Rhetoric, Community, and Cyberspace
rpi.edu
compiled by: James P. Zappen, Laura J. Gurak, and Stephen Doheny-Farina
---excerpts--- (light editing by me to ensure continuity)
a contemporary rhetorical community is less a collection of people joined by shared beliefs and values than a public space or forum that permits these people to engage each other and form limited or local communities of belief.
Contemporary scholars, most notably Bakhtin, have also recognized the mix and clash of individual and communal languages and perspectives--the professional, the social, the commonplace or everyday--within any given rhetorical community, one consequence of which is the increased democratization of such a community, another the likelihood of differences and disagreements between and among the local communities and individuals within it.
for individuals in particular and for humanity in general, things are what they appear to be relative to our perspective or frame of reference . . . the same thing can seem good or bad, seemly or disgraceful, just or unjust, true or false depending upon the community of belief within which it appears
Bakhtin: "All words have the 'taste' of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour"
While such a complex mix of individual and communal languages and perspectives is potentially democratizing, it also exacerbates the difficulty of finding the opportune moment to enter into a community and engage individuals within it and ensures that differences and disagreements will be an ordinary feature of discussions within such a community.
definition: MOO .. acronym for Multi-User Dimension, Object-Oriented
A MOO resembles oral communication in its ability to engage participants synchronously in "real time" and immediately or "face to face," and it resembles written communication in its ability to "reach" a multiplicity of individuals quickly across time, space, and cultural differences.3 Because it permits a multiplicity of individuals to meet synchronously and immediately, it intensifies the mix and clash of temporal, spatial, and cultural differences and thus serves less as a means of transferring knowledge and information than as a contemporary rhetorical community
Because many users are able to "speak" at the same time, communicating in a MOO can be a very intense, carnivalesque experience with potential for very positive and very negative encounters, as languages representing different professional, social, geographic, and other perspectives meet and mix, sometimes in harmonious though momentary communities, sometimes in tense confrontations, called "flaming"
experiment: put a bunch of graduate students together in a chatroom and observe what transpires ........ What could we do to ensure coherence and order in a graduate seminar in which all seventeen participants communicated continuously and simultaneously for a full hour? In an attempt to ensure that the discussions would not disintegrate and undermine our entire enterprise, we assigned "presenter" and "respondent" roles to all participants, ourselves included; asked a presenter to send a commentary on each week's reading to all participants via electronic mail prior to the Thursday evening discussion; and limited the first fifteen minutes of the discussion to an exchange between the presenter and two respondents. We discovered very quickly, however, that neither this traditional classroom structure nor other mechanisms of control could withstand the mix and clash of languages--professional, gendered, disciplinary and political, each intermingled with elements of the carnivalesque--in the rhetorical community of the MOO. Early in our colloquium, our discussions resembled traditional classroom discussions, with "faculty" directing and dominating the discussion and "students" raising hands, responding each in turn, and addressing both us and each other courteously, even deferentially
By the end of our colloquium, this traditional classroom structure has broken down almost completely. We believe, however, that this breakdown in structure did not produce chaos but, quite the contrary, orderly and serious, egalitarian, and often carnivalesque exchanges of views on substantive issues.
this professional community of graduate students, stabilized by a common resistence and a common language, also contained within itself the forces of language that threatened to destabilize and disunify it
Given such a complex mix and clash of languages and perspectives--professional, gendered, disciplinary and political, carnivalesque--individuals, not surprisingly, struggled to find opportune moments to enter into and influence the course of our discussions.
conclusion: Traditional rhetoric focuses its attention upon a single rhetor (or perhaps single rhetors each in turn) seeking purposefully and intentionally to persuade an audience within a single community upon the basis of shared beliefs and values. We found in our colloquium in the MOO a kind of rhetoric and a kind of community that seem to us to be quite unlike anything that we see in the mainstream of the tradition--a rhetoric and a community characterized by a multiplicity of languages and perspectives and a consequent challenge to the rhetor to find the opportune moment to enter into and influence the course of a discussion. Though we recognize the current limits to the access and use of this technology, we nonetheless believe that the MOO has potential to become a contemporary rhetorical community--a public space or forum--within which local communities and individuals can express themselves and develop mutual respect and understanding via dialogue and discussion, and we believe that the graduate students who participated with us in our colloquium demonstrated this possibility through their own positive action in making this space their own. Given the potentially global reach of the MOO, we also believe that it has potential not only to transmit information across time, space, and cultural differences but more especially to provide a forum for dialogue and discussion among people of vastly different cultural backgrounds and beliefs, to become, if we choose to make it such, a contemporary rhetorical community in cyberspace. |
