Five Ways of Looking at the Computer-Supported Composition Classroom
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Scene Three: Looking @ the Construction of Online Identity A man and a woman / Are one.
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Even with pre-determined formats in software, we can take opportunities to use them “against themselves” to initiate moments of critical discussion. Some of the issues I deal with on a regular basis in my composition classroom include race, gender, and sexuality. I have found that Microsoft’s chat program provides an excellent environment within which to expose the ways that these identity markers are represented in technological environments:
During a discussion of stereotypes, I have my students log onto Microsoft Chat, asking that they use this as an extension of our in-class discussion. I also ask that they use anonymous names so that they can’t be readily identified. Although MS Chat has two modes, text and comic strip, the default is the text mode. I allow them to chat in this format for about 10 minutes. I then ask them to switch to comic strip mode, where they control such options as the form their character takes—an Egyptian pharaoh, a woman in African garb, a white Beatnik, a space alien—or the range of facial expressions accompanying their verbal text. What this provides them with is an opportunity to observe how Microsoft represents different cultures, races, genders, and sexualities. Through visual representations of the various characters and the names that Microsoft has used to designate them, the students tend to move away from a discussion of the topic at hand and into a discussion of how they represent themselves on-line. Many of my students cross gender and race boundaries during this process, and some even take on the language of alternative sexualities with this change in the mode of the chat room.
One of the freedoms I’ve seen students exercise in this environment involves the alteration of language—a recent survey of my students show that the majority of them recognize typical chatroom abbreviations, i.e., “rofl” (rolls on floor laughing), “lol” (laughs out loud), or “brb” (be right back). The sense I get from this is that they’re familiar with the conventions of the environment not as static rules, but rather as part of a flexible, constantly evolving practice in which they assume the agency to alter as they see fit. The transitions that students are willing to make in this environment, both at the level of identity and with respect to language use, seems to provide them with a fuller understanding of the rhetorical options available to them as communicators in general.
The most important aspect of this exercise pertains to the transcript of their text-based discussion that I provide them with during the following class. In the course of reviewing this transcript, and without acknowledging their online identities, the students are quick to point out the various instances of stereotyping, generalization, and assumption that appeared during the conversation. As this discussion draws to a close, I reiterate the fluidity of identity and language in the chatroom and their willingness to engage in that fluidity. I also use this as an opportunity to call into question the ways in which they represent themselves in other writing environments.
Professionals in the world of computers and language arts no doubt remember the early ‘90s New Yorker cartoon voicing all the promise offered by online communication: two computer-literate canines touting the fact that “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” This oft-cited gag embodied the early discourse surrounding the Internet’s potential as a truly democratic communications environment, where the normally distracting differences that constitute our identities would no longer stand in the way of our efforts at genuine civic discourse. Of course, now the joke has morphed into something more ominous, reflecting the panoptic nature of a medium wherein your every movement is tracked and all communication centers around commerce, violence, and sex—not only do “they” know what breed of dog you are, but also the brand of dog food you like and your preference for French poodles and gentlemen’s pants legs. It seems we’ve gone from one extreme to another, from optimistic exuberance to pessimistic exasperation.
And yet online spaces remain that offer participants the potential to engage in play, to dress in virtual drag, to tamper with the very nuts and bolts of language—all positive practices, in our opinion. In short, spaces such as these underscore the performative aspects of our culture; this lesson we’ve learned at various times from the likes of such thinkers as Judith Butler, Lester Faigley, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin, to name but a few. More recently, an able defense advocating the concept of play in the computer classroom to enhance learning can be found in Gail Matthews-DeNatale “Teach Us How to Play: The Role of Play in Technology Education” (Harrington 63). In no small way, teachers start students on the road to empowerment as citizens when they begin to help them question the practices and discourses that help construct their very identities. More to the point, exercises such as the one outlined above offer students concrete examples of how they might resist identity roles and linguistic scripts that have been presented to them as somehow “natural” or essential.
And then there’s the question of how our students are helping to change the very fabric of discourse itself. In his insightful book Emergence, Steven Johnson talks about the phenomenon of distributed intelligence in such varied systems as ant colonies, cities, the neural network of the brain, and the Internet. Basically, Johnson is interested in the capacity of these multi-nodal networks to learn, to exhibit motivated changes in behavioral patterns, in ways that could not be anticipated by simply examining the intelligence of the individual nodes of that system—a “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” argument. One system that Johnson curiously doesn’t examine is that of language itself, though we would suggest that it, too, is given shape by the very same interplay of bottom-up forces (the top-down rules etched into our grammar handbooks aside). Specifically as it pertains to computer-mediated communication, language is undergoing some dramatic and forceful changes that originate from the bottom: in addition to the aforementioned abbreviation convention that pervades chatroom etiquette, think also of the alpha-numeric confusion that marks “133+speak” or "elite speak" (e.g., the word “hacker” would be spelled “h4ck3r”) or simply the contamination of our everyday speech by high-tech lingo. The changes affect not only the vocabulary and grammar of our language, but create wholly new rhetorical demands on it too; it would do our profession well to devote sustained attention to these still-emerging patterns.