This panel will present the Center for Media Education’s research on civic resources and activities available for young people on the Internet. Promising practices for youth civic involvement will be highlighted.

Panel 2: RHETORIC, THEORY, AND THE INTERNET (A)

Ann Z. Li, "Rhetorical policy analysis and collective voice as a political economy of signs"

The communitarian aims of e-democracy should be seen in the context of an increasingly problematic system of rights controversies. The discourse of cyberlaw and the rise of new forms of virtual capital in its collectivized forms ranges from electronic books and digital music to adult entertainment videos delivered over wireline and wireless network infrastructure. This media raises new challenges for democratic rights protection beyond content filtration and control concerns. The self-regulatory initiatives and privacy protection discourse continue to be appropriated and constrained by forces of exploitation and repression. This presentation will consider the libertarian challenges of electronic text censorship when the complex digital intertext is commodified and institutionalized as new objects of ekphrasis. The role of anonymity protections in an age of collectivized file sharing creates new challenges for the concept of an electronic commons. This necessitates a rhetorical analysis of public policy where property rights and a civil society reframe Habermas’ concept of a public sphere as a distributed network defined by its aporia.

My argument is that it is essential to bring Berlin’s social-epistemic rhetoric to the computer mediated classroom as a tool for the critical examination of the social, political, economic, cultural, and material conditions which have given rise to computer technology and its current place in society. Such investigation not only questions the utopian moment in computer mediated writing pedagogy argued for by some scholars, but also questions the utopian moment of participatory democracy. We must ask the questions: whose "democracy" and whose "Age of the Internet" are we talking about, anyway? In this paper I ask those questions as I suggest that social-epistemic rhetoric requires the impossibility of democracy.


Panel 3: POLITICS, POWER, AND THE INTERNET (A)

Camille Krawiec Martinez, "Paz Para Vieques: Challenging the US Navy and Democracy via the Web"

Mary Leonard, "Paul Celan and the Language of Exile"

In this presentation I will talk about Paul Celan's life, and show how his work, though it was written decades before the internet, gives us an example of the kind of political rhetoric that the internet can make use of.

Paul Celan was a Holocaust poet (1920-1969) who lived in Paris, in exile from his mother tongue and from his birth country of Romania, spending his life writing and translating, putting his life back in order after surviving a labor camp and the intense guilt from his parents' death in the camp, Transnistria. Instead of being silenced by his experiences, Celan felt a deepening need to bear witness to himself, and to find a way to write that he could justify in the face of the horrors he had experienced.

As he did so, his poetry gradually evolved into a new form of the German language, a new rhetoric--one with gaps, arcane references, compounds, technical words--he took back his language that had been brutalized. This presentation will take you through the history of Celan's move to such rhetoric and show how his poetry became one that engages the reader to fill in the gaps, becoming then an act of dialogic political rhetoric that we can learn from as we explore the possibilities of the internet.


Panel 4: DEFINING DEMOCRACY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: COMMUNITY BUILDING AND POLITICAL POWER

Phil Burns, "The Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project: Building for Other Communities"

While the Intercollegiate E-Democracy Project promotes practices [to be described in my paper] that support the building of communities, their presence in IEDP discourse does not mean that students participating in the IEDP at any given time actually constitute a real community, if a real community provides the basis for non-rhetorical as well as rhetorical action for social change. For any given student, or for any given population of students, the IEDP is too transient for that. What these practices can accomplish, however, is preparation for such action that might take place within communities that already exist or that might be built beyond the IEDP. The IEDP is a revolving door, a door through which students enter from and exit to their various communities within the greater public sphere. And what they experience as community-building, including the rhetorical skills they develop and practice within the IEDP, can be taken back to those established (or prospective) communities that are much more conducive to concerted action. IEDP students’ relationship to community is thus one of apprenticeship, or, to change the metaphor, the imagined community of the IEDP is a crucible where subjective agents are formed, or where political subjectivities are at least tried on, tried out, or otherwise tested for subsequent participation in democratic communities where real change may be possible.

Corey Dolgon, "The Work of Community in the Age of Post-Industrial Production: Stories From the Shop Floor"

Leda Cooks, "Living and Dying On-Line: Marking Identity and Community on the Panama-L listserve"

This paper explores the construction and negotiation of both physical and virtual community identification on line. The focus of the research is on the rituals that mark membership, celebrate life events, and grieve the death of community members in the on-line national listserv for Panama, Panama-l. Each time a member puts forth rules for participating in discussion, notes the birth of a child, marriage or grieves the loss of a loved one, they enter into a discourse that creates and maintains an on-line community even as it solidifies the (already understood) existence of a community centered around the physical (and imagined) national space of Panama The paper uses both ethnographic and textual analysis to analyze the discourses that ritualize this long-standing (and ever-changing) community.

Panel 5: THE INTERNET, HIGHER EDUCATION, AND THE CLASSROOM (A)

Linda K. Shamoon, "In Search of a Theoretical Frame for Public Deliberation on the Internet: Suggestions from the Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project"

Certainly one of the earliest and continuing hopes for the internet is the reinvigoration of citizen-to-citizen public political discussion and the increased participation of "ordinary" people in civic and public life. This was certainly the hope of the earliest civic network projects, such as PEN in Santa Monica, and those in Glendale and Pasadena, and also the hope of those of us who teach in the Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project. Our hope is that by creating a venue for students in different classes around the country to debate issues of public and social concern, our students' knowledge, understanding, and public involvement in such issues will deepen. In the public projects, however, the poor or even destructive quality of the discourse undermined some of those early efforts, and in our classrooms the students' internet exchanges often do not lead them to an increase in their commitment or understanding of an engaged public life. Why do these public discussion projects sometimes fall far short of their goals?

Part of the answer comes from the fact that those of us engaged in this complex undertaking paid more attention to issues of access to technology than to the often difficult nature of public deliberation in most venues but most especially on the internet. Internet-mediated conversation can be disjointed, inane, or even destructive. In this regard, however, the research of James Bohman on the nature of public deliberation offers a helpful starting point for us to rethink our efforts. In Bohman's scheme the key to successful public deliberation hinges on an array of "crucial discourse moments" that are nurtured by widespread "up-take" of freely shared concerns, as well as the slow and dialogical accumulation a public interpretation of complex issues, the opportunity for self-disclosure (changes of understanding), the self-monitoring of the discussion, and a vastly increased tolerance for critical, alternative, and contrary voices. These factors, argues Bohman, create a public discourse which is, in itself, the realization of a deliberative democracy. Capturing these factors within civic network technologies and within our teaching offers an interesting pathway to more successful public deliberation.

Kevin Eric De Pew, "Constructing Cybersubjectivities: The Responsible Rhetor in The Online Public Commons"

The question, "Where do you want to go today?"--a question asked in Microsoft's advertisements--implicitly promises to transport the individual to anyplace in the world, universe, or imagination that individual that the individual wants to go. Likewise, it assumes that computer technologies have the capability of transforming the individual into whoever the individual wants to be--sans race, ethnicity, gender and other marking characteristics. For many scholars, the construction of these cybersubjectivities raises questions about the veracity of our online experiences. Although these deliberations illuminate cybercitizenry's effects on the online public common as well as the real life public common, this scholarship assumes an effortless transition from the real environment to the virtual realm. As a result, these scholars overlook the rhetorical communicative process that constructing one's cybersubjectivity entails. In this presentation, the speaker will argue that scholarship about cybersubjectivities needs to be grounded in rhetorical and sociolinguistic theory. After explaining the problematic nature of the current theory, the speaker will present the implications of developing a rhetorically sound cybercitizenry and strategies for incorporating this rhetorical process into the classroom.

During the Spring of 2000, we noticed that one of the most recurring ideological differences and difficulties occurred because of the conflicting views caused by the more liberal views of the East Coast students and our Wyoming students' own Western conservative libertarianism. Based on discursive analysis of students' postings and interviews with our students (unfortunately we were not able to interview the Northeastern students), we conclude that the discussion between the Wyoming students and the Northeastern students failed to develop beyond clearly drawn regional differences because (1) the students were immersed in unexamined subject positions; (2) the students viewed the goal of the IEDP to be persuasive rather than deliberative (Burns); and (3) students were unable to identify and address the points of stasis in their discussions (Carter). In our examination of what we as instructors could do differently to promote more deliberative discourse and to increase students' self-reflexivity of their cultural positioning, we draw upon interviews and class assignments with IEDP student participants from Massachusetts and Wyoming in the Spring 2001.


Panel 6: CIVIL AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY (B)

Stephen A. Klien, "Public character and citizen agency: Promoting civil society (or not) in political rhetoric"

Understanding public character in this manner provides a helpful resource for critics and teachers of political rhetoric—as well as for public persons sensitized to this concept through civic-oriented education—to locate and evaluate the ideological and ethical implications of political communication. The rhetorical performances of politicians, public advocates, news media sources and so on can all be examined in terms of how the performance promotes (or impedes) the agency norms of a civil society: open, democratic and critical discussion and action on the part of active, engaged citizens that privileges the best interests of the community.

William Keith, "Face to face with Participatory Democracy: Lessons from the Forum Movement, 1920-1940"

This paper will briefly describe the Forum Movement, and the Discussion Movement, the successor to debate as the fundamental democratic skill. It will then try to sort out the obstacles faced by the Forum Movement, the solutions they tried, and the lessons for electronic democracy in what worked and what didn’t, paying special attention to their use of new technologies and how they defined democracy.

Vivian B. Martin, "Journalism, the Internet, and the Rhetoric of Snideness"

How does one begin to have a rational discussion with someone who sends an e-mail with a subject header that says "socialist scum" or hurls more personal insults? That's the question I have when readers send such missives in response to my bi-weekly op-ed column. There's sometimes even a snideness in e-mails that might have been intended as supportive, or at least neutral. Because of these and other rhetorical shortcomings that can make sustained dialogue between people of opposing worldviews impossible, Americans may miss opportunities to utilize new communication technologies to expand democracy for themselves. As I will discuss, it's not just the

Panel 7: RHETORIC, THEORY, AND THE INTERNET (B)

Christopher Schroeder, "Electronic Literacies and the Crisis of Legitimacy"

In ReInventing the University and elsewhere, I argue that the crisis of postsecondary education in the United States is less a crisis of literacy and more a crisis in meaning and education in a postmodern society. As the latest census figures attest, the country is more diverse than ever, and yet within the academy, a universalized literacy and culture attempt to serve the same function that they served in a more homogeneous institution, which has been disappearing since the nineteenth century. From this perspective, I would reverse a presupposition of the CFP by arguing not only that we have a responsibility to prepare students to be "active citizens for e-democracy" but also that we can exploit electronic literacies and cultures as a way of reducing the very conditions that give rise to these crises in meaning and education. In my paper, I outline my argument about the legitimacy crises in colleges and universities and illustrate ways that electronic literacies not only prepare students for e-democracy but potentially resolve the crisis that critics have mistakenly call a crisis in literacy. Only through a partnership between social expectations and educational practices can we can invigorate both classrooms and citizens toward a democratic polis.

Jeanne Ekdahl, "Conversation, Anyone?"

One of the intentions of the IEDP is allow students "to participate interactively in public discussion and debate" which to many means to encourage our students to engage in deliberative dialog on issues of substance. Often, though, students in the IEDP and other online forums seem to engage in a sort of speechifying. In these cases, the student writes a post, which may either introduce a new topic or be responsive to prior posts and which may, in fact, evoke a great deal of response from other students, but then the writer never revisits the thread. There are often, as well, posts to which no one responds. One wonders if they are read at all! Finally, in spite of the fact that the students in an online forum have, theoretically at least, a real audience, they often don't seem to evince any sense of either audience or purpose in their participation.

Panel 8: POLITICS, POWER, AND THE INTERNET (B)

Christopher M Porter, "The Political Dot Com Meltdown. Why?"

In an era where the internet continues to permeate all aspects of our society, why have so many political internet sites failed? Was it bad business economics, or bad market analysis? Is there a marketplace for politics on the internet, and if so, what does it look like?

The Political Dot Com Meltdown holds lessons for all people who are interested in politics and the internet, and their experiences are worth examining as teachers, students, researchers, journalists, and advocates try to deduce American politics and the internet in the 21st Century.

Andy Hasse, "ICANN and the Contras: The loss of Constitutional Rights online"

The paper will address the political use of the Internet and the loss of Constitutional Rights online. A case study of a current domain name rights case, as well as an analysis of ICANN (The International Corporation for the Assignment of Names and Numbers) and WIPO (The World Intellectual Property Organization) will be presented.

Related topics of the use of the Internet in political campaigns and general use statistics will also be covered.

Panel 9: THE INTERNET, HIGHER EDUCATION, AND THE CLASSROOM (B)

Mark Mullen, "Too Much Information! Web-based Courseware and Classroom Surveillance"

Rhetoric and composition teachers continually emphasize the value of audience awareness in the teaching of writing. To move students beyond simply writing for the teacher, many composition instructors involve students in writing for an expanded public that can range from the rest of the class, to the wider campus community and beyond. Courseware packages such as Blackboard, WebCT and Prometheus, have facilitated the ability to address an expanded public through, amongst other things, the fusion of discussion lists, file exchange, and real-time chat, and have thus offered significant enhancements to writing instruction for many teachers.

These same packages, however, are also designed to serve as sets of administrative tools. Many of the administrative features contaminate the pedagogical integrity of these packages by bringing a level of surveillance to the scene of writing instruction that beggars even the most extreme visions of the classroom as a disciplinary apparatus. Instructors can tell when their students posted work and sometimes from what location, how many times students have accessed the course website, and what materials they read, amongst other things. As the use of these courseware packages for writing instruction becomes more widespread, they threaten to undermine the very notion of a democratic public sphere central to much contemporary rhetoric and composition theory. Indeed the confusion of the administrative with the pedagogical moves us toward the surveillance model of educational technology that is all too common in the business world.

Clyde Moneyhun, "‘A Desire to Foster the General Welfare’: Technoliteracy and Cybercitizenship"

The exercise of fully literate citizenship has not kept pace with the extension of citizenship rights to more and more groups across the centuries. Access to literacy skills, published texts, and now electronic media has always been uneven, contributing to the creation of a literate elite whose "citizenship" is more powerful than that of others. Some foresee increased democratization in the proliferation of electronic information media, particularly the World Wide Web. While this is possible, we are more likely to see the same literacy gap that has characterized other technologies. De facto disfranchisement is likely to continue for many, and perhaps increase, even as technoliteracy enhances the citizenship of others. Democratic enfranchisement by means of the new electronic information media is not a given, but must be pursued as a political and educational goal.

I teach a research and argumentation class as an exercise is cybercitizenship. Points of departure are websites such as the Library of Congress’s "Thomas," which make details of Congressional business available to average citizens, and private websites such as Vote Smart, which offer openly partisan assessments of political events. I will share writing assignments and examples of student writing. I will also discuss both the sense of empowerment some students report that they feel as a result of this practice of citizenship, and also the perpetuation, even in such a controlled environment, of power inequities in technoliteracy among the students.

Judy Arzt, "Public Discourse in the Digital Age: Reconfiguring College Teaching"

Engaging students in Web-site and online-discussion projects creates opportunities for expanding audience and purpose. These forms of electronic writing complement collaborative learning, post-modernism, and social constructivism. Reviews and position papers beckon for an audience, and placing such writing on Web sites serves a public purpose. When students publish their writing on the Web, they become public ambassadors and maverick voices—participating in free speech and responsible citizenship. Electronic discussion boards enable exploring controversial issues, writing for a diverse audience, and discovering ways to engage readers. Placing an email link on posts and Web sites invites reader response, resulting in additional writer input—making writing cyclical and interactive. Opportunities for online public discourse exist in an array of disciplines; in education classes, lesson plans and critiques of instructional material can be published on class and individual Web sites. In the age of the Internet and electronic discussion boards, occasions for embracing public discourse as a pedagogical approach are endless. We need to explore the possibilities and expand our syllabi so students experience writing, learning, and communicating as engaging, lively, participatory acts. This session examines theory related to online writing and describes classroom practices with Web authoring and online discussions that promoted writing as a form of public discourse.


Panel 10: INFORMATION AND THE INTERNET

Cindy Butos and Bob Peltier, "Misunderestimating the Internet: Information and Disinformation on the World Wide Web"

Critical evaluation of political and media websites is becoming an increasingly important aspect of teaching civic literacy to students. Every year, first-year students arrive on college campuses with higher and higher levels of technological proficiency and more and more unrealistic expectations about what the Web offers them. Attracted by its convenience, they tend to rely too heavily, and often exclusively, on it in their research. Lulled by the homogenous look of Web information, they fail to discriminate among the kinds and quality of information that they find.

By demonstrating techniques of website evaluation and suggesting ways to build assignments that encourage critical reflection and turn the Web into a powerful learning resource, two college writing instructors will address these questions: How well do typical secondary students and undergraduates use the World Wide Web and for what purposes? How well do they understand the strengths and limitations of this new technology?

Emil Coman, "Searching Online: Impact of the Accessibility of Information on Internet Users"

This paper addresses the impact of the accessibility of Web pages on the Internet users. We will measure Internet users’ assessment of the credibility and bias of online resources.

We will expose subjects to a previously chosen list of modified web sites addressing a debatable issue and ask them to assess both their credibility and bias on that matter. An initial questionnaire will be administered in order to measure the subjects’ attitude toward the chosen issue.

Panel 11: RHETORIC, THEORY, AND THE INTERNET (C)

Jeffrey Parker, "Hypertext Authoring/Internet Culture"

In 1987, Russell Jacoby expressed concern over the disappearance of the public intellectual in his book: The last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. Jacoby points to the pressures and demands of a capitalist marketplace as well as to a variety of ideological shifts that determine the potential for critical discourse. This reshaping of intellectual and creative forums resulted in a reduction of, and in some cases, the virtual elimination of many of the options available for both scholarly and creative publication.

Taking Jacoby’s perspective as my starting point, this paper will examine the ways in which developments in hypertext as a serious authoring tool, and the availability of the Internet as an avenue for scholarly and creative publication offers a new territory for experiment and re-invention that will not only radically alter previous authoring strategies, but will also de-stabilize the relationship between reader and text through a process of interactions between writer and reader. This interactivity will, among other things, fundamentally alter traditional definitions of authorship as ownership of a "specific" text. In my argument, I will pay particular attention to the construction of fictional identities by author and reader made possible by various electronic environments such as MOOs and other interactive venues and how this process might re-invent and expand the potential for public, critical, and scholarly discourse.

Mark Kosinski, "Papier-mache Jeremiah and the New Technophobia"

Finally, this presentation will assess how these figures make some effort to articulate principles and relate specific questions to general ideas. At the same time, acknowledging that as jeremiads they may exhibit a formidable display of rhetorical devices, but not always hold up under critical scrutiny.

Peter Adamy, "Democracy and Technology in Education: Approaching Equity through Action"

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we will show why democracy in Japan is dysfunctional. Secondly, we will discuss how the Internet can be instrumental in reshaping democracy. Some of the above initiatives will be examined in detail.

Orayb Najjar, "Activism and Protest in the New Palestinian Public Square in the Age of the Internet"

Until the early 1990s, the news narrative about Arab world was monopolized by foreign news agencies (Reuters, AP, UPI, AFP). All that has changed due to: 1) The adoption of new technology that turned some Arab countries into content providers via satellite; 2) The reliance of Arab satellite stations on Palestinian correspondents to cover the West Bank and Gaza, giving Palestinians a regional broadcast voice they never had; 3) The establishment of (40) local PRIVATE mom-and-pop Palestinian radio and TV stations since 1994, in a region of one government TV or radio station per state; 4) The growing reliance on the Internet by the Palestinian media as well as by non-governmental and human rights organizations.

2. How do Arabs and Israelis use the Internet to make their political claims? How has the battle between Arab and Israeli hackers been globalized?

Panel 13: "COMMUNITY" ON AND OFF THE INTERNET

Leda Cooks and Erica Scharrer, "Are we a community yet? The formation of community in Community Service Learning"

Community Service Learning (CSL) as an idea and a movement in higher education has grown exponentially in the past decade. While much of the impetus for the movement could be seen as a growing need for and interest in civic engagement, few scholars have explored the ways in which in the majority of cases CSL is actually an intercultural experience. Oftentimes, in CSL the experience is one in which people from very different backgrounds attempt to come together to improve the quality of life for groups of people that are part of some community (not likely their own). Therefore, much of the learning that takes place (on the part of students) is around the encountering of their own thought systems and categories and the negotiation of differences. Whether such learning is always or already community learning is the question that guides this research. This paper explores the formation and negotiation of community in Community Service Learning classes and projects through discussing how people reference their own communities and how they integrate or translate that knowledge to the CSL context.

Through observation and interviews with students and community partners, we will first analyze how partners in CSL reference community (whether the partnership is physically located in a community or on-line) and if those references change through the course of their projects. Then, we look toward the implications for representing community learning across racial, sexual, economic, cultural and geographic (conducting on-line partnerships) differences.


Panel 14: THE INTERNET, HIGHER EDUCATION, AND THE CLASSROOM (C)

Betsy A. Bowen, "Social Advocacy on the Web: Teaching Students to Participate"

As part of this effort students critique and create social advocacy Web pages. They begin by reading about the special visual and rhetorical features of writing for electronic media. (See, for example, Haas, 1996). Then each student selects and critiques a professionally designed social advocacy Web site. Finally each student creates a Web page supporting a social cause of their choice. This semester only two of the fifteen students had any prior experience creating Web pages, but all found the task manageable. We went through the same cycle of activities with this task as with other, more traditional persuasive tasks: analyzing the intended audience; planning and drafting the text; reviewing a draft of the Web page with peers. By the end of the exercise students had not only used their persuasive skills to advance a social cause, but they had become creators, not just consumers, of Web-based material.

Beth Browning Jacobs, "Teaching Dialogic Democracy in the Classroom"

Democracy in the age of the internet demands of its citizens a kind of literacy not previously explored in the college writing curriculum. This engaged and dialogic literacy makes students the actors and makers of their own educational content. In enabling students as active knowledge-makers, we thus empower students as active future

An example classroom situation will be presented involving the teaching of democracy in action. The situation involves having students become involved in a freedom of speech case via a recent documentary film. The students do Internet research, correspond with the principals of the case, do law research, and write letters and papers on the topic. As an exercise in pedagogical democracy, this pedagogy demands that students make many decisions and engage in dialogue with each other and with the professor about the progress of the class. This classroom process becomes itself a self-reflexive model for the dialogic democracy we are discussing.

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