement really does is reclaim the public commons for something that could approximate participatory democracy. Bloggers are having an impact on politics in the United States, most prominently at the national level. Increasingly, with grassroots political organizing, a tool called “Meetups,”6 and citizen journalism, their impact is also beginning to be felt at state and local levels.

Why would journalists be leery of the blog movement? Perhaps its massive size 7 and cacophony of voices are off-putting. Unlike with the public square, interactive online spaces place no limits on the number of soapboxes, and interfaces make rude “interruptions” impossible. Headline feed readers assist in the sorting and editing process, and other evolving features online let readers know where the crowds are gathering in the commons, and what ideas are being discussed there.8 In that respect, the movement of crowds online resembles a political caucus, where participants vote with their feet.

A journalist wouldn’t expect every participant at a public hearing to be credible and quotable, but most often I hear journalists dismissing blogs because all bloggers aren’t credible or reliable sources. Why should they be? Would a journalist give prominence to and quote any person on the street, even the drunk that comes stumbling out of a bar?

This electronic commons is also a hybrid, because it’s a publishing space as well as a social space, and that gives a different kind of dialogic voice to the movement. While one person at a public hearing may have a nutty reason for opposing a particular change in the city law, that person didn’t used to have the power to publish that opinion and distribute it widely.

And that brings us to the most crucial issue between journalists and bloggers: power.

The folks who asked me to write this article probably expected me to discuss blogging codes of ethics like the excellent one found at cyberjournalist.net,9 or the “pledge” citizen journalists had to take at Dan Gillmor’s now failed “Bayosphere” project.10

Or perhaps they wanted me to discuss the common complaint made by bloggers against mainstream media, that traditional media methods are too cloaked in a black box and could be ethically suspect, so members of the blogging community often advocate for holding themselves to higher standards of ethical transparency than the mainstream press currently follows.

Those are all important issues because they deal with accountability and corruption, but the reason they are concerned with accountability and corruption is power. Power corrupts. If social and political power were not in play in the day-to-day workings of the mainstream press AND the blogosphere, none of this would be an issue. Until now, mainstream media has been a fairly exclusive gatekeeper to those who hold power.

Journalists approach power brokers in exclusive places on behalf of their readers/listeners/viewers. They must work with their feet in two worlds: the world of the power brokers, and the world of the ordinary people they serve. Corruption and serious ethical lapses in journalism usually happen when a power broker convinces a journalist to use the power of communication in service of the broker instead of the people. Journalists can be targets of such seductions just as surely as politicians can, because they sit at choke points of power, the power of the filter that says, “This gets published this way,” and “this doesn’t get published at all.” There are people who would like to influence that filter for their own benefit. A journalist may even see a way to personally benefit by influencing the filter.

And so long as the world determined and defined by that set of filters is the only game in town, that world rules.

But then along come the bloggers. The blog movement has risen up in open rebellion against the common practices of mainstream media in a self-appointed role as a check and balance against a non-elected, non-governmental entity that nonetheless wields great power. One major sector of the blogosphere devotes itself entirely to media criticism.

Why should bloggers have any power over huge media entities? Why should words disseminated over cyberspace, the words of millions of bloggers, amount to anything except a rising chorus of babble? If ethics are about how one uses power responsibly according to a set of values based on something other than personal gain, would bloggers need ethics if they had no real power?

A peculiar thing is happening to ordinary people in the United States. They may be participating in the public commons in cyberspace on their own time, but their employers are becoming interested in monitoring what they have to say. Unlike when you speak words into the air, words uttered in cyberspace live forever in the ethers, in Google’s long memory. And some people who have signed their names to their words online are losing their jobs over what they have written.

Generally, one would assume the First Amendment right to free speech and freedom to assemble would cover a person in such instances. However, employers who would restrict or monitor employee speech acts in cyberspace could seemingly respond, “Why of course you have freedom of speech. You are free to speak all you want, just as you also are free to not work here.”

Bloggers, dissenting radio stations with significant audiences but few advertisers, and divergent voices can be seen as a threat by powerful people who are willing to use their power to restrict such voices. Perhaps that’s because, as the writers of the U.S. Constitution understood, speech itself is powerful, simply the power of a voice speaking its truth. The kings and lords of our world amass power and wealth at levels that are hard to imagine, yet it appears some of them tremble in the face of free and dissenting speech.

What, then, is the most ethical act a person can engage in right now? What would that radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine have done? Many journalists decry the fact that a number of bloggers are not using their real names and instead adopt pseudonyms on their sites. This, they say, is a lapse in ethics and it undermines the credibility of these sites.

Bloggers, on the other hand, have to find a way to keep a steady paycheck while speaking their truths to power. Free speech uttered while warming one’s hands over a barrel fire under a bridge has very little communicative reach. Anonymity may breed irresponsibility and possibly risk libel, but which ethical value is higher, getting the story out, or putting it away to never see the light of day because the price of putting your name on it is too high?

Think of what our world would be like if the words of many pseudonymous writers in our past had never reached us, including that war correspondent and socialist Eric Blair, an advocate for clear and concrete writing and against the political use of language to deliberately lie and obfuscate. He did that all the while lying about his own identity and hiding behind the fake name of George Orwell.

Endnotes

1 “‘Blog’ Is Runaway Word Of Year.” Associated Press story at CBS News Dec.1 2004. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/01/print/main658433.shtml.

2 “Uthink: Blogs at the University Libraries.” University of Minnesota Libraries. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/.

3 “Weblogs at Harvard Law.” Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/.

4 Boese, C. Ed. (2006) “Headpiece Filled with Straw.” Retrieved 3/12/06 at http://www.serendipit-e.com/hollow.

5 I recommend starting at Bloglines.com or FeedDemon.com to try out some of the most user-friendly headline feed readers.

6 Meetup: World’s largest community of local Meetups, clubs, and groups!” Retrieved 3/14/06 at http://www.meetup.com.

7 At last count, Technorati.com says it is monitoring 30.5 million blogs (3/14/06).

8 Technorati.com is one of the most popular tools for finding out where the action is in the blogosphere on any given day. Other suitable sites are the Daypop Top 40 at Daypop.com and Blogpulse.com.

9 “A Blogger’s Code of Ethics.” Cyberjournalist.net. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/000215.php.

10 “Bayosphere Citizen Journalist Pledge.” Bayosphere. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://bayosphere.com/cjregister.

Download FreireBlogland04.pdf

Reprinted here with permission.

Full Citation:

Boese, C. (2004). The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution. In L.J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the blogosphere: Rhetoric, community, and culture of weblogs. Retrieved April 30, 2006, from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/the_spirit_of_paulo_freire.html.

By Christine Boese, Independent researcher

Abstract

Weblogs and knowledge-logs, or “blogs” and “klogs,” have emerged into the post-dot.com bubble online world as a notable (and often non-commercial) social phenomenon. While some hear echoes of Web homepage voices from the mid-1990s, the blogging phenomenon during the Iraq war may have taken Web cybercultures in new directions. This qualitative and exploratory research considers the viability and social effects of the altered web page phenomenon of blogs and klogs as they affect the lives of information workers, in public Internet spaces, and with implications for private intranets. It combines ethnographic observations from a single case within the Iraq warblog phenomenon with the   standpoints and personal observations from the author’s professional experience launching a klog inside CNN Headline News shortly after the war. It seeks to gain insight into the utopian and often unnecessarily technologically deterministic promise of a knowledge-log revolution and find points where the movement falls far short of that promise. While knowledge-logs can appear as efficient groupware   tools for organizations, klog interface features allow political openings to change corporate cultures in ways most groupware never intended, with a goal of a dialogic, critical pedagogy through workers helping and teaching other workers outside the realm of “official policy.” Personal blog sites of journalists in the employ of large, knowledge-commodity organizations such as Time Warner release this same tension into public spaces and reveal the very real disruption on a large scale that klogs can create on a small scale. Ideas and models presented by Paulo Freire and Michel de Certeau are used as a lens for one possible interpretation of the events studied from March to November 2003.

The Other Side: Josh Kucera
March 09, 2003

An introduction

Welcome to my blog, all. First, to introduce myself and The Other Side. I am a freelance journalist based in Erbil, in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. I am new to the world of blogging, and I heartily thank Chris Boese, a friend of a friend whom I’ve never even met, for suggesting this to me and for setting up all the technical stuff.

I chose to call the blog The Other Side for a couple of reasons. One, I want to show the other side of the news. I don’t intend for this site to be a substitute for the ordinary media, but as a complement to it. You can get good information from the New York Times, BBC and Associated Press. But you won’t hear unvarnished opinion from a guy on the ground, or what ordinary days are like for the people here: about pornographic movie theaters,     tragic love stories or the sunset over Erbil.

Secondly, “the other side” refers to the land outside America’s borders, a big place that most Americans, even well educated ones, are not very familiar with. Reading the news about the Middle East or Indonesia or Venezuela is as about as meaningful as watching a game of Risk if you don’ know what the streets smell like there or what people eat. I hope this blog can be a small substitute for that sort of experience. . . .

That’ll be it for today … soon to come will be more reports, focusing on particular issues, relating particular incidents, etc. Stay tuned.

Posted by Josh at 10:39 PM |Comments (16) |TrackBack (1)

Weblogs, or “blogs,” like the excerpt above, are a site of online communication that has sprung up in the margins around several forms of mainstream public discourses and professional communication practices, and in some cases become a deceptively powerful and somewhat erosive force in mainstream journalism–erosive in the sense that blogs have a dialogic and unobtrusive way of nibbling at established   mass media power bases, sometimes without institutional awareness.

As blogs enter mainstream public consciousness from the margins of the Internet where they originated, they bring a hidden and newly awakened army of interactive participants who may be experiencing the kinds of unsettling (to the powers that be) critical consciousness that is within the goals of an increasingly democratized culture such as Paulo Freire as an educator sought to foster. While blogs are now part and parcel of presidential campaigns, they really came into their own with the warblogs of the Iraq war in 2003.

For the purposes of this paper, a blog is defined as a regularly updated webpage using blogging software which functions as a database-driven, dynamic, content-focused shell (Carl, 2003, p 1, 3). Into that space, single authors or groups can take   any number of rhetorical stances and post creative and analytical source material and links, published with a reverse chronological order of most recent postings at the top, linked to a permanent archive through “permalinks.” While web pages are static, blogs are intended as part of an ongoing conversation through contextual “comments” bulletin boards attached to each post. Once installed, blogs require next to no technical knowledge to update and maintain. In addition, a social movement has sprung up around blogs, giving the technical   artifact meaning in a larger context, in what some call “neighborhoods” or “blog ecosystems.”

Klogs are simply blog software interfaces appropriated for company knowledge-management tools as a quick and easy, and participatory, content management system. Some firms may have IT departments build content management tools from scratch, often with uneven results due to usability difficulty. The sheer number of blog users online testifies to the ease of use for blog software, which may speak for their adoption for in-house klogs.

This qualitative and exploratory research considers the viability and social effects of the web page phenomenon of blogs and klogs as they affect the lives of information workers, in public Internet spaces with implications for private intranets. It combines ethnographic observations from a single case within the Iraq warblog phenomenon with the personal standpoints and observations from my professional experience launching a klog inside CNN Headline News shortly   after the war. It seeks to gain insight into the utopian and often unnecessarily technologically deterministic promise of a knowledge-log revolution and find   points where the movement falls far short of that promise.

The ethnographic methods employed in this qualitative study are informed by insider access to two separate sites. In each case, I participated on some level as a web designer and host and was an interested party in the blogs launched. While this may be seen as compromising the data gathered (in the case of the first site) or the personal observations (in the case of the second site), there is no other way that this information could have been obtained without being   one of the parties involved. The stories here would have remained invisible. But my standpoint must be claimed and foregrounded, from the perspective of   feminist standpoint theory as it affects scholarship (Rich, 1984), even while   distancing myself from the essentialism of identity politics to embrace a role more as a shifting cyborg hybrid from within the larger Time Warner organization (Haraway, 1991). According to Haraway, cyborgs are invisible and ubiquitous, “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to   mention state socialism” (153), without loyalties or origins, “committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity, it is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence” (151). In adopting such a role, my perspective becomes part of the story.

The two sites studied will be described in terms of ideas of “critical consciousness” (Freire, 1973) and “textual poaching” (de Certeau, 1984) in an effort to unpack the complex interplay of events through an Iraq war blog on a large scale and the launch of an intranet klog on a small scale.

Blogs as a site for research

Because 2003 was such a seminal year for blogging and bloggers, there is currently   little existing scholarship on blogs or klogs, other than the vast echo system bloggers have created themselves, a system the mainstream media is beginning to cover as a “beat.” The blogosphere shrugged itself into existence   most notably following the events of September 11, 2001, with a very small but   intensely interested audience (Carl, 2003). When regular communications broke down in New York City, personal blogs tracked the concerns of the many laid   off or employed tech workers. As war began against Afghanistan, conventions of warblogging also began to emerge. With the crash of the space shuttle and   the resignation of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, mainstream media became aware of blogs. Blogs may have fully landed on the scholarly radar in 2003 with the Iraq warblogs and the Howard Dean blogs. Undoubtedly, more articles and collections like this one are in preparation as well.

The usual popular and trade press articles have appeared, evangelizing blogs   and klogs as the next hot new thing (Heyboer, 2003; Lewis, 2004; Rosencrance,   2004; Creamer, 2004). At least one master’s thesis has been written (Carl   2003). In addition to a careful history of the blogging phenomenon (drawn largely   from bloggers’ own histories), Christine Carl conducted a significant   survey of blogger demographics and practices with more than 1,400 respondents   in the United States, analyzing age, race, employment status, income, and education   level, among other factors.

Most conference panels on blogs also first appeared in 2003, with papers such as Sybil Nolan’s from the proceedings at the Digital Arts and Culture   Conference in Melbourne, focusing on blogging’s impact on journalism (2003).

Jane B. Singer (2003) may have published the most complete study on the journalistic aspect of blogging to date, focusing not on blogs per se, but on the challenge to journalistic standards of professionalism by online journalists, particularly bloggers. Still, given the general dearth of scholarship on blogging and bloggers, there is more work to be done if blogging remains a significant social phenomenon   and not simply another Internet fad.

While also addressing the impact of warblogging on journalism, this paper attempts to situate the movement in the larger context of information workers crafting their products in both public and private work sites, and to look at the political   and social ramifications of those actions. As such, it considers all blogs to some degree as knowledge-logs.

The Other Side and OJO: Iraq Warblogs

The primary site studied using ethnographic methods are the Iraqi warblogs   of Joshua Kucera and Carolina Podesta. Both journalists worked for several years as foreign correspondents in Bosnia before going together to Erbil, Kurdistan,   in Northern Iraq just before the start of the war. I built and hosted these   sites, The Other Side, and OJO, on my domain, serendipit-e.com. Podesta’s   blog is entirely in Spanish, with a Google machine translation link on the side. Because I don’t speak Spanish, my understanding of the zeitgeist of this   blog remains rough, although I did sense that something literary and quite transcendent   was occurring for Carolina and her legion of fans. I gathered additional data   through personal correspondence with both Kucera and Podesta before and throughout   the war. Both had laptops and satellite phones, as well as freelance contracts, Kucera with TIME magazine, Podesta with an Argentine news service. While training   the journalists to use the software from a war zone, we discussed contingency   plans, but decided against outfitting the site for mobile blogging or “mo-blogging”   from cell phones. If their laptop access went down, they told me they had access to the Internet at various cybercafes.

Lest you think everyone in the Middle East hates America… I’ve had the Big Mac there, and it’s not bad. This restaurant is in Suleymaniya, there is also a fake McDonald’s advertisement in the soccer stadium in Erbil.

Posted by Josh at 12:11 PM |Comments (0) |TrackBack (0)

I first met Josh Kucera through a friend at work, and through him also met   Carolina Podesta, at the time his partner. I was working for CNN Headline News, writing the afternoon on-screen headline ticker Mondays through Fridays. In the time leading up to the start of the Iraq war, I was watching colleagues   prepare for the “embedding process,” going to D.C. and completing Pentagon training for chemical weapons and basic military rules in order to   travel with the units in which they would be reporting. Remembering the restrictions   on reporters during the first Gulf War, I was apprehensive about the embedding   process, even with good journalists in the units. I worried that their reports   would be censored by restricted satellite phone access, or worse, unconsciously   biased.

My reasons for offering to build blogs for Josh and Carolina were personal   as much as anything. I wanted to know I had a source on the ground in Iraq that   was independent of U.S. military control. I wanted to build their sites because   I wanted to read their blogs. At the time I had built several other blogs using   Movable Type, and I’d been following the warblogging movement closely.   It seemed that the most prominent names among the warbloggers were people in   the U.S., processing and reprocessing war coverage at a distance. “This   isn’t right,” I thought, “Independent, experienced reporters   in Iraq need to be blogging during this war. That’s what I want to read.”

About that same time, my employer, CNN, asked video journalist Kevin Sites, already in Iraq, to stop posting to his popular blog. That sealed my decision. Josh asked for permission to keep the blog from TIME magazine, since he had   an exclusive contract. TIME said as long as it was non-commercial and he wasn’t posting things TIME wanted to publish, he could create the blog. The same company   that owns CNN, Time Warner, owns TIME magazine.

My immediate supervisors at CNN Headline News knew I built and kept blogs, but given my on-air anonymity and relative unimportance to the news gathering   process within our organization, my extracurricular activities weren’t seen as a conflict to the performance of my duties as a ticker writer. I largely refrained from commenting about my employer on any of my personal blogs out   of ethical considerations.

Textual Poaching and Critical Consciousness

This research pulls together two frames, the Marxist radical pedagogical approach of Paulo Freire, who sought venues for dialogic teaching and learning outside   traditional classrooms, with the postmodern cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, who wrote on subversive ways ordinary people resist being defined by their workplaces   and by a consumer society. I believe these two lenses dovetail, as Freire escapes the often totalizing frame of Marxism with his emphasis on dialogic co-learning, and de Certeau’s writing on everyday practices can empower a more contingent   style of democratized knowledge-making in blogs, with a liberatory sense of   resistance even when workers are oppressed or dominated. Both look at what vibrates outside of areas of rigid control and professional editing.

While weblogs and knowledge-logs can appear as efficient groupware tools for organizations, klog interface features seem to allow political openings to change   corporate cultures in ways most groupware never intended, through a goal of   a dialogic, critical pedagogy of workers helping and teaching other workers   outside the realm of “official policy.” Given the unvarnished nature   of such in-house knowledge making, institutional controls on worker’s   minds and voices can be undermined, creating a tension between officially sanctioned   controls and policies and contingent and disciplinary knowledge or professional   expertise (Friedson, 1986; Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984; Edwards & Mercer,   1987; Geisler, 1994). Personal blog sites of journalists in the employ of large,   knowledge-commodity organizations such as Time Warner release this same tension   into public spaces and reveal the very real disruption on a large scale that   klogs can create on a small scale. As another journalist covering the war, I   was reading warblogs as my own kind of public knowledge-log, to expand my knowledge   of the subject I was covering by reading the postings of independent colleagues in the field.

Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, is concerned with workplace practices that live in the margins and engage in a kind of “textual poaching,”   as he writes:

Reading introduces an “art” which is anything but passive. …Imbricated within the strategies of modernity (which identify creation with the invention of a personal language, whether cultural or scientific), the procedures of     contemporary consumption appear to constitute a subtle art of “renters” who know how to insinuate their countless differences into the dominant text.  … Today this text no longer comes from a tradition. It is imposed by the generation of a productivist technocracy. It is no longer a referential book, but a whole society made into a book, into the writings of the anonymous law of production. (1984, p. xxii)

The practices of bloggers seem most clearly described in this quotation. While de Certeau’s study has to look hard to discover how the seemingly passive   readers find ways to “poach” on the dominant texts as a form of resistance, blogging during the Iraq war seemed to bring the resistance into   the open, as a more open rebellion. As a practicing journalist, Josh Kucera   was not typically someone in such open rebellion, although many warbloggers   outside of Iraq were. As we will see later, he resists becoming a “poster child” for the independent media movement. Even so, with his quiet and   observant posts from Erbil, Josh was “insinuating countless differences into the dominant text.” Ironically, in my position from inside CNN Headline   News, covering the war on the headline ticker at the same time, I was also most   clearly implicated and complicit with the “anonymous law of production” de Certeau mentions above. I was part of the dominant text the bloggers were   resisting, one of its many authors. Given the contradictions I was experiencing, I had no choice but to turn to Haraway (1991), to see myself as the cyborg hybrid inside the belly of the “productivist technocracy.”

CNN Headline News Knowledge-Log

That cyborg sensibility led me, concurrently, to propose and build a knowledge-log for the Headline News intranet, as a way to share this empowering interface   with my colleagues, so that THEY could share contingent knowledge, lore, and   professional practices that helped them produce excellent work day in and day   out. This is the second site studied in this paper, not through formal research   methods, but merely reported from my personal observations as an advocate and   klog evangelist. This work could not be called “ethnographic” because I did not have permission to undertake such a study in the newsroom, and even if I had had such permission, I was far too involved as an advocate to be able   to step back from it with an ethnographer’s eye.

I wanted to plumb beneath the surface of this respectable and reasonable practice of knowledge management in the Information Age to find the contingent practices in a workplace where the “widgets” are information products created by knowledge workers and knowledge-makers, through the shaping and social use of the information products in their workplaces and at large. I wanted to try out the effects of democratization and subversion on this process of keeping   a klog, and in doing so, possibly learn ways workplace practices could one day be further affected by the force of these software systems.

I also saw a visible (and documentable) clash of cultures between old and new   media—perhaps made even more acute than it might be at more “typical”   large corporations because the primary, external “product” or knowledge   commodity of Time Warner embodies almost in its entirety the assumptions of   broadcast or mass media, often unreflexively, as stated or even unstated truisms.   Before coming to CNN, I held certain beliefs about “old media” from   my dissertation research (Boese, 1998), which focused on power struggles between   the creators of the show “Xena: Warrior Princess” and the interactive   online fan community, seen through an ethnography in that fandom culture (populated   with active textual poachers as well).

On the other side of the fence, from inside the world of mass media production,   I was prepared to have those beliefs challenged. Instead I was surprised to   find them reinforced. The mass media model of communication appears so deeply   ingrained among so-called “old media” broadcast writers that it   is nearly unheard of in the newsroom to question issues relating to “good   news judgment,” “lowest common denominator” programming, and   demographic assumptions about 18- to 35-year-olds. Perhaps I was naïve.   Scholarly literature seems well aware of a “tension between the news media   and the discipline of cultural studies,” according to Sybil Nolan (2003). I had left the field of journalism to spend 15 years in academia. Perhaps because   I’d changed over the years, I assumed journalistic assumptions about audiences and interactivity would have changed also.

These are my personal observations, however, and not part of a formal study of newsroom cultures. I made these observations as I studied the audience for   the klog I was building, as part of the design process. And in the end, these   observations were reinforced when I went on to launch the klog. The most startling   thing I found was that these broadcast writers (the klog was primarily to serve   newsroom writers and copyeditors) envisioned viewers as passive recipients of media products, and they also constructed THEMSELVES as passive recipients of   media products, despite the fact that they were actively writing and shaping   those media products every day at work. The anonymity of the “voice”   with which they were conditioned to write seemed to preclude finding a voice with which to speak up on a klog.

The second thing I encountered was widespread technophobia or technological   ignorance relating to the Internet. One copyeditor told me web browsers still   were not on most CNN newsroom computers in 1996, when a co-worker showed him   the Internet for the first time. The newsroom still relies on mainframe-based   research tools and writing spaces at the time of this writing in 2004. While   I was able to easily teach Josh and Carolina (who speaks and writes basic English,   but I speak no Spanish) to use the input form interfaces of their blogs by email   from Atlanta to Kurdistan, I struggled to train colleagues face-to-face in the   newsroom to feel at ease posting to our intranet klog.

Bruce Garrison (2001) has studied the diffusion of online information technologies   in newspaper newsrooms, looking at critical mass and diffusion theory. Although   his study pre-dates the appearance of blogs and klogs, I compared his data to   the “diffusion of technology” anecdotes shared by my colleagues   who had been on site since the early 1990s. It does appear that the Headline   News newsroom at least (and anecdotally, the entire Turner building in Atlanta)   integrated online research tools somewhat behind the curve reported by Garrison.   I also observed colleagues’ reluctance to explore online research tools   on their own, as evidenced by the slow adoption of the beta “Google News”   algorithm tool, as well as slow discovery of the handy Google toolbar, which   also blocks annoying pop-up ads.

War Begins
The Other Side March 17, 2003

War Panic in Erbil
Today is the first official day of war panic in Erbil. Yesterday everything looked much like it has since I got here. Today many shops are closed, there are fewer cars in the street and people tell me their neighbors are fleeing the city for towns further towards the Iranian border. My translator’s family all left for their hometown of Koy Sanjak, which is closer to the Iraqi lines but which they feel is less of a target. Shop owners are emptying their stores, putting their stuff in more secure locations in case there are looting during the war.

Most people are afraid of chemical weapons. As you know, this area was attacked     hundreds of times by chemical weapons during the Anfal campaign of the 1980s. The most notorious incident, in Halabja, was 15 years ago this weekend. Over 7,000 people died in that one attack. Now people here are afraid that it will happen again. But people aren’t preparing much. Very few people have gas masks – other than the foreigners, of course. There is a military market here in Erbil, and I went a couple of weeks ago to stock up. I bought four German-made masks (for me, Carolina, our driver and translator) for $150, a little out of the range of ordinary Iraqis. The dealer told me the only     locals who bought the masks were the richest ones. “The poor people want to die,” he said. “The rich people want to live 200 years.” One political party today was giving out leaflets on how to make a homemade gas mask. You take flour, coal and salt, wrap it in a cloth and hold it over your mouth. . . .

Posted by Josh at 05:46 PM |Comments (2) |TrackBack (0)

Both Josh’s and Carolina’s blogs began getting heavy publicity during the course of the war. Carolina’s site was featured on Argentine TV, so   traffic shot up to about 1,000 hits a day after her first week. It eventually developed such an enduring presence (significant hits from areas beyond Argentina   as well, particularly Mexican domain names) that when she returned to Argentina   after the war, she got a contract to turn it into a book (2003b) and a conference   was held with the OJO blog as one of its central topics.

Josh’s blog was in English, well written and visual, with respectable citations from other blogs, leading up to the battle of Baghdad. Then it got written up in The Boston Globe (Bray 2003), as the stories of the Baghdad Blogger, Salam Pax, and the Back to Iraq blog sites put the issue on the national news   agenda. The Boston Globe article appeared to mock TIME, suggesting that the   writing and topics on Josh’s site were more immediate and compelling than   what TIME was publishing from him.

The day after that article came out, March 25, 2003, TIME demanded Josh stop   posting to his blog, just as CNN’s Kevin Sites had also been forbidden   to post to his blog as it started gaining popular acclaim during the war. The   screenshot below shows Josh’s two final posts on the permanent site archive.

Figure 1: The Other Side, Joshua Kucera’s weblog. http://www.serendipit-e.com/otherside

Many may remember the flurry of blog stories on the eve of the “Battle   of Baghdad” in 2003. Salam Pax had stopped posting at Dear Raed and many   blogs echoed the fear that something had happened to him (he later re-emerged,   safe). Kevin Sites and Joshua Kucera had been asked to suspend posting (after   the conclusion of the formal part of the war, Kevin Sites left CNN and is once   again posting to his blog). Sean Paul Kelly at Agonist.org was accused of plagiarism.   The cessation of Josh’s active posting was a disappointing development.   Josh’s style of first-person observation about the price of gas or the   porn movie houses open in Erbil had ruined me for the rehashing and linking   styles of many of the US-based warblogs. Traffic on Josh’s site shot through   the roof as its closing was written up prominently in The Wall Street Journal,   on the MSNBC site, and in a depth analysis article in The Chicago Tribune (Rose   & Cooper 2003, Femia 2003, Ryan 2003). Both MSNBC and the BBC had embraced   the warblog movement and were hosting warblogs by their own correspondents on   their official sites. For Time Warner, and CNN, a division of that company,   it was as if the warblog movement did not exist, despite perfunctory news coverage   of warblogging as a “gee whiz” tech story.

So while I was putting in six-day weeks, 10-hour days as part of our intensive   Iraq war coverage, I was also caught up in the ongoing drama that saw mainstream   media’s war coverage challenged by this upstart blog phenomenon. The challenge   was to try to make meaning from conflicts between the two different universes   of discourse, one severely restricted by mass media assumptions about the patriotic   attitudes of US audiences, and the other, in the blogosphere, situated much   more firmly in the discourse of international media coverage, which differed   significantly from U.S. war coverage in its skepticism toward the U.S. point   of view.

The frame I found most helpful placed these divergent journalistic endeavors   as rhetorically epistemic knowledge-making, a macro version with corporate broadcast   journalism content contrasted with international warblogs, echoed on a smaller   level with klogs, and with the tensions and frustrations in the delayed launch   of my intranet klog. The lines were starting to blur, once I considered journalism   and professional communication in blogs and klogs as a commodity and site for   interactive and contingent knowledge products and knowledge making.

Paulo Freire and Empowered Knowledge-Making

Let’s step back and look at blogs and klogs in terms of this interesting   dance with corporate entities, some of which see knowledge management as asset   management for the Information Age. Ostensibly, blogs and klogs would seem to   help corporate entities to “manage” the “intellectual assets”   of a company in an information-based economy, particularly in the context of   knowledge workers, but who is managing whom? It has been said that companies   are increasingly concerned that the greatest assets of the firm are walking   out the door every night at the end of their shifts. The wolf in sheep’s   clothing in the dance could be the knowledge-logs that seek to create artifacts   based on those information assets. The contingent knowledge disseminated through   both intranet company klogs and more public, journalistic or topical extracurricular   blogs of journalists or other experts, writers, and communicators create a kind   of knowledge commodity that exists outside conventional economic systems of   value. If understood as formal publishing ventures, there is a model for thinking   of blogs and klogs, the kind of model that would put TIME magazine in the right   for protecting its own publishing venture from a rival or competing publishing   venture by shutting down Josh’s blog. But are these formal publishing   ventures?

The late Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator wrestling with the problem of   how to bring democracy to a colonized and oppressed people who had never in   the better part of their cultural memory known anything like democracy. Literacy   was not the only problem. Empowerment and responsibility for self-governance   had to come from somewhere. Rather than accept traditional models of teaching   and learning, Freire saw that those models, such as the “banking model   of education,” were actually working against the larger goals of democracy.   From these realizations, he developed a Pedagogy of the Oppressed, his most   famous work, and also the concept of “critical consciousness” or   ”conscientização,” the goal of his model of education.   This concept involved being an active participant in one’s life, not merely   a spectator, making choices rather than oppressed by the illusion of choice.   This he saw as a key to an open society (Freire, 1973).

If worker brain power is the warehouse capital of the Information Age, it certainly   seems reasonable for a company to develop its own intellectual and knowledge-based   assets, also as a way to preserve and document processes and policies developed   by employees, the information products of employees, to guard against the loss   of these assets should a worker leave the company. Worker intellectual development,   continuing education, and collaboration all seem to speak to the value to a   company of fostering an active and thinking work force. Intranet klogs, which   dialogically explore aspects of one’s work product, team projects, processes,   and so on, would seem to be a valuable tool to refine such workplace assets.   It would appear, then, that Paulo Freire’s goals and the goals of those   creating software to support workplace knowledge management would be in alignment.

While klogs can craft a form of groupware to assist in this knowledge management,   they can also appeal to business hierarchies that want to know what their employees   are thinking and doing, that may even view these klogs as a tool of company   surveillance. Indeed, in both the journalistic articles and the klog discussion   groups, this issue is often addressed and cited at times as a reason for a less   than enthusiastic response from one’s co-workers when it comes to participating   in the klog, particularly in workplace cultures where workers are afraid to   speak up in their own voices, even if fears of reprisal are unintended by management   and not at all overt, as I found with my fellow journalists at CNN Headline   News. In a time of recession and constant corporate cutbacks, where many are   doing the jobs of more than one person already, most workers keep their heads   down and say little because one never knows if an unvarnished opinion may hit   some random boss the wrong way. Many in the larger corporate workplace have   also witnessed higher paid co-workers in their 50s with considerable intellectual   capital for the company jettisoned by cost-cutting managers looking to fill   those positions with younger people on smaller salaries. In these situations,   it would appear that those greater intellectual assets are not valued.

La perruque, or the Wig

Some companies take possessiveness of worker intellectual products a step further,   claiming all items on a worker’s hard drive should the employee leave   the company, for instance. Marshall McLuhan (1963) demonstrates that a hard   drive, like a book, is an extension of the worker’s mind. How much of   a worker’s intellectual activity can a company reasonably claim to own?   If telecommuting, can the company lay claim to all writing one does at home?   In the case of personal blogs of journalists, we see Time Warner was threatened   by the non-professional publishing activities of Kevin Sites and Joshua Kucera,   implying that a different economy or scale of value is superceding money in   this marketplace. But those are the kinds of instances savvy lawyers might think   to cover in a standard non-compete clause. What if Josh were writing letters   home to his family, writing many of the same kinds of things that did appear   in his blog? Could he keep a password-protected blog, a private and personal   intranet, ostensibly for his family and friends (and a few hundred others) to   access? I offered to host such a site, but Josh worried he might get in trouble   for that and didn’t want to risk it. Is it the intellectual content of   Josh’s brain that Time Warner coveted, or the fact that the publication   site allowed him to reach an audience that hurt the future viability of one   of the largest media chains in the world? Or was it his point of view, standard   for blogs, what we might call “first person idiosyncratic,” in such   a marked contrast to the depersonalized style of TIME reporting?

Michel de Certeau writes of a diversionary workplace tactic called ‘”la   perruque,” or “the wig” within the sometimes invisible “arts   of practice.” Something of a ruse, “the wig” is

…the worker’s own work disguised as work for his [sic] employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. …The worker who indulges in la perruque actually diverts time (not goods, since he uses only scraps) from the factory for work that is free, creative, and     precisely not directed toward profit. In the very place where the machine he must serve reigns supreme, he cunningly takes pleasure in finding a way to create gratuitous products whose sole purpose is to signify his own capabilities through his work and to confirm his solidarity with other workers or his family.  (1984, pp. 24-26)

In other words, “the wig” is a form of poaching from the workplace by only appropriating products that are to some extent invisible and unvalued   or undervalued in the workplace. In an information marketplace peopled by knowledge workers, the “scraps” that the worker diverts come from the firings   of her own mind, just as Josh’s blog consisted of the “leftovers” that he perceived TIME did not want to publish. Josh told me that TIME was not so much concerned with getting a first shot at his best observations as much   as it didn’t want anyone else to be able to see his cast-offs. The reach   of Internet publishing through blog software gave these seemingly “gratuitous products” a value outside of the conventional system of money or information economics. The “scraps” Josh used were whatever happened to catch   his eye outside of his more formal tasks. At issue are boundaries, partitions   information workers would seemingly have to erect inside their own brains between work for their employer and work for themselves. Perhaps a reporter might say, “TIME magazine is renting my eyeballs right now. No one else is allowed to use them for the moment…” New boundaries are coming up for negotiation.

One could even argue in a klog context that Freire’s “critical consciousness”   is a trait that is undervalued in the workplace, along with a worker’s   ability to make knowledge, to take scraps and develop truths about workplace   practices, best professional communication practices, disciplinary practices,   and lore. But here is the subversion of unedited and interactive blogs and klogs.   They live in a place at the intersections of a number of different border regions,   between expert and contingent knowledge-making, between disciplinary boundaries,   between populist and elitist systems of access to research or technology or   capital or power, boundaries between professional life and home life, not to   mention, with telecommuting, physical boundaries between work and home (Friedson,   1986; Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984; Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Geisler, 1994).

As blogs and klogs enter the mainstream from the margins, they bring along the   ruse of “the wig,” with dialogic and interactive participants who   may be experiencing the kinds of unsettling (to the powers that be) critical   consciousness that is within the goals of a more democratized technoculture   such as Paulo Freire as an educator sought to foster. Whether journalists are   publicly assisting other journalists through their public blogs or workers are   helping to train colleagues in internal klog contexts, an active critical awareness   supercedes the passive absorption of information or top-down policies.

By design, blogs are oriented toward humanization and textual poaching with   active and dialogic co-participants rather than a passive audience. Klogs seemingly   appear to allow corporate entities to “manage” the “intellectual   assets” of a company in an information-based economy, particularly in   the context of knowledge workers. But intranet klogs and some of their more   public counterparts such as these knowledge products created by journalists   during the Iraq war have the potential to release voices as “humanized”   knowledge-makers with a claim on power that can force many institutions to change   with the force of awakened and empowered dialogue, creativity, and analytical   power, even as other institutions react strongly and resist change (a move both   described and discussed by Freire through his experiences in Brazil).

While corresponding with Josh through our several weeks of notoriety before   the Battle of Baghdad, he told me something that I came to understand was very   important to him. He had worked as a freelancer in Bosnia for several years   before moving to Kurdistan to cover the war. After TIME shut the blog down,   Josh was clearly disturbed by the anti-mass media ranting and the level of anger   against big media corporations in the comments field of his blog. He strongly   resisted becoming a poster child for the independent journalism movement. Josh   said he had been trained to focus on the story and not to become the story.   Still, he said, in four years working as a freelancer overseas, he had not ever   gotten as much feedback and interest in his work as he had in the weeks of the   Iraq war through his blog. His writing was being published by one of the largest   circulation newsmagazines in the West, yet his blog audience cared about him,   worried about him, gave his work constant dialogue and feedback. He was blown   away by it.

I know I was affected by it as well, but in a different way. I’d never   met Josh or Carolina face to face, but as the war moved closer to Erbil, I found   myself worrying about them, involved in their stories, in their blogs. If I   didn’t hear from them by email regularly, I became very anxious. There   was a human face, a level of personal involvement, with war correspondents breaking   through the impersonal barrier of the affectation of the journalistic voice.

The Practices of Blogs and Klogs

In developing my intranet klog for Headline News, I turned to helpful klog evangelist   sites online such as Phil Wolff’s “a klog apart.” Wolff has   undertaken a form of dialogic, critical pedagogy to help klog evangelists in   organizations teach co-workers to communicate in blog-format, also looking at   issues involving teaching colleagues to write, not simply with words, but through   posting images, diagrams, audio and video clips, etc. In quite a number of posts,   he sounds very much like a composition teacher, seeking ways to encourage and   empower writers, to help co-workers not feel self conscious, to help them find   their voices. Without teachers and classrooms, the atmosphere for learning and   sharing invokes not only Paulo Freire, but also Peter Elbow (1973), in Writing Without Teachers.

Figure 2: Phil Wolff’s “a klog apart”   site at http://www.dijest.com/aka

Wolff collects tips and tricks and future ideas for use of klog software from   his network of correspondents and contributors. These ideas range from the practical   to the theoretical to speculative “what if” projections and software   wish lists, like one big collaborative klog-brainstorming session. One post   suggests klogs can be used to help generate PowerPoint presentations. Another   addresses literacy problems in the workplace. One has tips for would-be writing   coaches. Another, ideas for empowering shy writers by developing mixed media   klogs with audio clips, video clips, captured white board graphics, etc. with   the idea that different thinking and learning styles will express themselves   in different ways.

Ethical and workplace power and politics are also discussed quite bluntly on   “a klog apart’ and on the klog Yahoo! discussion group, including   fears of panoptic surveillance by supervisors (Foucault 1977).

Peter Elbow would likely recognize these klog evangelists as leaders of a dialogic   writing workshop without teachers, with co-teachers, outside of traditional   classrooms. But this is also something more—something like the Freire   model as a response to oppression, a kind of oppression Freire himself would   be hesitant to name as such, centered as it is in the overprivileged West. But   if spontaneous and dialogic writing workshops are springing up in this medium,   is this not what Freire sought to foster outside the socially limiting and often   authoritarian spaces of traditional classrooms? As a tool that not only poaches   the texts of the mass media and business knowledge-making, but also discourses   of the classroom, klogs as envisioned by Phil Wolff have a very auspicious beginning,   at least in theory.

On the other hand, I can also describe the difficulties I had once my Headline   News intranet klog launched, well after the formal end of the war. Management   decided to hold six weeks of writing and script coding seminars conducted by   copyeditors, attendance required. I adjusted the klog I had built to specifically   support handouts and discussions from the seminars and was given the seventh   week in the schedule to hold klog training seminars.

The klog that I launched had anything but an auspicious beginning. Despite enthusiasm   from management and my own evangelizing, writers and copyeditors seemed ill   equipped to use it for anything except as a passive reference for handouts.   I billed the klog as a place to talk about the craft of writing and ways to   make our work better. People at Headline News are very ambitious and are always   training to move to their next position, often taking overtime, double shifts,   or overnight shifts to do it. Even so, they seemed not to have ways to talk   about craft, about what made writing good or bad for our particular context   and audience. Writers complained orally that copyeditors were unable tell them   what they were doing wrong, would instead just say, “this script sucks”   and leave it at that. I’d hoped our klog could address these issues in   script workshops. These are journalists, I thought. Writing is what they do.   Surely they will have a lot to say.

Instead I came to understand the very real barriers against posting to our klog,   barriers ingrained in the CNN workplace culture and probably many workplace   cultures. It wasn’t just fear of reprisals. People in low-end positions   striving to move up can be afraid to speak because it can hurt their chances   at promotion, despite honest management encouragement. Most could talk about   facts in stories but did not have a vocabulary to talk about writing, across   all ranks. These are also people who are exhausted, overworked, dragging themselves   through stressful television shifts that push them to the limit. After their   show gets off the air, they head out the door or to another training session.   Finally, to a person, I could not find anyone who was not intimidated by technology   and the Internet, even people who work in the control room or route video through   complex series of feeds in the CNN system. To post is to have a voice, however   it may be socially constructed, and to have confidence in that voice. I encountered   people who froze up staring at the “Post to Blog” button on our   klog, and those who thought they would never be able to figure out the blog   in the first place, despite working at terminals every day.

Our klog still has value as a database, a shell to hold training materials,   style guides, and official policies. It is more easily searched or cross-referenced   than the file on the mainframe that holds these materials. But that is top-down   communication. The grassroots empowerment with our klog never happened. As an   alternative, I tried to interest friends in the newsroom in creating personal   blogs, offering to help, still puzzled at the reticence of professional writers   in developing an outlet for what they did best. My best guess at why so few   took up my offer has to do with the learned impersonal tone of mass media journalism,   a tone that erases the author’s point of view. These are writers who spend   every day at work trying to erase their biases and points of view, to make their   writing voice sound like the voice of the anchor of the show they are on.

How do groups evolve and contribute when shaping and being shaped by blog interfaces?   Partly the answer to that question can be found in the sudden rise to power   of the blog movement as a social force as compared to static web pages or pages   merely generated from databases, such as I studied in my research into the Xenaverse,   the constellation of fan web sites around the television show “Xena: Warrior   Princess,” (1998). While it may be too soon to tell, given the complexity   of forces arrayed within interfaces and cultures, I do believe the interactive   interface features unique to the blog social movement deserve a good part of   the credit for harnessing dialogic energy on the Web. I am not taking a technologically   deterministic stance when I say this, however. The interface features minus   the social movement could not create the same force alone, as Phil Wolfe has   written of in “a klog apart” and as I found out for myself with   the Headline News klog. It seems to be bit of a “chicken and egg”   question of which came first, the interactive features or the social movement   that rises up and is empowered by the interactive features. Bruce Garrison’s   (2001) study into a “critical mass” in the diffusion of online information   technologies in newsrooms also shows how gradual increases in adoption rate   can create a snowball social effect.

The Xenaverse was an empowered social movement that existed before the blog   interfaces became available. The connected communities and regular posters and   commenters around some of the most popular blogs, like Boing Boing or Kuro5hin   don’t have to be goaded into participating. They are people who seem to   feel they have something to say, and are technically adept enough to see how   useful the simple web forms can be. Yet offline groups don’t migrate into   online spaces nearly as well, no matter what opportunities exist, or how easy   they are to use, or even by virtue of the fact that the people in the group   are already skilled professional writers.

Conclusion

A Business 2.0 newsletter article considered the viability of “Management by Blog?” (2003) and came to the conclusion that, despite many strong   proponents, the klog movement has not caught on yet. The article notes that   companies are still more likely to incorporate blog features into public customer   service web sites (such as Macromedia has done) than they are to use it as a method for workgroup teams to pool thoughts, progress reports, documentation   for projects, etc, as another tool for computer support for collaborative groups, in other words. Why the reticence? It may be because blogging grew up from a   grassroots social movement and not necessarily a dot.com business plan seeking venture capital. Blogs didn’t show up on business radar until Google bought Blogger. It could also reflect worker resistance to groupware blog tools, as I found at Headline News.

The Business 2.0 article claims that the move of Google buying Blogger alone gives the business knowledge-management klog camp such force that it can only be the next big thing. On the other hand, anyone who follows the often-uncritical   hype of Business 2.0 has heard that story before. Many who have tried to launch   company intranet blogs realize that a bigger problem can be training and levels   of participation with harried and overworked colleagues, issues that Phil Wolff at “a klog apart’ is more than prepared to address. I’m not   ready to declare such an easy victory for intranet-based knowledge logs primarily   because the borders and gates of intranets are still deeply affected by corporate   cultures built on information control, and are too rigidly exclusive for concepts   of information-sharing, both by turf-guarding employees within competitive corporations,   and by turf-guarding corporations that would rather live with restrictive technology and knowledge management tools than experience a more democratized workplace.

We can see how deeply these interests are threatened by blog interfaces by looking at what Time Warner did to attempt to control the flow of knowledge commodities by its “intellectual assets.” Joshua Kucera was a freelancer, not even a full employee of Time Warner, a distinction might has well have been   moot, since the issue was about leverage, power, and control of his intellectual   “scraps.” Also lost are the dialogues, the enrichment, the Freire-style   learning and growth that would ultimately improve knowledge products in the   workplace because certain topics are so off-limits they cannot be broached in   public discourse or on company intranets, except anonymously on “gripe”   blogs such as enronsucks.com and the like.

Personal blog sites of journalists in the employ of large, knowledge-commodity   organizations such as Time Warner release the same tensions and conflicting   issues into public spaces and thus reveal the very real disruption on a large   scale that klogs can create on a small scale within organizations as voices   enter into dialogues rather than listen to the one-way monologues of policies,   of being told what to think, about in-house corporate processes or the role   of the Kurds in Erbil. However, as I found with the Headline News klog, there   are still many challenges to be overcome before off-line groups can successfully   migrate to klog-style interactions.

As Paulo Freire set reflection, questioning, and dialogue as ideals in fostering   critical consciousness in Brazil, so also does the use of these same techniques   within a corporate environment let a genie out of a bottle. Freire discusses   how repression and backlash by elites are often the result of the “oppressed”   gaining too much power of voice and consciousness. While we are not seeing here   a military coup and repression as backlash such in Brazil, I do believe we are   seeing and will continue to see a backlash. Even so, the greatest counterforce   that keeps the genie from going back into the bottle may be what de Certeau’s   describes as the poaching technique of “la perruque,” “the   wig,” a worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. This   is the site of cultural resistance I will be watching from my feminist cyborg   hybrid post as this phenomenon evolves, as a backlash drives some underground,   or at least, under the wig.

March 25, 2003

Goodbye for now

My editors have demanded that I stop posting to this site until the war ends. And they pay the bills, so what can I do. Thanks everyone for reading, and I hope to be back here soon. Peace, Josh.

Posted by Josh at 10:00 PM |Comments (33) |TrackBack (0)

References

Allbritton, C. (2003). Back in Iraq 2.0: Being a recounting of my journalistic   adventures concerning Iraq. Weblog. Retrieved May 20, 2003, from http://www.back-to-iraq.com/

Bakhtin, M. M. (1996). The dialogic imagination. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.

Boese, C. (1998). The ballad of the Internet nutball: Chaining rhetorical   visions from the margins of the margins to the mainstream in the Xenaverse.   (Doctoral dissertation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). Retrieved May 19,   2004, from http://www.nutball.com/dissertation.

Bray, H. (2003, May 24). On-the-spot blogs from war: Conflict in Iraq gives   rise to journalists’ online diaries. The Boston Globe. pp. B9.

C. Carl. (2003). Bloggers and their blogs: A depiction of the users and usage of weblogs on the World Wide Web. (M.A. Thesis, Georgetown University). Retrieved May 19, 2004, from http://cct.georgetown.edu/thesis/ChristineCarl.pdf

Creaner, M. (2004, January 5). Employee weblogs: Employee blogs can be good for business. PR Week. 18.

de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of   California Press.

Deuze, M. (2001, October). Online journalism: Modeling the first generation of news media on the World Wide Web. First Monday: Peer-reviewed journal on the Internet, 6(10). Retrieved March 19, 2004, from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_10/deuze/index.html

Deuze, M. (2002). The Internet and its journalisms, Part I & II: A typology of online journalism. USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. Retrieved May 19, 2004, from http://www.ojr.org/ojr/future/1026407729.php

Edwards, D., & N. Mercer. (1987). Common knowledge: The development of understanding in the classroom. London: Methuen.

Elbow, P. (1973). Writing without teachers. NY: Oxford University Press.

Femia, W. (Ed) (2003, March 26). Weblogs central: weblogs: The new tool. MSNBC.   Retrieved March 30, 2003, from http://www.msnbc.com/news/809307.asp

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Trans.   Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin.

Friedson, E. (1986). Professional powers: A study of the institutionalization   of formal knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Freire, P. (1984). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. New York: The Seabury   Press.

Garrison, B. (2001). Diffusion of online information technologies in newspaper   newsrooms. Journalism. 2(2) 221-239.

Geisler, C. (1994). Academic literacy and the nature of expertise. Hillsdale,   NJ.

Gilbert, G. N., & Mulkay, M. (1984). Accounting for error. In G. N. Gilbert & M. Mulkay (Eds.), Opening Pandora’s box: A sociological analysis of scientists’ discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Guterman, J. (2003, April 25). Management by blog? Some see it coming, but it’s not here yet. Business 2.0 Barely Managing Newsletter. Email correspondence, May 16, 2003.

Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York, Routledge.

Heyboer, K. (2003, December). Bloggin’ in the Newsroom. American Journalism   Review. Freepress 10.

Kelly, S.P. (2003). The agonist: Thoughtful, global, timely. Weblog. Retrieved   May 20, 2003 from http://www.agonist.org/.

Klogs: Knowledge management weblogs. (2003). Yahoo! groups listserv. Retrieved May 19, 2004, from http://wwwgroups.yahoo.com/groups/klogs

Kucera, J. (2003). The other side: Joshua Kucera’s weblog. Retrieved May 20, 2003, from http://www.serendipit-e.com/otherside

Lasica, J.D. (2002, September 25) When bloggers commit journalism. USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. Retrieved March 19, 2004, from http://ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1032910520.php.

Lewis, A. (2004, February 20). U. Maryland campus weblog use could explode. The Diamondback via U-Wire. Retrieved March 8, 2004 from LexisNexis.

McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy. New York: Basic Books.

Nolan, S. (2003, August). Journalism online: the search for narrative form   in a multilinear world. Proceedings from the Melbourne Digital Arts and Culture   Conference: Fine Art Forum E-zine . pp. 17(8). Retrieved March 19, 2004, from   http://www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_17/faf_v17_n08/reviews/nolan.html

Pax, S. (2003). Where is Raed? Salam Pax’s weblog. Retrieved May 20, 2003, from http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/.

Podesta, C. (2003a). OJO: Carolina Podesta’s weblog. Retrieved May 20, 2003, from http://www.serendipit-e.com/ojo.

Podesta, C. (2003b). OJO: ver desde Irak. Weblog de la Guerra. Distal. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Rich, A. (1984). Notes toward a politics of location. In Blood, bread, and   poetry (pp. 210-231). New York: W.W. Norton.

Rose, M., & Cooper, C. (2003, March 25). Web logs tell war stories, unfiltered and in real time. Wall Street Journal. The Archives. Retrieved March 28, 2003, from http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB104854599843896800,00.html

Rosencrance, L. (2004, January 26). Blogs bubble into business. Computerworld, 23.

Ryan, M. (2003, April 16). Sites are blogged down in controversy. The Chicago Tribune. Retrieved April 18, 2003, from http://www.chicagotribune.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=chi%2D0304160255apr16&section=/printstory

Singer, J. B. (2003). Who are these guys? The online challenge to the notion of journalistic professionalism. Journalism. 4(2) pp. 139-163.

Sites, K. (2003).  Kevin Sites | blog. Retrieved May 20, 2003 from http://www.kevinsites.net/.

Winner, L. (1986). The Whale and the Reactor. University of Chicago Press.

Wolff, P. (2003). a klog apart. Phil Wolff’s subversions. Retrieved May 20, 2003 from http://www.dijest.com/aka.

Published in conference proceedings: New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2000. 232-233.

At this same conference, I also presented the following material in a poster session:

• Download “Adventures in Alternative Hypertext Structuring: Research, Professional, and Classroom Uses”
• Download “Making a Successful Case for a Hypertextual Doctoral Dissertation” ACM offprint

Find this article in its original location here.

Making a Successful Case for a Hypertextual Doctoral Dissertation

Christine Boese, Department of English
Clemson University, Clemson, SC USA  29634

ABSTRACT

In August, 1998 the first hypertextual dissertation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was accepted (http://www.nutball.com/dissertation),  a case study applying methods of rhetorical analysis and cultural critique to the online phenomenon called the “Xenaverse,” the cyberspaces devoted to the cult following of the syndicated television program Xena, Warrior Princess. The hypertextual research site, a vital online culture, seemed to demand a new kind of scholarship to describe and analyze it. Still, there were many hurdles to getting such an unorthodox presentation form accepted by the dissertation committee and the Graduate School.

This paper summarizes a few of the justifying arguments that led to the successful acceptance this dissertation, a hypertext that could not be reproduced in any way on paper. In showing how one case for a hypertextual dissertation was successfully argued, I hope to help other scholars make similar cases at other institutions, perhaps leading to further debate on the ways arguments and epistemologies will be defined in the future.

KEYWORDS: hypertext dissertation electronic scholarship online cultural studies library archives University Microfilms graduate school Xenaverse Xena

INTRODUCTION

There are good and bad reasons for wanting to attempt a hypertextual dissertation. An attempt at hypertextual scholarship should not be motivated by a gratuitous desire to find any excuse to hypertextualize an argument. David Kolb, in a number of his works [1][2] has raised important reservations about hypertextual forms of academic arguments, especially because linearity and coherence have often been seen as essential features of good arguments. Some argue that dissertations are by definition linear, and therefore something that is nonlinear cannot actually be a dissertation. I agree that dissertations must present an argument, but I remain unconvinced that arguments are essentially defined by their linearity. The field of rhetoric in particular shows us how most arguments that strive for linearity are not fully linear, and are instead dependent on enthymemes and other rhetorical figures and stances.

Meanwhile, some of us are in search of truths that don’t proceed linearly, that build a persuasive case by accumulation and reiteration, by inviting users to make their own connections and to actively construct truths from extensive archives and linked appendices.

However, the best reason for attempting a hypertextual dissertation is that the content of the research demands it. In the case of the cyberspace-based virtual world called the “Xenaverse,” an ethnographic study could take into account the hypertextual virtual culture created, describe it on its own terms, and then circle back and analyze the findings. The dissertation could contain both detailed description and critical rhetorical analysis, cross-linked and tied directly to the sites of the study’s co-participants. With this in mind I began the project, The Ballad of the Internet Nutball: Chaining Rhetorical Visions from the Margins of the Margins to the Mainstream in the Xenaverse (http://www.nutball.com/dissertation).

WHAT FORM SHOULD IT TAKE?

How do I effectively report back on my research? How much
hypertextual knowledge and understanding would be lost in the
translation from webbed text to linear print text? The data consist of
multiple media strung across a web of links. The shape of the
dissertation content, both my own description and analysis and the many
voices of the people who live in my data, is primarily
non-hierarchical, decentering, marginal, polyvocal, multi-threaded, in
short, hypertextual. My goal was to move outside of the standard,
linear, centered form for a dissertation argument in order to devise an
alternative, perhaps more expansive, form for my persuasion in
hypertext. The hypertextual performance of this dissertation was merely
one step toward testing whether nonlinear arguments can be made in
hypertext, a challenge put forth by David Kolb in “Socrates in the
Labyrinth” [1] and “Discourse Across Links” [2].

If closure doesn’t always happen down a predetermined route, how do
I judge, how does my dissertation committee judge, whether I have
successfully completed and defended a dissertation that exists in
native hypertextual, multimedia form? Perhaps what I am making is more
of a hypertextual creative work of considerable substance, a
performance, a representation of a dissertation in experimental form.
However, this does not mean that my argument cannot be effective and
persuasive, and thus still meet the institutional requirements for
dissertations.

This project sought to link and merge with the webbed Xenaverse
culture in cyberspace. To learn about the Xenaverse, the power
relationships and constructions of authority within it, the user is
invited to step through a scholarly portal, to become immersed,
explore, both within and beyond the blurred boundaries of the
dissertation and into the Xenaverse itself. I made a choice to match
the form of my dissertation to the webbed environment of the Xenaverse,
in order not to lose the hypertextual knowledge and understanding that
could perhaps be gained from associational linking and dialogic
interactions between frames and windows.

INSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS

With a dissertation I couldn’t be as free form as I might have been
in a fictional piece. If I had been more experimental, I would have run
the risk that the dissertation would have been unacceptable to the
Graduate School. My committee was receptive to experimentation, and
eventually voiced concern that I had been too conservative in
structuring the interface. However, I had to find a way to ensure that
the major argumentative points of my study were communicated through
multiple paths and navigational styles. I attempted to do that by
building redundancies into the content for a holistic effect. I also
attempted to build recursiveness into the link structure, so that
patterns of links would lead the reader back around and around until
unexplored sectors will almost inevitably be reached.

There were also some key negotiations made between the chair of my
doctoral committee, the Graduate School, and myself. Our research
indicated that University Microfilms had been accepting CD-ROM
dissertations since 1996, and it was heralded as a sign of progress in
the “Information Technology” section of The Chronicle of Higher
Education [3].

Upon contacting University Microfilms in 1998, however, I was told
that the electronic submission policy only applied to Portable Document
Format (.pdf) files, in other words, facsimile document files that
faithfully reproduced images of a paper dissertation. The person I
spoke with had no idea what University Microfilms would do with the
multimedia dissertations written about in the Chronicle article. These
were described as traditional linear dissertations with extensive
support media (e.g. video clips, photographs). There was no mention of
what would be done with the nonlinear structuring of hypertextual
forms. Eventually I came upon the same difficulty with the Rensselaer
Polytechnic library: lack of a digital archive.

I had developed an interface of dialogically interacting frames and
windows forming a composite text. In the first round of negotiations
over a “no paper” dissertation with the Graduate School, I was asked if
I could just print out all the Mainscreens, negating the effects of
nonlinear linking. My advisor, David Porush, and I had decided early on
that if an electronic dissertation could be reproduced on paper, then
there was really no compelling reason for it to be in electronic form
at all.

To its credit, the Rensselaer Graduate School was remarkably
open-minded. I proposed a small introductory text that would contain
instructions on how to install the CD-ROM or access the Web site. This
small amount of paper could be hardcover bound, with an envelope
affixed to the inside back cover for the CD-ROM. Finally a compromise
was reached. The Graduate School required that each dissertation have
four sections, an Abstract, an Introduction, a Conclusion, and a
Bibliography. In the end, the paper component totaled 73 pages.

The greatest obstacle to the archival longevity of the project had
to do with the Institute’s lack of stable, long-term digital storage
and access space on the Internet. I needed a permanent Uniform Resource
Location (URL) that I could publish in the paper archives. I had to
take it upon myself to provide a stable and permanent URL for the site,
paying to register a DNS as well as the monthly server space rental.

CONCLUSION

I hope that other scholars can add to the development of such cases
like this, opening the door for a more firmly established genre of
hypertextual scholarship. We also must consider the traditional and
not-so-traditional institutional constraints for archiving and
referencing such work, and advocate changing the storage system
assumptions made by University Microfilms and library archives in
making hypertextual electronic scholarship available to other
researchers. Electronic dissertations that are exact representations of
paged paper texts show little justifying reason for being created and
stored in digital form, other than the expedience of saving library
shelf space. Some scholars are using digital materials to archive
multimedia rich data appendices, but the form of their argument remains
primarily conventional. There is much more work to be done.

REFERENCES

1. Kolb, D., Socrates in the Labyrinth, in Hyper/Text/Theory, G.P.
Landow, Editor. 1994, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, MD.

2. Kolb, D., Discourse across Links, in Philosophical Perspectives on
Computer-Mediated Communication, C. Ess, Editor. 1996, State University
of New York Press: Albany, NY. p. 15-26.

3. Mangan, K.S., CD-ROM Dissertations: Universities consider whether new format is appropriate
way to present research. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1996 (March
8, 1996): p. A15-A19.

This research first appeared as a chapter in the following peer-reviewed book:

Boese, C. (1999). The Virtual Locker Room in Classroom Electronic Chat Spaces:
The Politics of Men as Other. In P. Takayoshi & K. Blair (Eds.), Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces. Ablex Publishers.

By Christine Boese, Ph.D.

With the increased use of electronic classrooms, collaborative software tools, and the Internet with its interactive forums, a great deal of scholarly speculation has turned to new social contexts this technology may create.  Many have suggested that electronic tools and forums have a democratizing influence, at least for those granted access (Bolter 1991, Flores 1990, Selfe 1990, Selfe & Selfe 1994). Some feminist theorists have recently examined this assumption in light of the ways women and men participate in news groups on the Internet, and have found subtle effects of “silencing,” a de facto kind of censorship which seems to reinforce inequalities of power and influence based on gender (Herring 1993, Herring 1992, Herring, Johnson, & Dibenedetto 1992).  While many teachers of introductory writing classes are turning to feminist pedagogies (Jarratt 1992, Hollis 1992, Eichhorn et al 1992), others are incorporating features of feminist and radical pedagogies into computer versions of writing classes (Selfe & Selfe 1994, Selfe 1990).

At issue then is whether these computer forums can serve the goals of various feminist pedagogical practices in writing classrooms.  Is this technology fair and democratizing, or is it simply a forum which reproduces the biases and inequalities of the dominant society, despite anonymity and equal access to the “conversational floor?”  And if the answer is the latter, does that mean that the technology is unsuitable for use by teachers employing feminist pedagogies?  Should feminist
teachers be using a computer tool which allows men to continue to dominate and oppress women?

To examine these questions, I brought synchronous conferences or chat rooms into my electronic classroom, incorporating the forums into prewriting activities and peer review sessions.  Due to unusual circumstances of registration in 1994, I was able to compare variables of gender in electronic chats for pedagogical purposes, with interesting results for rhetoric and composition research as well.

I held four comparative real-time electronic conferences, two simultaneously in the same class in Spring Semester 1994, and two simultaneously in the same class in Fall Semester 1994.  Each conference occurred in connection with the same assignment in an electronic classroom section of Expository Writing: Language and Culture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  Each semester the class was divided into conference groups of approximately six to seven members. One group used their real first names and one group used anonymous nicknames.

Because Rensselaer is an eighty percent male engineering school, there was only one woman regularly attending my class both in the spring and the fall semesters.  In Spring 1994, the woman participated in the Real Name Group.  In Fall 1994, the woman participated in the Nickname Group.

Each semester two distinct types of virtual cultures emerged, independent of a condition of anonymity.  One became an inflammatory, abusive, sexist, racist, and homophobic environment, the Virtual Locker Room, while the other remained serious and focused in its discussion.  Each semester the differentiating factor appeared to be the known absence or presence of a woman in the group.

Captured texts of the conferences and student journal responses afterward reveal how the Virtual Locker Room culture was created, and show how gendered communication was affected by the absence or presence of one woman, who became a “normalizing” force in the online culture.  For a feminist frame to examine these texts, I want to look at this electronic communication by men as something “Other,” putting a reverse spin on conventional assumptions of alterity.

I also want to consider whether such an exercise has any classroom value, and whether the electronic forums can be productively integrated with the ideals of feminist pedagogies.  In this class, the discussion and introspection generated from an oppressive locker room atmosphere provided a gateway to higher understanding of the politicized contexts of language and culture.  Particularly interesting was how nearly all-male classes responded to their own debate texts as course readings, analyzing the culture space they had created in ways which are consistent with the goals of most feminist pedagogies.  My research, then, validates a contradiction between the egalitarian ideals for CMC and the effects of conflict in computer-mediated spaces, and uses this contradiction directly, for feminist, consciousness-raising purposes.

Teachers as Technology Critics

In  College Composition and Communication, Cynthia and Richard Selfe call for teachers to step back from “overoptimistic ways” of embracing computer-assisted pedagogy, to the end of helping “teachers identify some of the effects of domination and colonialism associated with computer use so that they can establish a new discursive territory with which to understand the relationships between technology and education” (Selfe & Selfe 1994).  In bringing teachers into a role of technology critics, the Selfes point to a growing understanding that while teachers may have high-minded, liberal democratic goals, they may be promoting racism, sexism, and colonialism inadvertently along with the technology.  One may even speculate that there is something intrinsically imperializing about the technology (Winner 1977).  Indeed, many teachers such as Lester Faigley (1992) and others have commented on how online discourse degenerates into juvenile gibberish and obscenity in student-centered chat spaces. But I wasn’t ready to dismiss this discourse so easily.  In the interests of greater intellectual reflection and understanding of the “cultural and ideological characteristic of technology” (Selfe & Selfe, 1994a), I decided to explore the Virtual Locker Room when it appeared in my classes.

In other research, Cynthia and Richard Selfe have noted an oppressive presence of the State, or the military-industrial complex, in shaping computer culture-spaces, and have suggested that democratic social action in these virtual spaces is actually a subversive activity, one possibly best undertaken by “feminist cyborg nomadic guerrillas” (Selfe & Selfe, 1994b) to work against “the logics and practices of domination” (Haraway, 1990). But most of the rhetoric surrounding electronic discourse communities is closer to utopian optimism, looking to the advantages of information sharing, networking, egalitarian access to forums and conversations (although access to the technology itself is unfolding in ways which perpetuate an elitism of computer haves against have-nots), higher levels of literacy and semiotic thought (Bolter, 1991), the overthrow of traditional and textual authorities, and nonlinear or nonhierarchial relationships. In Bolter’s “network culture,” disintegrating hierarchies lead to “greater and greater freedom of action” in accord with “the goals of liberal democracy” (232) where “[o]ur whole society is taking on the provisional character of a hypertext: it is rewriting itself for each individual member” (233).

Meanwhile, some significant doubts have been raised by Susan Herring and her collaborators in an analysis of gendered discourse in Internet newsgroups.  These studies seem to show that gender domination and sexist bias perpetuate themselves in these supposedly egalitarian cyberspaces (Herring, Johnson, & Dibenedetto, 1992; Herring, 1992; Herring, 1993).  Although access to the “conversational floor” is open to all group members, Herring’s more detailed look at two specific discussions in two different Internet newsgroups, LINGUIST and Megabyte University,  shows that domination by male group members remains consistent.  At points in the discussion where women did assert themselves in greater numbers (often using qualifiers and hedge words), group backlash was immediate and silencing, with threats from some male members to unsubscribe from the list.

Without going into detail on Herring’s studies here, I think we can find aspects of democratizing assumptions which relate directly to the cultural climate created in the electronic chat space by my virtually all-male class. We can do this in light of the formal “rules of reason” advocated by Habermas  (qted in Ess 1996) as necessary qualifications for “a discourse to be truly democratic” (Herring, 1993). These rules cover “internal and external coercion” as a form of censorship which prevents a democratic exchange of ideas.  If computer forum members can be internally coerced by electronic social structures not to participate even when they have access, and if we can call this censorship, then these electronic forums cannot be truly democratic.  In applying this criterion, we are allowed to look past the simple matter that all members have equal opportunities to post messages to Internet newsgroups, and to begin to consider the cultural dynamics created in the virtual spaces of the group discourse.

Feminist Frame for Analysis

In order to examine the effects of gendered communication in these captured chats, I want to locate myself in the taxonomy of Spitzack and Carter’s “five conceptualizations of women that are present in communications research,” (1987).  Tracing the evolution of communication scholarship on women, Spitzack and Carter find “The Politics of Women as Other” and “Women as Communicators” as two of the five typical frames for study.

In the “Politics of Women as Other” category, they suggest that scholars should view Women as Other openly, allowing the alterity to become a focus for analysis.  In this category scholars acknowledge their politics and seek out the richness in women’s communication styles because
Given the social polarization of males and females, identical communication behaviors are unlikely: thus, presumably universal principles that guide inquiry are not universally applicable.  The priority placed on objectivity in research practices serves the dominant culture because registers of discourse “have been encoded by  males for their own ends . . .Women shall either be excluded, or made uncomfortable, or serve those ends if, and when they do participate.” (Spitzack and Carter, 1987, qting Dale Spender)

Within this model it should be noted that while “male speech is the standard against which female or ‘other’ speech is judged,” the politics of that conception are brought into the forefront.  According to Joseph Pillota, “To recognize differences it is necessary either to assume one of the cultures as a base and interpret others in terms of it or to assume common features across various cultures on the basis of which the variations are comprehensible” (as qted in Spitzack and Carter, 1987).  The mistake would be to allow the alterity to go unacknowledged and unanalyzed, with the risk that scholarship would unwittingly help entrench the conception of Women as Other.  To guard against that risk, the political implications of the different discourse conventions must always be considered as well.

In contrast, Spitzack and Carter’s more inclusive “Women as Communicators” approach allows for insights on both men and women without turning a blind eye to the special conditions women experience, for instance as both outsiders and insiders.  The value here is that male communication does not have to define the standard against which women’s communicative actions are judged.  Moving outside the frame of alterity altogether does not mean studying communication as if women did not exist.  It does allow us to view women’s and men’s communicative actions more flexibly as both genders move inside and outside dominant discourse conventions.  As Spitzack and Carter write “Female inclusion requires not only an understanding of women within the parameters of communication studies, but includes analyses of gender as an organizing force in social interaction” (Spitzack & Carter, 1987).

The twist I’d like to put on these two categories is a simple reversal of gender in the interest of feminist politics. Since, in these captured chat texts, the single woman communicator becomes a “normalizing” force in the virtual culture, why not examine the male-only Virtual Locker Room texts as Other, as the deviation from the norm of standard rhetorical conventions? This twist may reveal for us the politics of a commonly self-censored gender and minority/ethnic prejudice. In turn, it may shed light on the majority group exercise of power behind closed doors. By adopting the inclusiveness of the “Women as Communicators” frame and placing women in the mainstream of study, perhaps we can also take a step toward examining the “Politics of Men as Other.”

Setting

I have continually played with electronic forums in an anti-authoritarian or “democratized” feminist classroom.  I also wanted to go a step further in decentering the teacher than Lester Faigley did in his “Achieved Utopia of the Networked Classroom” (1992) by leaving the teacher out of the discussion while it is taking place, even as an eavesdropper or lurker.  Other than in routine monitoring of software and hardware, I did not see the texts my classes created until they were captured into word processor files.

The context of the assignment that led to the online discussions was an attempt to persuade, to write a position paper. I had assigned formal topic proposals, due well before the assignment and brought to class on the day of the chat. The electronic chats were set up to give students feedback on various argumentative positions raised by their topics. This exercise took place near the middle of the term, and it was not our first foray into the chat space, although it was our most purposeful and most extended use, since students didn’t have to take time to learn the software. Using the chat space for a prewriting exercise, I hoped it would help students consider their classmates as an audience for their upcoming paper.  I recorded real-time electronic debates in captured transcripts, and I announced that we would be reading the transcripts in the next class period.  I had seen electronic chats become chaotic when a class had no direction, but I thought the medium held promise if I set up a loose structure and gave specific instructions.  Two groups were established, each with an assigned Guide and a Gadfly.  One group would use real first names and the other would use anonymous nicknames. Students selected their own nicknames on private screens. The Guide would host the session and keep group members informed about which topic held the floor, various threads of the debate, and technical glitches that arose. The Gadfly would marshal the opposition, ensuring that important points were not ignored or silenced. Other group members could take and change their positions as the debates evolved. As one topic became exhausted, the Guide would ask for another topic and they could begin again.

In the old way of debating, it was rude to change direction or interrupt.  Here I encouraged students to see past old models and to try to introduce several ideas or threads at once. I pointed out that everyone could talk at once, yet no one would be interrupted. In that way I did make an overt effort to give students enough background on the issues surrounding the technology so that they could observe their debate culture and the language it used even as it evolved. They were told (and it was explicitly repeated in an instruction handout) that we would capture the text and study it in a later class period. In both classes, however, students claimed to have forgotten that announcement.  I can only surmise that in the heat of debating it slipped their minds. I did use members of each group to capture the debate texts, and many heard me working out the logistics of the text capture at the end of the hour. Perhaps they used forgetfulness as an excuse for the outrageousness of their behavior.

Of course a key factor in the two groups had to be that with one woman in class all semester, one group would be all men and one group would have one woman.  Due to logistical concerns with the software linkup, I divided the groups on either side of a central aisle.  In this way, it was commonly known to the group members whether the woman was present in their group or not, as much as they may have thought to pay attention. To the class I never mentioned gender or gender issues in connection with chat discourse until after the texts had been captured for discussion in the following period. I occupied myself principally with monitoring the performance of the software and preventing crashes.

Much could be made of the biases of group leadership if this were a conventional discussion or debate.  But this should have been less of a factor given the open access to Chat Room interaction and the technical impossibility of interruption. I selected Guides and Gadflies on the basis of their apparent ease with the UNIX interface (common at an engineering school), and included a mix of good writers and average writers, races and ethnic backgrounds. I did not assign a role to the lone woman, not wishing to single her out further unless it was by her own choice.  I was more concerned that each group member had a grasp of Chat Room functionality, that each saw how to quickly send a comment, that the group knew it was not required to stick to one linear conversation thread, and that, in the ephemeral nature of electronic communication, students knew they did not have to write carefully and selectively.  Instead they could write more quickly and responsively, more in the nature of a verbal exchange than a written exchange.

The Debates

My first impulse is to tell about the Virtual Locker Rooms the way I would tell a story.  These texts, after all, do not lend themselves to extensive quoting because they are so long and unwieldy. Yet even as they are multi-threaded, nonlinear, polyvocal documents, it is very difficult to remove excerpts from their larger contexts, and purists could argue that it should not be done at all, particularly in rhetorical analysis where context is of great importance. The ideas are so interwoven and closely linked that a great deal is lost in excerpting. There is not a single excerpt with a clear beginning or end.  To many readers the chat texts are dense and hard to follow without practice. I believe these texts are a new rhetorical form and a rich lode to mine for textual analysis in future research, but somehow I must solve the problem of how to even begin writing about them.

A comparison of group participation levels, similar in style to Herring’s analysis, does make one distinction between the groups in my classes very clear. In both semesters the groups without the woman participant generated considerably more text . The groups which generated the most text in either semester (perhaps reflecting high energy and interest levels) were also the most broadly participatory, meaning all members were quite active evenly throughout the debate, and two or three members were not able to dominate the discussion.  The percentages for the most broadly participatory groups can be compared to scores for a well-balanced basketball team when all the starters and several players on the bench score in double figures, but no one player is a big star.

On the other hand, the groups with the woman participant were also dominated by several members who contributed more than 20 percent of the text each. In these chat groups, dominant speakers with the strength of their writing voices and attitudes somehow kept the others from fully participating, or at least participating at the same relative level as the more dominant members. This can also be compared to the box scores of a basketball team where one or two star players rack up 20 to 30 points alone.

Yet, if more members do participate fully, the total number of comments goes up, and the percentages become more balanced. There are no external features to control who writes and who does not. The controls are cultural, social and psychological. Interestingly, broad-based participation does not appear to be contingent on whether real names or nicknames were used. But, broad-based participation does correlate with the degeneration of conversation into the Virtual Locker Room, and it correlates with the absence of the woman. In other words, the discussions in which the woman was present generated comparatively less text and tended to be dominated by two or three members (not the woman). When the classes analyzed and discussed the captured texts of both debates in a later face-to-face session, there was widespread agreement as to which group had remained serious and which group had gotten rowdy.  For the sake of shorthand then, I will refer to the two rowdy groups, the Nickname Group Spring 1994 and the Real Name Group Fall 1994 as Virtual Locker Rooms. Indeed, the discursive similarities between the two texts were so uncanny that I asked students if they had any friends from my class the previous spring. But most members of my Fall 1994 class were first-year students, new to the institution, and they hadn’t met many others a year ahead of them.

But let me subjectively summarize what I read in these texts from having lived with them and the representations of the students I once knew in 1994.  I will also excerpt a characteristic section from each conference group so the reader can get a feel for its tone and participants.

The Spring 1994 Debates took place in a brand new electronic classroom that had just gone online at Rensselaer, and we met there every other class period.  It was quiet and carpeted, well-designed and lighted, and students sat comfortably on swivel chairs.  Even in the hushed calm, I had problems with the software, and a crash made me lose two thirds of the text for the Real Name Group (W)  Spring 1994 . Still, according to the group members, the saved comments are representative of the group, which was focused primarily on Stephen’s topic of banning smoking in public places.

Excerpt: Real Name Group (W) Spring 1994–Woman named sue

1.    Guide Norb:     So everybody, should we ban smoking??
2.    Guide Jeff:    I dont think so. I dont use tobacco in any form, but people should be free to do what they want with their bodies as long as it doesnt threaten someone elses rights.
3.    Guide Norb:     Does anybody see this???
4.    sue:    But smoking does…it threatens someone elses life
5.    Guide Norb:     I agree with Jeff, who are we, or the government, to prohibit people from doing as they please.
6.    Stephen:    Second hand smoke does threaten others lives
7.    Guide Jeff:    Only if they smoke right in front of someone else
8.    Guide Norb:     Smoking shouldnt be allowed in public places, such as the Union, but why not outside.
9.    Guide Jeff:    Or in your own home
10.    Stephen:    It is illegal to shoot a gun down a crowded street but one can blow smoke down the same. Is it a matter of time.
11.    sue:    I think the laws are fine the way they are. They dont prohibit people from smoking. They just limit where they can smoke.
12.    Guide Jeff:    good point
13.    Stephen:    The gun kills instantly, the smoke takes a while
14.    Guide Norb:     Smoke only kills if there is contact.
15.    Guide Norb:     If someone smokes outside the somek dissipates.
16.    Guide Jeff:    the smoke diffuses in the air, while the bullet is a projectile
17.    Stephen:    Yeah, but the point is, they both kill
18.    Guide Norb:     The smoke from one cigarette doesnt compare to they amount of pollution put  out by your car.
19.    Guide Jeff:    If smoking is banned in public places you dont have to worry.
20.    Guide Norb:     Second hand smoke is only a threat if there is someone else there to recieve it.
21.    Stephen:    True. Pollution control standards are being formed.
22.    Stephen:    Yeah, in restaurants, sporting events, walking behind someone, walking out of a         building in the entrance way
23.    Guide Norb:     Point being, the amount of smoke put out by one cigarette or a million is         inconsequential when compared to the other forms and quantiier of pollution we  produce
24.    Guide  Jeff:    The amount of smoke from all the tobacco smoked in the U.S. doesnt even         compare to the amount of smoke from burning the Amazon rainforest
25.    Guide Norb:     Smoking should not be allow at sporting events, in restuarants, or in other public         places.

As we can see, Guide Norb dominates the discussion not only with his quick, fluent writing, but also with an emphatic tone, not so much debating as making pronouncements.  He generated 37 percent of the text in his group. Other group members filled in with 23 percent, 19 percent, nine percent, and two percent.  (Also, there was some confusion in this group as to who would be the Guide and Gadfly. That is why there are two guides.) Despite its seriousness, this debate introduced two potentially ridiculous arguments, an analogy comparing second-hand smoke to shooting a bullet down a crowded street, and later another about whether tobacco companies ever mix marijuana into cigarettes.  In Virtual Locker Room groups this kind of a conversational thread could have easily instigated further silliness, but this group was so serious and Guide Norb so intent on pursuing his points that the discussion remained very linear and single-threaded.

In contrast, the Nickname Group Spring 1994 (Virtual Locker Room) began silly and intensified to rudeness. Topics officially discussed were the death penalty, euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide, and the abortion pill.  Unofficial topics included sex, the Jerky Boys, modified song lyrics, and the movie Hamlet with Mel Gibson. As a group there was much laughter and high spirits, and many commented in their journals that they felt the conversation was out of their control. By the same token, this discussion did elicit high levels of inventive verbal performance and creativity, even if the end result degenerated into what would be offensive to most general readers.  Group participation levels were well balanced, 22 percent, 19 percent, 19 percent, 17 percent, 15 percent, with one goof-off constantly changing names for about four percent each. Also notice how much shorter the lines are compared to the previous excerpt.

Excerpt: Nickname Group Spring 1994–No Woman (Virtual Locker Room)

32.    Felix the cat:    if somebody takes a life they should lose theirs as well
33.    Tula:    but at least thats one problem that could be fixed, gadfly
34.    Gadfly:    if the people are given a chance for rehap they may be useful
35.    Guide:    an eye for an eye right kitty
36.    Hamlet:     So the people who put the guy in the chair should die , and the ones who kill         them should die
37.    VanDam:    what desides who is to die and who is not
38.    Tula:    for the most part felix
39.    Tula:    hamlets an idiot
40.    Gadfly:    that would make us no better than the murderes and rapists
41.    Guide:    ya whatever hamlet
42.    Felix the cat:    how so?
43.    Hamlet:     Thank you Tula…I agree
44.    Gadfly:    killing people for killing.  Is that right?
45.    Felix the cat:    how else do we punish them
46.    Guide:    good question vandam, what do u think
47.    VanDam:    gadFly.. An eye for an eye?
48.    Tula:    eh?
49.    Felix the cat:    grrrr
50.    Gadfly:    Im glad to see someone supports my position Vandam
51.    Gadfly:    cats dont grrr they purrrr
52.    Guide:    anyway……
53.    Felix the cat:    do we punush someone by teaching them useful skills and giving them food ?
54.    Gadfly:    how bout so input from the guide
55.    Hamlet:     New Topic?
56.    Gadfly:    Useful skills that may improve the society Cat
57.    Guide:    if u fry a criminal u dont have to worry about him repeating his crime
58.    Felix the cat:    speak it girl
59.    VanDam:    …Guid: certain acts of criminal behavior should be punished by death and these         should be known by all
60.    Guide:    you go kitty

This is one of the milder exchanges for this group, with fun banter easily traced between the Guide and Felix the Cat. It is also worth noting how well this group has adapted to the medium, using conversational feedback to make up for nonverbal cues. They quickly learned to attach names to their responses, which allowed multithreaded exchanges to coexist in the same spaces.

The Fall 1994 Debates took place in a crowded older lab with uneven lighting.  Loud air conditioners hummed and buzzed the whole hour, and still the room was very hot. However, even with the older workstations, the software did not crash.  In this semester the Nickname Group (W) Fall 1994 remained very serious, covered everyone’s topics, tolerated mild multi-threadedness, and took on a volatile topic, feminism, in an evenhanded manner. Other topics covered by this group included violence in the media, gun control, role-playing games, and late night infomercials.

Nickname Group (W) Fall 1994–Woman named Clide

66.    Guide:     We should be on Media and Violence now everybody, why doesnt the big Ragu         give us some input.
67.    The Big Ragu:    It is also wrong to censor the media.  It is also a breach of the Constitution.
68.    Clide:    This sounds like the legalization of pot issue, if you make it illegal people will         get it anyway.
69.    Cable:    meida is not the root of violence.
70.    The Big Ragu:    WHAT?
71.    Gadfly:    So if guncontrol is so hard to enforce we can have total gun control
72.    Guide:     Hey Clide where are you, and what the hell are you talking about?
73.    The Big Ragu:    Cable, Great call!
74.    Kurt Cobain:    I dont think we should censor violence on TV, but I think that the networks have         some responsibility…
75.    The Big Ragu:    Who then is responsible for violence.
76.    Guide:     Gadfly, lets talk about the Media thing now.
77.    Kurt Cobain:    ….the networks have a responsibility to control what they braodcast.
78.    Clide:    Theyar only giving you what you want to see.
79.    Kurt Cobain:    I dont think that there is necessarily a correlation between violence and what is         on TV…
80.    Cable:    how come Japan has the most violent television in the world but has the least         violence on the street?
81.    Guide:     The only people responsible for violence are the people who sadly believe that         everything on T.V is true.
82.    Gadfly:    Violence should be eliminated from the media. Because the TV tells us basically         what to do
83.    bob:    They networks do a little, for example some shows have viewer discretion is         advised every time it comes back from a commercial
84.    The Big Ragu:    Is it right to show Beavis and Butthead at 8:00p.m.
85.    Clide:    In japan, what kind of violence do they show?
86.    Gadfly:    most of us believe everything we see
87.    Cable:    hvae you ever seen japanese anamation? When they brough it here, some of it         was rated NC-17.
88.    The Big Ragu:    They show graphic violence in cartoons.  You see people getting there heads         and limbs blown off.
89.    Guide:     Wow I didnt know that Cable.

The Big Ragu participated more than the Guide in this group, although with the Gadfly, the three dominated with 21 percent, 21 percent, and 17 percent, compared to 13 percent, 12 percent, 9 percent, and seven percent for the rest. The Guide’s comments reveal that he felt compelled to obey the constructed authority of the teacher in the classroom even though I was not looking over his shoulder. Although this group knew a woman was present, they did not know which nickname she was using.  In the class discussion the following period several tried to guess who she was, but the woman kept her identity to herself.

On the other hand, the Real Name Group Fall 1994 (Virtual Locker Room) reads like urban street kids “playing the dozens,” each trying to out-insult each other. Official topics covered very energetically by this group included racial misconceptions, nuclear power, RU486 abortion pill, the death penalty for Jeffery Dahmer, and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariff (Gatt).  Unofficial topics included sex, masturbation, one’s parentage, and one’s masculinity. Again, notice how much shorter the lines are compared to the previous excerpt.

Real Name Group Fall 1994–No Woman (Virtual Locker Room)

50.    Guide:     we are doing the death penalty
51.    Gadfly:    Thats right and we are starting with you
52.    Eric:    This is dumb
53.    vic:    i think that all the prisoners should be made into minced meat and the turn them         to dim-sum.
54.    Lin:    I am doing the death penalty]
55.    Gadfly:    No. You are, dam it!
56.    King Cobra:    My topic for the final paper is that Cutco Cutlery is the finest set of kitchen         Cutlery in the world
57.    Hans:    I say we should put more people on death row, this way we dont have to pay         500000 $ a year for tham.
58.    King Cobra:    Do you guys know what Cutco cutlery is?
59.    Guide:     lets get back to the topic
60.    Lin:    I support people die
61.    Hans:    King Cobra what the fuck are you talking about
62.    Lin:    who is cutco cutlery
63.    vic:    Dim-sum and we can start a franchise selling human meat dim-sum
64.    King Cobra:    Its not a who you dooff.
65.    Guide:     I agree with the money figure, do you know that if Dahmer was jailed Ny he         would cost us 3,1 Million
66.    Gadfly:    Well the problem with death row is that my of the criminials go through many         appeals for a number of years before they are put to death.
67.    Lin:    that is a lot the city can give it to me and I will be rich
68.    King Cobra:    Its a brand of kitchen knives.  I has been around over fifty years.
69.    Hans:    Are you trying to say that you want to eat all the people who have been         executed.
70.    Gadfly:    Lets get down with business.
71.    vic:    I think that swiss army knives are the best cutnary in the whole wide world
72.    Eric:    I dont think we should waste money on the electric chair or lethal injection just         give them a bath with a toaster!
73.    Lin:    yeah
74.    Guide:     I dont believe in the death penalty but I also dont believe in paying tax dollars         because some criminal needs housing
75.    Lin:    lets debate
76.    Hans:    No more appeals if you are suppostu be killed than be it.
77.    Lin:    If someone kill you do you want him/her to pay
78.    Hans:    Guide you are a pussy
79.    Gadfly:    Remember the Constitution, no cruel and usual punishment.
80.    Guide:     I think if someone is to be in jail for life he should work of his stay
81.    Eric:    do your job guide
82.    Gadfly:    Hey, Hans watch you lingo man
83.    Eric:    slacker!!!
84.    Lin:    what are we debating
85.    Gadfly:    I second that.
86.    Guide:     you and me later on Hans well see who is the pussy
87.    Eric:    Your mom

While this Virtual Locker Room lacked the level of creative performance exhibited by its predecessor in the spring semester, it more than made up for it with higher levels of sheer rudeness. In another part of the text, a group member introduced nontextual, physical information about another group member, taunting, “You have a pimple on your nose,” even though the workstations blocked sightlines. The student was drawing on his real name knowledge and face-to-face memory, since he could not see his target. King Cobra unilaterally chose a nickname, even though he knew he was in the Real Name Group.  In this group, all members participated in a range from 10 to 20 percent.  Gadfly dominated somewhat at 20 percent, but six other members participated at 15 percent, 15 percent, 15, percent, 13 percent, 13 percent, and 10 percent.

Overt Gender Prejudice

In order to characterize what seems to be happening in these all-male groups and relate it to what I call the Politics of Men as Other, we need to range from the obvious to the subtle, from overt examples of gender or minority/ethnic prejudice to silencing or control and subtle effects of self-erasure, in both types of groups. When someone types “the guide is a faggot,” or “you and me later we’ll see who is the pussy” or “I did my job with your mom last night,” or  “Peace out my nubian brothers” (when all group members but one are white), I believe we are seeing overt prejudice and bias as an unthinking impulse, despite any tongue-in-cheek intent or deliberate irony. We have an unusual opportunity within these captured texts to study the rhetorical effects when this language runs largely uncensored and becomes a social norm that stands in direct contrast to more “polite” conversation.  When that happens, more subtle effects can be detected, such as when one male student called another male student a “woman” in the following extended exchange (line 266).  Notice how the discussion evolves from the introduction of “mother insults” to increasingly higher and higher stakes, until the final line, where the Guide verbally enacts sexual activity.

Real Name Group Fall 1994—No Woman (Virtual Locker Room)

238.    Hans:    Ru486 is the answer
239.    Eric:    Your mom tried it
240.    King Cobra:    the issue is freedom to choose
241.    Eric:    it failed miserably
242.    Hans:    dont talk about my mom
243.    Guide:     just look at him
244.    King Cobra:    Keep with the topic here
245.    Eric:    I do more than talk with her
246.    Hans:    guide who are you talking about
247.    Gadfly:    why not she was so good last night
248.    Guide:     you
249.    King Cobra:    new topic?
250.    Gadfly:    no you
251.    Lin:    yeah
252.    Hans:    she, are you sure it wasnt a he
253.    Gadfly:    probably
254.    Eric:    guide do your job
255.    Gadfly:    maybe both
256.    Lin:    oh
257.    King Cobra:    Cutco Cutlery
258.    Guide:     give me a new topic
259.    Lin:    ha
260.    Gadfly:    waterfight
261.    Lin:    new topic
262.    Eric:    Ill give you a topic!1
263.    Gadfly:    girls
264.    King Cobra:    Cutco Cutlery
265.    vic:    Your mum is so dumb
266.    Gadfly:    woman
267.    Hans:    lets talk about your mather
268.    King Cobra:    girls are alright too
269.    vic:    Pathenon
270.    Eric:    they have cooties
271.    vic:    Atlantis
272.    Guide:     idid  my job with your mom last night
273.    King Cobra:    stop callling names
274.    vic:    Pergamon
275.    Gadfly:    what woman are you
276.    Lin:    woman
277.    Eric:    your mom rides a vacum cleaner
278.    Hans:    you are sick, guide she is 75 years old
279.    Guide:     give me a topic
280.    vic:    Your mum is cheess
281.    Gadfly:    I am not
282.    King Cobra:    new topic
283.    King Cobra:    new topic
284.    Hans:    guide we need a topic
285.    Gadfly:    How your sex life
286.    Gadfly:    guys
287.    vic:    Lets talk about Guides mum
288.    King Cobra:    gooo
289.    Guide:     ooooooooooh but she was great the way she moved was unbelievable

Clearly a great deal of overt gender prejudice is revealed in the above exchange. Many may wonder what kind of teacher allows or even tolerates the above behavior in the classroom, even in the electronic spaces of the classroom. That thought has certainly gone through my mind. But the challenge of a writing classroom where students are encouraged to be independent thinkers, where authority is de-centered, where feminist pedagogies place greater value on consciousness raising and active questioning of all texts rather than dogmatically asserting authority, is that the teacher is literally riding a wild horse in a contact zone where she never knows what people will say or write next. One impulse says, “Oh my god, get this under control,” while the other impulse says, “All learning is discovery. Ride the wild horse.” That is why I made one of the central pedagogical tenets of the assignment the in-class reading and analysis of the printed chat texts the following class meeting. My goal was not to wag fingers, but rather, to remove the texts from their location in fast-scrolling, synchronous time in order to reflect on electronic strategies of kairos and persuasion, the prevailing ethos each group created, and some oppressive assumptions in the contrasting virtual cultures. When the class analyzed the above text as a printed class reading (an assignment written into the syllabus along with any other assigned readings), there was very little I had to do.  On their own in small groups and then back as a whole class, students effectively characterized the virtual culture that had been created and noted its hostility toward women.  They also commented on how this locker room culture, usually self-censored in the presence of “outsiders,” seemed to enjoy a perennial existence in spite of the censorship.  My students showed a common knowledge and acceptance of the politics of insiders and outsiders, and knowledge of the discourse in groups that close ranks thorough self-censorship in the presence of an outsider.  While they could identify the characteristic discourse readily, their initial attitude toward it was that the locker room culture was simply the way of the world, that it was somehow off-limits to political awareness and change.

My own point of analysis centers around the seemingly innocuous (in comparison to everything else) use of the word “woman.”  The word appears three times above, serving as a haunting kind of punctuation in the context of the rest of the discourse about women, mothers and sex.  Most of the time in this group, women are on the outside, spoken of derisively, “done to,” until Gadfly utters that line (266).  Woman as Other then comes into the group as one of their own, into the group which has no woman, and in spite of all of the other rude talk in this exchange, the lowercase word “woman” is the most supreme insult offered, and so it is picked up and echoed into the virtual culture.

Eric introduces women into this particular excerpt in line 239, but in the overall debate context, “mother insults” have been present since line 87, and the theme is mentioned in 13 different entries in this group.  In the above excerpt, Eric implies that Hans’s mother tried to abort him. Hans snaps back and shows sensitivity to the topic, which instigates Eric’s further taunting that he has had sex with Hans’s mother. King Cobra shows discomfort with this thread and tries to rein in the group, but he is ignored.  Gadfly picks up the theme and claims that he had sex with Hans’s mother just the night before (line 247).

Again, seemingly bristling with sensitivity, Hans lashes back with a suggestion that Gadfly had not been with his mother, but with another man (line 252).  Rather unimaginatively, vic chimes in with a mundane insult about Hans’s mother’s intelligence.  But Gadfly has been the most greatly diminished as an accused homosexual. In retaliation, he writes one word, “woman,” seemingly to no one, yet ultimately directed at Hans (line 266). With that word he tries to “one-up” the homosexual insinuation.  In the world of Western prejudice against things connected with women, a gay man may be considered by some as stereotypically effeminate, but he is still a man.

Still trying to get the topic off his own mother, Hans tries to get the mob to take on Gadfly’s mother.  King Cobra wants to make sure no one thinks HE is effeminate, the woman, the image of the Other who has entered the chat room with Gadfly’s line.  King Cobra types, “girls are alright too” (line 268). Always the bold ringleader, Eric shows he has no fear of the homophobic insults and declares that  girls “have cooties” (line 270), an elementary school defense against the “enemy sex.”  The Guide now wants his turn in this virtual gang bang of Hans’s mother.  Meanwhile, “woman” is further invoked into the room by Gadfly and Lin (lines 275 and 276).  But the Guide has been sparring with Hans since line 86, with “You and me later and we’ll see who is a pussy,” calling him out after class.  In the above excerpt it is the Guide, an African-American-Latino body builder, who types the penultimate insult, pushing invisible boundaries of social norms within the Virtual Locker Room to the typographic imitation of sexual performance with “ooooooooooh but she was great the way she moved was unbelievable.”

Silencing and Self-Erasure

These are the strong forces within the virtual culture.  Now let’s turn to some of the more subtle effects of silencing, verbal control, and self erasure which only show up within the dynamic context of the synchronous threads as they scroll up the screen.  By far the most difficult question to ask has to be “How does this internal or external coercion (Habermas’s censorship) occur in this environment and exert force, both for men and women, if it does?”  For in this environment, if someone tries to exert control over a person or group, anyone can disregard the “herding of the stray” and flaunt rebellion to the entire group. (One such rebel in each separate Virtual Locker Room group independently discovered that hitting the return key over and over forced everyone to look at rows of his blank lines, immediately breaking up all conversation threads.)  In a text-based synchronous culture, the group can only enforce social norms through verbal control or indifference.  We have already looked at instances of verbal abuse.  Now let’s consider indifference.

I have written of the broad-based participation in the Virtual Locker Rooms.  Yet many of the controlling effects also occur on different levels in the serious discussions as well, where two or three group members were more effectively able to dominate and possibly silence other members, and in a non-abusive fashion.  For instance, it appears that the Real Name Group (W) Spring 1994′s way of dealing with multiple threads when they were introduced (usually by already marginalized group members) was to choose not to respond, to ignore the tangential thread, as when Amet was the only person to bring up the addiction angle in line 37 in the debate over smoking ordinances:

Real Name Group (W) Spring 1994 (woman named sue)

25.    Guide Norb:    Smoking should not be allow at sporting events, in restaurants, or in other public         places.
26.    sue:    The smoke from the rainforest has nothing to do with lung cancer.
27.    Guide Jeff:    There should be specified smoking areas
28.    Stephen:    True, but we have to start somewhere.  Another point, what about all the money          it costs tax payers for health care?
29.    sue:    It might deplete our ozone, but that seems like a completely differentissue in         itself.
30.    David:    What is wrong with smoking at sporting event if its in the open air
31.    Guide Norb:    I concede on the cost issue. THe government should not cover healthcare costs         that result from smoking
32.    Stephen:    People who dont want to breath it have to
33.    Guide Norb:    I still smell the smoke of those around me in the open air
34.    Guide Jeff:    Put yourself in someone elses shoes. What if you enjoyed smoking. How would         you feel if it was banned?
35.    Guide Norb:     Consideration for others should override someones selfishness to smoke in         public
36.    Stephen:     So we have the streets full of people coughing, with black lung.  With no health         care
37.    Amet:     People who enjoy smoking are really addicted.  Its not a question of enjoyment          its just another drug
38.    Guide Norb:     Once again, the responsibility lies with the user.
39.    Guide Jeff:     Im not talking about smoking in public.  I think that should be regulated.  What         Im arguing is smoking in the privacy of your own home or car.
40.    Guide Norb:    As a smoker you are making the conscious decision to harm your health.
41.    Guide Jeff:    That is your body, not the federal governments
42.    Stephen:    On the drug issue, I used to smoke. I have even tasted reefer in cigarettes. What         does the manufacturers add to tobacco?
43.    Guide Norb:     I have no problem with smoking in private. just dont burden me with your         health care costs

Several marginalized group members  (see the lower percentages of participation, Appendix A) did comment on the effect of being ignored in their journal entries, often while praising the seriousness of their group’s debate over the antics they saw upon reading the transcripts of the other group.  Amet, an Indian student who struggled at times with American idiom, wrote in his journal:

My group had two guys that really  took off with the topic leaving everybody behind.  They  were both well-informed and serious about the debate. …Consequently, I put in my two cents and had it ignored for the most part.  The combination of our names being presented and moreover the fact that the “chat”  was being taken over by two well informed individuals, enabled our debate on smoking to be intellectual, serious, non-circumlocution, wealthier, and mundane.

Meanwhile, the dominant members of the Real Name Group (W) Spring 1994  made no mention in their journal entries about the lack of participation by their own members.  Most interestingly, no member of this group ever referred to another member by name in the debate texts.  But all participants in the Real Name Group (W) Spring 1994 had a great deal to say in their journal entries about the frivolousness of the Nickname Group Spring 1994 (Virtual Locker Room), most of it disapproving.  Stephen’s entry captures the representative tone.

…I feel that 2/3 of the debates were nothing but a bunch of babble from sexually  repressed immature adolescents.  I was in the group that debated the topics of financial aid reform and banning tobacco.  Our debate were 99% serious with 1% consisting of political jokes during the lulls in the debate.  Our peers however were 1% serious and 99% jokes.

Interestingly, the one woman in that class, sue, although easily as disapproving of the Nickname Group Spring 1994, expressed a regret in her journal that she wasn’t allowed to switch groups in mid-class. I can’t tell if she meant that she wanted to be raunchy along with that group, if she wanted to go undercover with a male-sounding nickname, or if she wanted to confront the sexist language the group was using.  An outside reader of the transcript immediately noted that sue’s use of lowercase letters for her name and Amet’s denial of his own silencing at the hands of classmates both constitute subtle effects of self erasure.  This was a group so dominated by Guide Norb, Guide Jeff, and Stephen that sue only logged nine percent of the posts, and Amet barely two percent.

Members of the Nickname Group Spring 1994 (Virtual Locker Room) even seemed to admire the other group’s debate, as one remarked in his journal:

The second debate was very different.  It was a real conversation that could easily have taken place on the floor of the House of Representatives.  It was simply one good point after another.  There was some real discussion going on.    Gadfly, Nickname Group Spring 1994

We can also consider the ways in which silencing, or attempted silencing, played a role in this Virtual Locker Room group.  One group member, Tula, appeared to violate the bantering tone debating the death penalty with an argumentative point  (line 64) that was longer and perhaps more suited for the ethos of the Real Name Group (W) Spring 1994 (Virtual Locker Room).

Nickname Group Spring 1994–No Woman (Virtual Locker Room)

56.    Gadfly:    Useful skills that may improve the society Cat
57.    Guide:    if u fry a criminal u dont have to worry about him repeating his crime
58.    Felix the cat:    speak it girl
59.    VanDam:    …Guid: certain acts of criminal behavior should be punished by death and these         should be known by all
60.    Guide:    you go kitty
61.    Gadfly:    Maybe so, but have you ever asked for a second chance Guide?
62.    Felix the cat:    good point vandam
63.    Guide:    sure gadfly, meanwhile he escapes rapes your mom and kills your dad
64.    Tula:    i went to the middle east one year…to UAE (United Arab Emirates)…They have no crime, no homelessness, no poverty…because they are so strict with capital punishment
65.    Gadfly:    What would be those certian crimes Vandam?
66.    Felix the cat:    this topic blows goats
67.    Guide:    I rest my case then Tula
68.    Hamlet:     I agree
69.    Gadfly:    But is it good to live in fear of strict capitol punishment?
70.    Guide:    yes
71.    Felix the cat:    how about them Mets
72.    VanDam:    …Gadfly: This is to be desided by the court
73.    Guide:    wer not talking about little league
74.    Gadfly:    The courts waste so much money with appeals for the death penalty
75.    Hamlet:     Oh sure…let other people decide for us vandam
76.    Tula:    their rules are like…if someone steals something, they chop off their hands…a         murder—off goes the head!….i dont want to know what they do for rape!
77.    Felix the cat:    yeah but more money is wasted suppoting these people
78.    VanDam:    …Hamlet: Those other people are us, “SOCIETY”
79.    Hamlet:     The courts are not us…we dont even decide who the courts are vandam
80.    Hamlet:     excuse me the courts are not us vandam
81.    VanDam:    Hanlet:  DO YOU VOTE?

We should note here that within this comment about the United Arab Emirates, Tula possibly also revealed to group members that his nickname was the identity of the single non-white member of the group, from the Middle East.  Tula’s point and more wordy writing style were not taken up, but two exchanges later Felix the cat interjected “this topic blows goats” and his next entry was “How bout them Mets.”  Felix the cat was just as unsuccessful in his attempt to pull the group off topic, so he had to rejoin the death penalty exchange. Tula, an older and more assertive member of the class, was not one to be marginalized or silenced easily.  Until the above segment of the debate, he was behind the other group members in a running tally of comments made. He remained relatively quiet until the Guide’s machine crashed and a new topic was introduced, and then he asserted himself, becoming the most dominant member of the group, accounting for 22 percent of the comments by the end.  In his journal entry he was glowing about his experience in virtual culture.

The Chat Box was cool although it didn’t seem like we were getting much accomplished.  It was cool to learn to use this new tool.  I think it could be used in a very effective manner.  It was like experiencing a whole new culture.

On the issue of silencing, the Nickname Group Spring 1994 (Virtual Locker Room) members also tended to assert themselves in tantrum fashion if no one responded to their threads.

Nickname Group Spring 1994 –No Woman (Virtual Locker Room)

202.    Guide                             :nobody answered my
question!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
203.    Tula:    what ?
204.    Guide                             :$?
205.    Hamlet:     Do we really need buissinessmen anyway?
206.    Felix the cat:    do I look like a dictionary guide
207.    Tula:    buttloads of moola

The Guide in this group commented in his journal entry about being ignored, and about his (mock) frustration with unruly group members.

…One thing that definitely made the debate difficult was that there was so many people and it was impossible for everyone to respond to everyone else.  A few times when I said something to someone it went totally unnoticed, even though I used the person’s name to get their attention.  I’m not sure why people did not take the debate serious.  In the beginning, I tried to have a serious debate, and it went well for a while, but then people started to get silly.  Reading over the transcript I found the point where the debate went downhill to be exactly where my session crashed.  After I came back it was too late; they were lost forever.  I just went along with the goofiness after that because there was not much I could do about it.

But in thinking about the issue of silencing and internal censorship in the context of this group, we have to consider the cultural space this group created without the presence or input of women in particular. Tula also contributed many of the overtly sexist comments. A debate culture was being created which had high levels of participation, openness, and abusive and outrageous language, often directed toward belittling women or other minority groups.  The following exchange is a good example of its attitude toward women.

Nickname Group Spring 1994–No Woman

215.    Hamlet:     Kill Guide
216.    Felix the cat:    $22.95 per hour
217.    Tula:    20,000,000 bucks/per death
218.    Guide                             :kill ophelia!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
219.    Tula:    do her first
220.    Guide                             :me first
221.    Hamlet:     Ouch!
222.    Gadfly:    I love they way we stick to the topic
223.    Guide                             :she was hot!! in that movie with Mel Gibson!!!!!!
224.    Tula:    hell yeah
225.    Felix the cat:    what topic?
226.    Gadfly:    but she died (suicide)
227.    Hamlet:     What was the topic anyway?
228.    Tula:    what a waste
229.    Gadfly:    fuck her

Hypothetically we have to ask, what would have happened to a woman in this virtual space?  Would her presence have modified the discourse?  Would she have been swept along into the discourse of the group?  sue commented aptly on this in her journal after reading the transcript of the Nickname Group Spring 1994 (Virtual Locker Room).

As I read through the repartee of the latter group, I found myself making comments in the margins like “confusing,” “obscene,” and “candor superseding morality.”  I believe that in  their aliases the members of the second group found the voices of the idiot in every one of us.  He very much exists, just more curtailed in some people than in others.  The entire exercise reminded me of The Lord of the Flies, and how quickly, when left to his own devices, man can forget all his prior teachings and regress.

Note that her unconsciously ironic use of the “universal” man , as in “…the idiot in every one of us.  He very much exists.”  and “…when left to his own devices, man can forget all his prior teachings and regress.”  In many ways sue allows us to view Men as Other, even as she subsumes her own identity into the “us” of “all of us.”

To conclude that women would be silenced in such a boys’ locker room virtual culture, or that they would be forced to write like the boys while wearing a sickly smile at some of the jokes, is basically impossible since there were no women in the Nickname Group Spring 1994 (Virtual Locker Room).  But if a woman had been in that group, the attitudes of these men might not have been as candidly revealed.  I did, however, attempt to reverse the conditions the following fall and put a woman into the Nickname Group.  What I found is that it appears to be impossible to put a woman into the Virtual Locker Room, because if a woman is known to be present, the Virtual Locker Room disappears.

Homophobia also became an integral element to the abuse in the Nickname Group Spring 1994 (Virtual Locker Room).  In the class discussion on the transcripts of the Spring 1994 Debates, a student who admitted to being Felix the cat protested that he was not being homophobic when he called the Guide a faggot (line 150).  “I have two good friends who are gay and I’m really cool with it.  I just wrote that because we were ranking on each other.”  I asked him, if he was so cool about gay issues, why the term faggot was still considered a “rank,” a bad thing to call someone. This student continued to protest that he was not homophobic, as did other class members.

I don’t want to tell any student what or how to think.  I did not have a stake in convincing that student that he was homophobic in order to call the exchange a success. He is still thinking about it, and he can work it out on his own.  He responded to that class in his journal entry, rigidly holding on to his original idea, unaware of the irony of what he was writing.

I think that we read into the debate way too much.  We shouldn’t make judgments of people for what they wrote.  If we do this, people will be afraid to say what they mean in fear of being made [fun] of.  It’s not correct or fair to call a person homophobic just because they call a person a faggot.  It’s just joking around and it should be taken that way and none other.  You can’t characterize a person about what they write.  We should not create an opinion about a person just from what they write.  Felix the cat, Nickname Group Spring 1994 (Virtual Locker Room)

I enjoy this journal entry most of all.  This student claims we read too much into the transcripts of the debates, and it is a charge worth thinking about, given the speed of the interactions as they scroll up the screen.  His motive for writing above is defensive.  He did not have to own up to his nickname, but he did it anyway, because he felt that we were wrongly characterizing “the guide is a fagot” (line 150) as homophobic discourse.  He says it was just a joke.  But between the lines of his journal entry are the seeds of its own undoing.  In claiming that “We shouldn’t make judgments of people for what they wrote,” he remains oblivious to the fact that calling someone a faggot is making a judgment of another person, a much more harsh judgment than suggesting that a certain discourse reflects homophobic attitudes.  This student is defensive over being called homophobic, yet claims that he should be able to call anyone a faggot and that person should not be defensive, rather, he should take it as a joke.  Felix the cat’s position on this matter seems to reflect his majority group/insider status in the Virtual Locker Room.  According to the apparent rules of this group, certain name-calling is understood to be a joke, and other name-calling is not.  The way to tell the difference is whether the names, in this case “faggot” or “woman” are seen as representing members of the group.  They are not, thus the name-calling is OK and an acceptable joke.

But am I reading too much into these debate texts?  For me, the most enlightening aspect of all of the prejudice and bias found in the two Virtual Locker Rooms is its rootedness not purely in sexism, but in the homophobia that underlies the sexism.  To look at the insults and idle comments, “woman,” “speak it girl,” “the guide is a fagot,” “he’s a pufta,” “a flying faggot,” “ok there sweet tits,” “kill ophelia!” “do her first,” “me first,” “fuck her,” “Guide you are a pussy,” “you and me later on well see who is the pussy,” “if you don’t want to be raped dont do the crime [referring to male rape in prison],” “I did my job with your mom last night,” “she, are you sure it wasn’t a he,” “guide is a weiner,” “suck my dick,” and  “you homo” as an extended list, the connection becomes clear.  Suzanne Pharr, in Homophobia: a Weapon of Sexism, suggests that homophobia gives sexism much of its power because it links sexism with heterosexism.  She writes,

Heterosexism creates the climate for homophobia with its assumption that the world is and must be heterosexual and its display of power and privilege is the norm.  Heterosexism is the systemic display of homophobia in the institutions of society.  …It is not by chance that when children approach puberty and increased sexual awareness they begin to taunt each other by calling these names: “queer,” “faggot,” “pervert.”  It is at puberty that the full force of society’s pressure to conform to heterosexuality and prepare for marriage is brought to bear.  Children know what we have taught them, and we have given clear messages that those who deviate from standard expectations are to be made to get back in line.  (Pharr 16-17)

To examine sexism and gender bias without making the link between sexism and homophobia is to miss half of the story, a story about misogyny so complete that even when no woman is present, her aura cast upon men in a closed group makes sexuality between men as constant a tension as sexuality between men and women.  This is the political impact of a societal imbalance of power: an enforcement of the value of all things male while devaluing all things female, yet at the same time desiring them, obsessing upon them.  I would venture that this is an attribute of groups that understand themselves to be something “Other,” outside the norm of society, able only to define themselves in terms of that mainstream society.  This is how I move to my understanding of the Virtual Locker Room as closed group communication by Men as Other.  From this understanding, we can look both inside and outside of these groups and perhaps see the effects of the Politics of Men as Other.

Which leaves me to consider the Nickname Group (W) Fall 1994, as anti-climactic as it is.  Three group members were able to dominate the rest somewhat (20 percent vs. 7-12 percent).  One group member, Cable, was a racial minority and an experienced MOO-er whose debate topic was Role-Playing Games, yet he participated the least of anyone in the group.  In analyzing the transcript of this group, which held in many ways a model debate, the most notable feature is the heavy enforcement hand of the Guide, who took his role seriously and played it with the fairness of a good teacher, a benevolent despot.  When I selected him for the role, I had no inkling he would do that, as this student was quiet in class.  Even at the beginning of the debate, when some group members initiated silliness, testing the water, he didn’t take the bait and go along, as the following exchange shows:

Nickname Group (W) Fall 1994  (woman present–Clide)

1.    Guide:     Hello everyone
2.    bob:    Hey everybody.
3.    Cable:    present and accounted for…
4.    Guide:     Tell me some topics please
5.    The Big Ragu:    Hey, hows everyone doing?  My topic deals with censorship in the media with regards to violence.
6.    bob:    I have not yet figured out a topic.  Im open for any ideas.
7.    Guide:     Wheres everybody else
8.    Kurt Cobain:    My brain hurts…
9.    Guide:     sorry about that Kurt
10.    The Big Ragu:    Lets get this thing underway Guide.
11.    Guide:     I can only do what she tells me
12.    The Big Ragu:    No, you dont.
13.    Guide:     Yes I do

I should note that the “she” is the teacher, me, and the Guide’s sense of my directing him was his own construction.  My only direction toward the Guides of both groups concerned pace, and getting to everyone’s topics at approximately 15 minute intervals so no one would be left out.  I should also add that a friend was sitting in on the class to learn the software, and he participated in this group as Kurt Cobain.  He was sitting in the back of the room and no one knew he had slipped in, or which nickname was his.  People always drifted in and out of the back of the lab, trying to use an open machine if the teacher would let them.

The woman in this group on her own selected a man’s nickname, Clide, and kept her identity to herself.  The group knew she was one of them because she sat on the same side of the aisle, but they didn’t know which pseudonym.  Even in the following class session, the face-to-face discussion of the printed transcripts, she slyly kept her identity secret and the class argued over which nickname she had, opening a discussion on assumed characteristics of gendered communication.  Half of the class thought she was Kurt Cobain.  Several others guessed correctly.

A test of this group’s even-handedness can be seen in its discussion of a volatile and attitude-revealing subject, feminism, a thread that ran for quite a while because it was the topic of two different group members (taking opposite positions).  The following two excerpts show this group in action early in the thread, and near its end.  At no time did the discussion degenerate into ad hominem attacks or highly charged emotional statements.  Most interesting is how near the end the group explored writing issues around sexist language, all of its own instigation.  Perhaps these classes don’t need teachers after all.

Nickname Group (W) Fall 1994–(woman named Clide)

148.    The Big Ragu:    Feminism, we could do without the radicals.
149.    bob:    What is Feminism???
150.    Kurt Cobain:    …I personally think that RPGs are sort of silly, why not experience the real         world and all it has to offer?
151.    Gadfly:    kurt every things harmless to you next to a gun (If you had one…)
152.    Guide:     Im against Feminism for the most part.  Your right Ragu, the radicals are the         worst.
153.    Clide:    Where do you draw the line between being over sensitive to feminist issues and         bening ignorant?
154.    Cable:    Some time you just want to get away when the real world brings you down.
155.    The Big Ragu:    The problem that I have encountered is that they ask for equal rights so they get         equal rights,but when it comes to being a
156.    Guide:     Good question Clide, I really dont know the answer?
157.    Kurt Cobain:    Ragu, finish your thought
158.    The Big Ragu:    gentleman and paying for the bill or opening a door, if we dont then we are a pig         and rude and inconsiderate.
159.    Clide:    A feminist is someone who believes in equal rights for men and women.
160.    The Big Ragu:    It is a double standard that us men cannot win.
161.    Gadfly:    It should be equal rights all the way?
162.    Guide:     Is that true Clide.  I wasnt aware of it.
163.    Clide:    Thats the basic definition
164.    Kurt Cobain:    Of course it should be equal rights all the way
165.    The Big Ragu:    It should be but it is not.
166.    bob:    Im for feminism but it shouldnt be called that.
(167-192 cut for space)
192.    Gadfly:    I do not like to say “he or she” every time in my papers
193.    Kurt Cobain:    GAdfly, stick to writing “she” then.
194.    Clide:    No one does. Can you think of a gender neutral word?
195.    The Big Ragu:    “it”
196.    Gadfly:    thats what I thought but are we being politically correct?
197.    Guide:     Clide we dont have one.
198.    Clide:    That sounds primitive.
199.    Kurt Cobain:    how bout “they”? All it takes is a little thinking and reiwriting.
200.    The Big Ragu:    but it is gender neutral and that is all the criteria that was asked for.
201.    Guide:     They is plural and doenst refer to one thing.
202.    Gadfly:    I have to go out of my way though
203.    bob:    yeah, but they has he in it isnt that wrong.
204.    Gadfly:    good guide
205.    Clide:    Youd have to create a new word.

The Big Ragu and the Guide open the discussion of feminism by stating that they were against “the radicals” (lines 148 and 152)  While this potentially could become an attack on feminists, bob asks what feminism is, leading a number of group members to help him work out a definition.  Clide (the woman in the group) raises the issue of drawing a line between oversensitivity and ignorance.  The Big Ragu shows some sensitivity to what he perceives as a double standard about equal rights and gentlemanly conduct.  Kurt Cobain (the outsider) allies with Clide and uses an emphatic tone, “Of course it should be equal rights all the way” (line 164).  By line 166, bob understood feminism well enough to have developed an opinion on it.

In the second part of the excerpt on feminism, the discussion had evolved to writing class papers.  Gadfly objects to political correctness and says that he does not like writing “he or she in his papers.”  “It” and “they” are offered as alternatives. The discussion does not accept simple answers or simple contentiousness. Instead, we get a feeling that the group is wrestling with pros and cons of different alternatives.  Later they talk about possible new words and the awkward feeling of “one.”  As the teacher I should add that I had mentioned the chapter in our writing handbook on gender fair language when I handed out the syllabus on the first day of class.  At the time of these debates, a full-fledged class discussion of the topic had not yet taken place (I usually wait until I comment on sexist language on a paper and students bring it up when I am handing papers back).

What happened to keep this debate on track?  Was it the strong hand of the Guide, the presence of the woman, or the dynamic of the entire group?  Most certainly, anonymity was not a factor.  And, despite my having varied the conditions over two semesters, I still cannot rule out utter chance and circumstance, or teacher influence.  More research will have to be done in this area, and throughout 1995-96 I have continued my work along these lines.  I also look to others to conduct further studies under different conditions and variables.  But my first priority remains the quality of my classroom discussions and the pedagogical value of the whole exercise, both before and after electronic chat experiences.  I must put the needs of my students first and continue to strive for enlightening, interactive, and positive experiences in the classroom, both electronic and otherwise.

Conclusion

That said, I have to add that I look forward to using these electronic spaces in my classrooms again and again, with debates or any other topics I might think up.  I will of course continue to experiment with structures and group leadership in order to tilt the experience in a more positive direction for all students while at the same time relinquishing teacherly control and authority to my students as active learners, increasing the amount of interactive, dialogic experiences and helping them to think and analyze for themselves, without looking to an authority.   But still, I must ask the following pointed questions: “Why would I want to have students participate in an activity that generates oppressive, hegemonic, sexist, racist, and homophobic atmospheres? How could this possibly align with my goals for feminist and critical pedagogies?”

However, just think of how often this locker room discourse is self-censored and thus hidden from the eyes of the people whom it would offend. Would you rather know about it or not know about it? How about your students? Would you rather protect them from it, as sheltered children unaware of the gut-level feelings of their hegemonic oppressors, or would you rather use the site of your classroom to open the door for rare dialogue and interaction with these commonly hidden and unexamined attitudes?  I know my answer.

I find the electronic chat rooms to be an intriguing educational tool for feminist pedagogies, and one that my activist heart will not let me flinch from. The class discussion of the printed chat texts was the most essential and valuable part of the experience. My students had created collaborative, dialogic texts in a somewhat nonlinear form, and we were able to turn around and have an active discussion of the language and cultures created in the virtual space of those texts. Their words, their peculiar polyvocal compositions, became the highlight of the class reading list, bringing in alternative and often unprivileged texts for examination. This gave us a valuable gateway to higher understanding of the politicized contexts of language and culture. For instance, consider an assigned class bulletin board posting one week after the Fall 1994 Debates. It is from the Guide of the Real Name Group Fall 1994 (Virtual Locker Room), the student who described having sex with Hans’s mother:

Doing the chat box was pretty fun, I mean we were supposed to be doing work but it seemed  like other things wee on our minds.  I now wish that you never printed out the results of the chat box.  It is pretty evident that I have a very dirty mouth.  I guess you learn something about yourself in those kind of situations.

One of the things I learned was that a society can be formed by something so basic as a different name or the lack of one. There was an obvious tone difference in the writing of the real name group and the writing of the nick name group.  The group with the real names seemed to be more violent and aggressive (raw even ) with their speech but the writing of the nick was easy flowing and easy to comprehend. Though these differences were obvious it doesn’t make one lesser than the other. Guide, Real Name Group Fall 1994 (Virtual Locker Room).

In light of this and other similar responses, I would have to conclude that seemingly oppressive electronic forums can have an important consciousness-raising function in a writing classroom, illustrating the subtle effects of sexist, racist, and homophobic language more dramatically than position papers on pronoun usage and social oppression alone.  And if we assume that these forums are a simple reflection of our existing cultures, rather than some democratizing, egalitarian ideal space, then class work analyzing how communication in these spaces can silence and empower different groups and individuals will become a valuable step in changing the existing cultures which are reflected in the electronic forums.

We can also see at times greater participation and interaction in a Chat Room debate than we might see in a face-to-face classroom discussion, particularly since there is no turn-taking and people need not queue waiting to talk or deciding that what they have to say is not worth the wait.  This brings a richness to class discussions due to the volume of ideas able to be introduced in a multi-threaded discourse, a subject that in itself is worthy of more research.  But we should not pretend that this effect is automatically a good thing, especially not for all students.  Several students in my class commented in their journals that these debates were also biased toward fast typists and people with good vision, and that is indeed the case.

Yet after looking at these texts, we still have to ask:  Isn’t all this obvious?  What is the big deal about the common phenomenon of adolescent banter getting out of hand?

The contrast between mainstream discourse and male-gendered discourse that emerges online can reveal for us another aspect of gendered communication in a forum where traditional nonverbal cues can be removed, and where egalitarian access and the inability to interrupt have been widely noted. These conditions eliminate often-cited variables affecting gendered communication and unfold before us a curiously distilled view of dominance and silencing. We can see how the gendered tone is set in the creation of on-line cultures, perhaps leading us to a better understanding of similar face-to-face cultures.

But more importantly, if we shift around to view these online male-gendered discourse conventions as deviations from the mainstream, as something Other, these texts have a great deal to reveal about attitudes toward women and minorities that only show up when the door seems to be closed, when the group is insular.  In an age when prejudice and overt discriminatory practices have gone underground, these texts serve as important proof to counter those who claim that the war is over, that the battle already has been won.  Without the evidence of these texts, how many of my students would have sat in a class discussion and vigorously asserted that sexism and racism were things of the past, that women and minority groups needed to “get over it?”  How many of them insisted that anyway?

But beyond the immediate classroom contact zone, these texts allow us as scholars to examine the dynamics of communication in exclusive domains, both with and without the presence of an outsider, a woman who represents and brings with her mainstream values and discursive styles. To spin Spitzack and Carter’s categories, “The Politics of Women as Other” and “Women as Communicators,” into “The Politics of Men as Other,” brings a hidden aspect of gendered communication into the open. From my analysis of the above chat texts, we can see that at times some men do view their position as one of Other, set off from the mainstream. This position of alterity can easily be characterized as resentful, hostile, and oppressive to women. If, according to Spitzack and Carter, “male speech is the standard against which female or ‘other’ speech is judged,” exactly what is this locker room speech, mainstream or Other?  If it is mainstream, why is it usually so carefully hidden?

Spitzack and Carter’s  “Women as Communicators” approach lets us consider political implications for men and women as both outsiders and insiders. In the Virtual Locker Room, women are outsiders, yet Virtual Locker Room discourse is outside the mainstream, affected by the controlling factor of even one woman (dare we refer to this male self-censorship as Habermas’s “internal and external coercion?).  So if male communication is not the standard against which men’s and women’s communicative actions are judged, what is the “organizing force in social interaction?” What are the political implications of these two different positions, mainstream and Other, once we construct them to operate more flexibly, less dualistically, to allow us to consider deviant, commonly self-censored, marginal discourse from men, the very group holding the greater political power?

For instance, an all-male locker room culture may be old news, yet from the point of view of women communicators, it is a cultural attitude and space from which they are excluded, along with other traditional bastions of male privilege, the men’s clubs, the good ol’ boys golfing circles.  While few women may want to be included or exposed to locker room discourse, a greater issue is at stake.  Getting in to the Men’s Club, the golfing circle, etc. may make no difference.  As we see in the Virtual Locker Room, it is possible that the discourse conventions which define this exclusively male terrain may cease to manifest themselves given the presence of even a single woman.

As many writers have already noted, power, favors, and connections are often commodities in these exclusively male groups, despite attention to other topics such as basketball or golf.  Cultural precedents may be established that in effect circle the wagons of the group, defining itself as Other, to effectively exclude even when it is forced to or seeking to include by law or social mandate.  Allowing women into men’s clubs may make no difference if the cultural boundaries demand self-censorship in the presence of an outsider.

Perhaps this kind of research could be done with conventional face-to-face methods (or unethical hidden tape recorders). The fact that this locker room discourse broke into the open in the medium of cyberspace should be sobering for those who make claims for greater egalitarian forums, for higher levels of democracy in this so-called “achieved utopia” of virtual reality.  Rather than theorizing impossibly ideal democratic features for cyberspace classrooms, communities, and cultures, we might  be better off trying to democratize our existing face-to-face cultures as they move into cyberspace, because more than anything, cyberspace culture seems to simply mirror and perhaps distort whatever we bring in to it.

Appendix

Key: Gender/Minority/Ethnic Identity (self-described)
W=Woman
AA=African American
A=Southeast Asian born
MEA=Middle East Arabia born
MEI=Middle East Israeli born
L=Central American/Cuban born
I=India born

(all percentages have been rounded to whole numbers)

Real Name Group (W) Spring 1994 :  43 Comments Total
(computer crash destroyed some text)

Guide Norb        37 percent.
Stephen (Gadfly)         23 percent
Guide Jeff         19 percent.
sue (W)              9 percent
David              2 percent
Amet (I)              2 percent.

Nickname Group Spring 1994 (Virtual Locker Room): 322 Comments Total

Tula (MEA)        22 percent
Felix the cat         19 percent.
Gadfly             19 percent
Guide (machine crash)         17 percent
Hamlet             15 percent.
Van Dam (changed names)     2 percent
The Beaver/Phoque/others          2 percent

Nickname Group (W) Fall 1994 :  244 Comments Total

The Big Ragu            21 percent
Guide                21 percent
Gadfly (MEI)            17 percent
Kurt Cobain            13 percent
Clide (W)            12 percent
bob                    9 percent
Cable (AA)              7 percent

Real Name Group Fall 1994 (Virtual Locker Room):  467 Comments Total

Gadfly (L)            20 percent
Guide (AA-L)            15 percent
Hans                15 percent
King Cobra (A)            15 percent
Eric                13 percent
Lin (A)                13 percent
vic (A)                10 percent

References

Bolter, J. D. (1991). Writing Space. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Ess, C. (1996) The Political Computer: Democracy, CMC and Habermas.  In C. Ess (Ed.) Philosophical Perspectives on Computer-mediated Communication.  Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Faigley, L.  (1992). Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition.  Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Flores, M. J. (1990). Computer Conferencing: Composing a Feminist Community of Writers. In C. Handa (Ed.), Computers and Community (pp. 106-117). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers.

Haraway, D. (1990). A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism. In L. J. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (pp. 190-233). London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc.

Herring, S., Johnson, D., & Dibenedetto, T. (1992). Participation in electronic discourse in a “feminist” field. In K. Hall, M. Bucholtz, & B. Moonwomon (Eds.), Locating Power: Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Women and Language Conference,  . Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group.

Herring, S. C. (1992). Gender and Participation in Computer-Mediated Linguistic Discourse. In ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics (October).

Herring, S. C. (1993). Gender and Democracy in Computer-Mediated Communication. Computer-Mediated Communication.  Special issue of the Electronic Journal of Communication/la revue electronique de communication, 3(2), 1-16.

Lea, M., O’Shea, T., Fung, P., & Spears, R. (1992) “Flaming” in computer-mediated communication: Observations, explanations, implications. In M. Lea (Ed.), Contexts of computer-mediated communication (pp. 89-112) :London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf.

Pharr, S. (1988).  Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism.  Little Rock, AR: Chardon Press.

Selfe, C. L. (1990). Technology in the English Classroom: Computers through the Lens of Feminist Theory. In C. Handa (Ed.), Computers and Community (pp. 118-139). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers.

Selfe, C., & Selfe, R. (1994a). The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones. College Composition and Communication, 45(4), 480-504.

Selfe, C. L., & Selfe, R. J. (1994b). Writing as Democratic Social Action in a Technological World:  Politicizing and Inhabiting Virtual Landscapes. In A. H. Duin & C. J. Hansen (Eds.), Nonacademic Writing:  Social Theory and Technology Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.

Spender, D.  (1985)  Man Made Language.  2nd Ed. London: Routledge.

Spitzack, C., & Carter, K. (1987). Women in Communication Studies: A Typology for Revision. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 73 (November 1987), 401-23.

Winner, L. (1977). Autonomous Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Click to view larger image of dissertation interface design schema

Click to view PDF of Dissertation Site Flow