The key questions that have prompted me to consider the Internet in terms of immediacy are these: How can we conceive of a practice of discourse that seems to function absent any sensible adherence to the classic and modern rules of context and rhetorical situation? How can someone be named the "rhetor" in a situation where everyone can be simultaneously speaking and listening? How can discourse be conducted in a "space" that exists only as streams of electricity, as convenient navigational metaphors ("up" a menu, "going to" a newsgroup, "home" pages, etc.)? What happens when a common perception of "presence" at a given place and time is thwarted by a technology that is able to connect people via written texts at the speed of light? How is any sense of authoritative hierarchy maintained when all information is connected in such a way as to be easily attainable by a multitude of audiences and rhetors alike? What happens when official, authoritative sources compete against the remote and potentially inaccurate writings of people who have something (anything) to say and who have access to the Internet?
I think to consider these questions, we need to re(con)figure the assumptions classical and modern rhetoricians have made regarding rhetorical situation. In chapters one and two, I describe in some detail my theory of immediacy and suggest that it is a more fluid and dynamic way of understanding rhetorical situations within the postmodern condition than the classical and modernist theories of Plato, Gorgias, Bitzer, and Vatz. In this chapter, I would like to apply my concept of immediacy to some specific examples in order to explore the Internet (as I defined it in the previous chapter) as both an example and a generator of immediate rhetorical situations. I will first examine the lack of boundaries between the causes and effects of discourse on the Internet, as well as the problematic relationship between the categories of "rhetor," "audience," and "message." Then I will discuss how discourse on the Internet exemplifies and creates immediate rhetorical situations because Internet discourse thwarts modernistic themes of unity in terms of static conceptions of time and place, and also of "whole" and "unified" selves. Finally, I will consider some of the potential implications of the simultaneous confusion and intimacy in immediate rhetorical situations on the Internet.
As I wrote in chapter two, Plato and Bitzer argue that the "right" or "critical" time of rhetorical situations is discovered by rhetors, whereas Gorgias and Vatz see the "right" or "critical" time as an opportunity created by rhetors. However, immediate rhetorical situations are first and foremost those which cannot trace their origins (or, in Bitzer's terms, "exigence") to any singular cause--that is, the distinction between "cause" and "effect" is negligible, and the recognition of the "right" or "critical" time is extremely problematic. This inability to trace origins fosters a synthesis of roles within immediate rhetorical situations. While classical or modernist views of rhetorical situations rely on the stability of such categories as "rhetor," "audience," and "message," postmodernist and immediate views of rhetorical situations assume these divisions are arbitrary and in constant flux.
At a basic level, the Internet is literally the embodiment of this lack of traceable cause. I suppose it would be possible to describe the original ARPANET as the "cause" of what we now know as the Internet, but this seems to me to be reductive and inaccurate in describing what the Internet actually is now. As I argue in chapter three, the Internet as we currently know it began when protocols made it possible for anyone with the proper hardware and software to easily connect to the network, meaning that the rhetorical space of the Internet didn't exist until connectivity became unlimited. In other words, I think the Internet can be seen in general terms as an immediate rhetorical situation because while it contains rhetors, audiences, and messages, its origins and boundaries cannot be effectively traced. Indeed, the very definition of the Internet--the millions of host computers electronically networked together--constantly changes with each addition and subtraction of host computers and their users.
If we examine the discourse that takes place within this fluctuating context more closely, I think it becomes even more clear that the nature of discourse on the Internet problematizes cause and effect and the modernistic divisions between rhetors, audiences, and messages. To exemplify this, I'd like to consider at some length a discussion that took place in November 1995 on the listserv "ACW-L," which is a forum for an organization called the Alliance for Computers and Writing. Most of the members of this group are college teachers who are dedicated to incorporating computer pedagogies into their writing classes at various levels. I am a member of this group and took part in the discussion I'm considering here, which concerns the differences between Apple Macintosh computers and the Personal Computers that operate with "DOS" or Windows, one of the most common conversation topics on the Internet.
Kim Ballard began the thread that she labeled "MAC vs. DOS (again)" with a post concerning a relatively straight-forward problem and call for help. She was in the process of getting a new computer in her office, and the school where she was teaching insisted that it be a DOS-based PC. Her preference was for a Macintosh because she had one at home and was used to working with it, but the technical support staff at her school was "vehemently opposed to allowing instructors to have MACs in their offices." In order to respond to the school's support staff, Ballard was seeking information from the listserv group about why Macs provided a better learning environment than PCs:
[I]f we can prove that students could benefit from a MAC in our Learning Resource Center, then teachers would have access to a MAC. In particular I've been asked to find support for the fact that students can access OWLs (i.e., On-Line Writing Centers) more readily with MACS than with DOS or Windows software.
Ballard explained in some detail the previous roadblocks she had experienced with the technical support staff at her school, such as Macs were incompatible with the software running at the school, there was no one in the technical support department who knew how to fix Macintosh computers, and PCs were more common and popular in the workplace than Macintosh computers. She said that while she had offered answers to all of these claims, the technical support department was still seeking justification from Ballard as to why she wanted a Macintosh. She closed her post with a specific plea:
So, folks, while some of you may want to help me by telling me how to navigate the debate I'm part of, could some of you also direct me to any sources that suggest pro-Mac arguments or any sources that suggest the opposite--that no particular system is that important? I'll be grateful, honest (n. pag.).
In a sense, this "caused" the discussion that took place on ACW-L labeled "MAC vs. DOS (again)," and the first few posts responding to Ballard did offer general advice and tentative answers to her questions. However, the first message in a thread on a listserv cannot necessarily be accurately labeled as the "cause" of the discourse. In the example I provide here, this is clearly the case. The fact that Ballard used the word "again" in naming her subject indicates that this discussion was not something "new" at all, but rather a continuation of the many discussions that had taken place on the Internet concerning Macintosh versus PC-type computers. I think it is also important to bear in mind that this discussion, based on e-mail messages that have been archived at the ACW World Wide Web page, is reconstructed with a tremendous degree of hindsight. For my purposes here, I've selected only the specific messages I'm discussing and have arranged them in an order that suits my needs but that does not fully convey the way messages actually appeared in listserv members' e-mailboxes. At the time of Ballard's posting, there was no way of knowing whether or not her message would cause any further discussion at all and nothing to indicate to the other participants on this listserv that this was the "beginning" of anything. E-mail messages posted to listservs are frequently ignored by other members of the group, and since the format of the listserv allows for multiple rhetors to speak on the same topic at once, there is no real sense at the moment discussion is taking place where the discussion began or when it will end. In other words, despite my focus on this thread, I don't think there is anything inherent in Ballard's post that made it an "exigence" or cause of a rhetorical situation that inevitably led to the discussion that took place. Second, as will become increasingly obvious as I continue, since the discussion responding to this initial post quickly moved away from Ballard's announced purposes, it seems to me reductive and simplistic to label this first post as a cause in any sense of the word. Granted, without it, the conversation perhaps would not have taken place, but given the multiple directions of the conversation, it doesn't seem reasonable to trace it back to Ballard's original post.
While the initial posts did respond to Ballard's questions, soon the responses began drifting away from Ballard's announced purposes. For example, Bill Newmiller's post (which was actually a response to another post made to Ballard's message) began with his admission that he couldn't "resist throwing in my two cents--though I should know better than to enter into what is essentially a religious argument." Newmiller went on to point out that the differences between the two computer systems are analogous to the argument regarding which religion is "better." He did respond to Ballard's original comments regarding her problems with technical support, but ultimately, I think Newmiller was shifting the direction of the discourse, a move not usually available to an "audience" member in the classic or modern rhetorical situation. "In the end," Newmiller writes, "I suppose the MAC/DOS debate will become as anachronistic as the debate over how many angels can. . . " (ellipses his).
Joseph Unger also seemed to execute a shift in the direction of discussion, this time by addressing the technicalities of terms. He wrote "Kim, Mac vs DOS is no longer an argument. With the introduction of Windows 95, which is really Mac System 7.5 shuffled around, DOS is officially DEAD. Nobody uses DOS anymore, not even businesses." Unger then went on to offer more personal "testimony" about the configurations of the labs at his institution, Texas Tech. This was followed by a number of other testimonial posts regarding configurations of Macintoshes and PC computers at the writers' institutions that generally dealt with the preference for Macs over PCs at the particular institution (or vice versa), but that rarely offered any advice or answers for Ballard. In fact, many of these audience members/rhetors seemed more interested in responding to several discourses simultaneously. For example, David Roberts began his post about his own experiences with PCs and Macs in both the traditional workplace and in higher education by addressing "Kim, George, et al.," which recognized that there were now multiple rhetors and audiences at work within this one situation. He suggested that the issue between Macs and PCs was the "same as the Ford/Chevrolet issue," a move that essentially labeled the question originally asked as not relevant, which is again a move that is not easily facilitated in classical or modern rhetorical situations.
At this point in the discussion, many other rhetors/audience members offered their own posts suggesting that the "MAC vs. DOS" thread should be dismissed as the focus of discussion, and they instead proposed new topics. For example, while some participants continued to debate the "religious argument" of the pros and cons of Macintoshes versus PCs, Stacy M. Clanton seemed to simultaneously be responding to Newmiller's claim and making an appeal for the whole discussion to stop when he wrote "I tire of MAC vs. DOS. Let's argue Ford vs. Chevy for a while. Or maybe Clinton vs. Gingrich. How about Roman Catholic vs. Episcopal? Coke vs. Pepsi?" Nick Carbone suggested still another turn in the discussion: "More interesting questions will not be about platforms, but about software. There are different pedagogical assumptions behind the designs of Daedalus and Norton's Connect, for example. Writing hypertext in Storyspace is a different experience than doing it in hypercard or on the WWW." Eric Crump essentially agreed with Carbone's post, suggesting that instead "we might start thinking about some richer variety of computing environments than a handful of different platforms"--that is, we don't really need to be responding to the question of "Mac vs. DOS" at all, but should rather should expand the discussion to consider the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of hardware and software configurations. These posts were all followed by several other posts that either expressed agreement or disagreement with these new positions with no attention to the so-called "origins" of the discussion.
There were well over 75 posts on this one thread which only occasionally returned to the "origins" of Ballard's thread and more frequently moved on to other topics. In fact, this thread led to another thread labeled "Can English Types Become the Man [sic] Behind the Curtain," where the discussion generally considered the advantages and disadvantages for English departments of providing their own computer support. I think this is another example of the lack of clear divisions between discussion threads within the situation of the ACW-L listserv. Besides the multiplicity of conversation within the "MAC vs. DOS (again)" thread, it's important to remember that this thread was one of many threads that were discussed on this one listserv for the better part of November 1995. In other words, the ACW-L listserv--like most listservs--can and does facilitate a multitude of discourses within one electronic space despite the lack of clear beginnings or endings to these discourses.
The multiplicity of "origins" or causes of USENET Newsgroup threads tend to be even more difficult to discern than listserv discussions, in part because of the enormous volume of traffic of posts (as I noted in chapter three, there are well over 72,000 messages posted to thousands of different newsgroups every day), but also because of the practice of citing previous messages within new messages. Figure Five on the following page shows one post in a thread of discussion about word-processing programs that appeared on the newsgroup "misc.writing." Each ">" indicates a quote from a previous writer; ">>" indicates a quote from two writers ago, ">>>" indicates from three writers ago, and so forth.
In this example, the only "original" comments from the sender of the message--the "rhetor"--are "oops, sorry," an apology that seems somewhat ambiguously offered. The rest of these comments come from a variety of pervious posts. Furthermore, as was the case with the ACW-L listserv example, it is important to remember that this is merely one very typical post of a newsgroup discussion that involved multiple rhetors and audiences.
Besides exemplifying the lack of clear causes or "origins" of discourse in the modernistic sense of rhetorical situation, both listservs and USENET Newsgroups are good examples of the break-down of barriers between rhetors and audiences in immediate rhetorical situations. This is clearly the case with listserv discussions like the one I have just described. Classical and modern theories of rhetorical situation assume the sort of stable definitions of "rhetor" and "audience" apparent when a rhetor is physically present before an equally present audience, or the single channel of communication of a rhetor speaking to an audience facilitated by traditional print, television, and radio. Listservs and newsgroups thwart these assumptions. Both technologies can facilitate multiple discourses within any given situation in the form of different threads of discussion. For example, while the "Mac vs. DOS" debate took place on the ACW-L listserv, a variety of other threads carried on uninterrupted or curtailed, and the message I offer as an example of a discussion from "misc.writing" was one of literally hundreds of threads of discussion taking place simultaneously in that forum.
This multiplicity is not only common in these discussion forums--it is the explicit point of them. Anyone can simultaneously be the rhetor and audience member in a discussion on a listserv or a USENET newsgroup, and the electronic space can accompany an immense number of rhetors and audience members without regard to the constraints of modern rhetorical situations. As Dinty W. Moore describes it in The Emperor's Virtual Clothes, "If you offer an unpopular or impolite opinion in a letter to your local newspaper, they can refuse to print it. . . . But on USENET, you pretty much determine for yourself what is acceptable and what is not" (24). Further, even if a local newspaper was willing to print "unpopular or impolite" opinions, they are inherently limited by the constraints of newsprint and the mechanics of publishing. USENET newsgroups are not and thus thwart the modernistic constraints of who is allowed to be a "rhetor."
Thus, listserv and newsgroup participants' roles as rhetors/audiences are constantly intertwined with the context of the particular discussion and of the listserv or newsgroup in question. This is not to say that participants in listservs or newsgroups don't become more known for their roles as rhetors or audience members. For example, many of the ACW-L listserv posts that I quote are from well-known members of this virtual community who frequently take on active roles as highly vocal rhetors. But despite their visibility, there is nothing to prevent other previously less known listserv members from making their voices heard, or from well-known members to be part of an attentive audience. Listserv and newsgroup participants ultimately determine for themselves how they will (and won't) participate within a thread of discussion.
In short, as Jay David Bolter observes in Writing Space, electronic writing, like listservs and newsgroups, questions the assumptions regarding author and reader because "Anyone can become an author and send his merest thoughts over the networks to hundreds of unwilling readers" (101). Michael Spooner and Kathleen Yancey point out in their experimental dialog/essay "Postings on a Genre of Email" that if Bolter's observations are true, "then the rhetorical situation of e-mail is indeed different--something beyond and apart from other genres" (268). I would argue that a necessarily different conception of rhetorical situation is exemplified and created by immediacy.
The fluidity of the boundaries and lack of clear origins in listservs and newsgroups I've discussed are also apparent in the Internet's hypertextual components such as Gopher Space and the World Wide Web. When users begin to browse Gophers or the WWW, they need to begin someplace, of course, but this point of origin is purely arbitrary and more a factor of the software than anything else. Further, there is nothing about the WWW that requires a user physically located in Bowling Green, Ohio to "enter" the WWW via a Web Page residing on a computer also physically located in Bowling Green; in fact, when the popular WWW browser "Netscape" is first installed on a desktop computer, it begins users with the corporation's homepage, regardless of where the user might be located.
In other words, there is no inherent or natural starting point or origin in the hypertexts of Gopher Space and the WWW in any classic or modern sense. Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan explain this lack of boundaries in their essay "They Became What They Beheld: The Futility of Resistance in the Space of Electronic Writing":
Hypertext challenges . . . hierarchical, book-centered model[s] of writing and literary response. Being electronic (i.e., defined on the scale of molecules and particles), hypertext knows no real limits on the scope of its discourse. In practical terms, "writing space" may be considered infinitely expansible and thus promiscuous (in the root sense of "seeking relations"). Because there is always room for a new link and a new word, no hypertextual discourse is ever formally closed. While one version of the hypertext must always precede another, its precedence is not equal to the formal priority reinforced by printing (227).
We can certainly disregard the origins and boundaries implied in modernistic and classical rhetorical situations as well. We can, for example, read books out of order (skipping around to relevant parts or jumping ahead to the conclusion) instead of reading from beginning to end, "channel-surf" our way through television viewing instead of watching a single program, or walk in and out of conference presentations instead of sitting quietly as attentive audience members. We can also read hypertexts on the WWW as if they were situated in a classical or modern context. In fact, many WWW pages are presented in a seemingly straight-forward linear fashion. But these sorts of readings are conscious rejections of the presumed and announced origins of conventional texts. The hypertextual environments Moulthrop and Kaplan describe and that are apparent on Gophers and on the WWW are examples of immediate rhetorical situations because there is no implicit or explicit point of origin or specific boundaries. And even when specific WWW pages appear to present themselves in a linear fashion, the links to other pages--the feature that makes these electronic documents hypertextual-- quickly break down the linearity and fixed order of classical and modern rhetorical situations.
Figure Six, "'A Brief Overview of Rhetoric' WWW Page," is an excellent example of a hypertext in which the linearity quickly "seeks relations" as a result of the links offered. This WWW page is one of several WWW pages on the history and study of rhetoric and composition put together by Joseph Petraglia-Bahri at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The page is actually divided into two windows: in the left is a "table of contents" which lists and provides links to all of the other WWW page essays available; in the right and larger window is the essay itself--"An Overview of Rhetoric." Readers could simply read this as a traditional, linear text, but if they choose to follow one of the links indicated by the underlined text, they will then be taken to another text entirely--either to a different part of this one essay, to a selection from one of the essays that appears in the "table of contents" list of essays, or to another WWW page not listed in the contents. Further, the writers of these WWW pages could also have potentially made links to any other pages on the WWW, which would in turn lead readers to texts in the "promiscuous" fashion described by Mouthrop and Kaplan. In short, as soon as readers select links and find themselves making connections to other texts, they break down the order that governs classical and modern rhetorical situations and they engage in the practices of reading and writing that characterize immediate rhetorical situations.
Because of these unclear boundaries and origins, the boundaries between "rhetor" and "audience" also become very problematic when considering Gopher Space and the WWW. As the previous quote from Bolter suggested, electronic writing breaks down the traditional barriers between rhetors and audiences by making publishing to a wide audience within the reach of huge numbers of Internet users. This is particularly true with the WWW, which, as I suggested in chapter three, is based on a coding system that makes it relatively easy for those with access to the proper computer accounts to publish texts available to anyone on the Internet. I don't want to overstate this claim, however, because "access" to the resources that allow users to author their own WWW pages is still problematic. For example, while all faculty, staff, and students at Bowling Green State University have easy and practically unlimited access for fully participating in e-mail listservs and USENET newsgroups, undergraduates are currently not permitted to use the school's computer systems to author and store WWW pages. Further, while most commercial services now offer customers the necessary computer facilities to author and store WWW pages, there generally are significant additional charges associated with this access. In other words, while it is technically feasible for anyone to thwart the hierarchy of rhetor/audience, access issues (not unlike those with traditional print) still remain.
Even with these limitations, Gopher Space and the WWW are still good examples of immediate rhetorical situations not only because they exemplify and create unclear boundaries and origins, but also because they directly problematize the definitions of as well as the relations between writing and reading, or speaking and listening. The postmodern condition which frames my conception of immediacy is in part defined by a fluid boundary between authors and readers. In Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, George P. Landow claims that the critical theories of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault (among others) are closely related to hypertextual theories in that "critical theory promises to theorize hypertext and hypertext promises to embody and thereby test aspects of theory, particularly those concerning textuality, narrative, and the roles or functions of reader and writer" (3). Bolter explains this relationship between contemporary critical theory and hypertext more fully in his essay "Literature in the Electronic Writing Space":
[T]he computer, as it works against the fixity of the text, calls into question the authority of the author. So the computer as hypertext raises fundamental questions of literary theory. And, in a curious way, hypertext is a vindication of postmodern literary theory. For the past two decades, postmodern theorists from reader-response critics to deconstructionalists have been talking about text in terms that are strikingly appropriate to hypertext in the computer (24).
Bolter's questioning of the singular authority of writers is similar to the relationship between audiences and rhetors that I explain in chapter two: audiences in immediate rhetorical situations also generate messages and discourses that must be interpreted by rhetors, and rhetors in turn, by necessity, have to assume the simultaneous role of audience. Being an audience member or reader of the hypertexts of Gopher Space or the WWW means actively seeking and creating meaning, making the reader and writer "more deeply entwined" (Landow, 71). Readers must choose (or not choose) to follow the links to other texts that define hypertexts, thus taking on a highly active and creative role in making/discovering meaning. Different audience members reading the same hypertext have the option to follow different links, thus creating distinct texts, a role not available to audience members in traditional rhetorical situations. Further, because all of Gopher Space and the WWW is potentially linked together, there is no workable or distinct boundary defining the rhetorical situation being explored by rhetors/audience members.
The conditions that are created and exemplified by Gopher Space and the WWW are very different from those of classical or modern rhetorical situations because even if individual audiences/readers approach the message/text present in a situation differently (e.g., one person reads a book straight through, while another reader skips around), these rhetors and audience members are still situated within the same well-defined space. Quite literally then, what constitutes the boundaries and origins of immediate rhetorical situations is determined by the actions of rhetors/audience members, who themselves are fluidly and contextually defined. The theories and epistemologies of postmodern and poststructualist critics are thus manifested as rhetorical methodologies for participation in discourse within immediate rhetorical situations like the Internet.
Closely related to the notion that immediate rhetorical situations lack distinct origins or borders or clear definitions of "rhetor," "audience," and "message" is the concept that postmodern situations also problematize and fragment unifying concepts of time, place, and identity. As I noted in chapters one and two, Plato, Gorgias, and their ancient Greek contemporaries had a literal, physical conception of the time and place within which a rhetorical situation existed and also of the autonomy individuals who carried on the discourse--the "human media" (as Richard Enos described it) of the courtroom, face to face conversations, etc. While Bitzer and Vatz account for some of the contemporary high-tech medias that are necessary to facilitate immediate rhetorical situations, I think they assume that radio, film, television, and the like are merely extensions of the physical world contemplated by the ancients--that is, rhetorical situations mediated with these technologies are really no different than those mediated in face-to-face situations.
In contrast with this limited conception of time and place, immediacy, as I wrote in the closing pages of chapter two, begins with the premise that classical and modernistic themes of unity need to be re(con)figured; instead of presuming the definitions of "time," "place," and "identity" as static and unifying forces, immediate rhetorical situations suggest that we need to examine these concepts at their points of rupture and difference. Further, because immediate rhetorical situations take place within (and contribute to) the realm of the hyperreal suggested by Jean Baudrillard, simulations and simulacra fog meaning and raise questions about the constituents of rhetorical situations, including the "reality" of time, place, and identity.
As I discussed in chapter three, the WWW problematizes traditional definitions of time and place because of the ease of access. With the proper address or "URL," it is as easy for anyone on the WWW to go to my "homepage" as it is to go to the Time Magazine page. This is not to say that my homepage will ever attract as wide an audience as Time's pages, but the very potential of this access--which clearly doesn't exist in the modernistic situation of print--makes the WWW an immediate rhetorical situation. Further, as I discussed in the previous section, the WWW questions classical and modernistic assumptions about physical place and thus the location of discourse. There is no "beginning" point on the WWW and, because all WWW pages are potentially linked, no clear borders of discourse.
I think a problemtization of time and place is also apparent within the situation and context of e-mail. Now, in their College Composition and Communication essay, Spooner and Yancey discuss e-mail as a "genre." Their essay is broken up into chunks of text separated roughly into two columns, with the "not a genre" comments appearing on the left-hand side of the page in italics, and the "is a genre" comments appearing on the right in a normal font. Their essay attempts to explore the question of genre without reaching any firm conclusions and tries to simulate in print form the "feel" of an e-mail discussion. I am not comfortable with the need to label writings "genres" in general and I am particularly uncomfortable with their efforts to make such a sweeping generalization about e-mail. However, I think their struggle to define the nature of e-mail is important because it both informs and exemplifies immediate rhetorical situations. For example, this description of e-mail was offered in the "is a genre" column of text:
But I still think e-mailing isn't writing--or not the discursive variety we're used to reading in academe. Our expectations will not the centre [sic] hold. This is the start of another kind of e-speech-that-is-writing: montage-like, quick, unpredictable in form and substance and tenor. That unpredictability, that flexibility, is its charm and thread. The linear and hierarchical, the neatly categorized, seen under erasure (275).
While I think this is an accurate description of e-mail, I'd suggest that these features are not a result of the "genre" of e-mail, but rather the context--the immediate rhetorical situation--of e-mail. Unlike interactions that take place in "real" or synchronous time (conversations that take place face to face, over the telephone, in a MUD/MOO or IRC environment), e-mail interactions are written responses that take place over an indeterminate period of time. Further, unlike traditional forms of written communications (letters, newspapers and magazines, books, etc.), e-mail interactions are frequently almost instantaneous and allow for immediate response, giving it the "e-speech-that-is-writing" quality described by Spooner and Yancey. This "quickness" contributes to the volatility of e-mail discussions (and perhaps contributes to the well-known and impolite behavior called "flaming") as well as to the fluidity of the relationships between rhetor, audience, and message.
The ACW-L listserv discussion on computer systems I provided in the previous section is a good example of the fluidity of time and place in immediate rhetorical situations. While most of the many messages posted to the "MAC vs. DOS (again)" thread were posted within a few days of each other, there was no definitive beginning or ending time for the discussion. Further, there were no "real" time or place constraints on how individual users participated in the discussion as it happened; rather, "time" and "place" were metaphorically or virtually constrained by the context of the discussion itself. In other words, while rhetor/audience members participated in this thread in a "place" (the ACW-L listserv) over the "time" of a few days, individual participants were not literally present at the same time and place. Participants read and posted messages at different times of the day (at their convenience) and were physically located all over the world. Clearly, this thread of discussion (like many listserv and newsgroup threads) problematizes what can constitute the "right" time and place for discourse to occur. It is an example of discourse that cannot easily be accounted for with the classical or modern definitions of rhetorical situation.
This reconfiguration of time and place on the Internet also contributes to a problematized conception of unified identity or "self," which is another characteristic of immediate rhetorical situations. As I pointed out in chapter two, classic and modern conceptions of rhetorical situation assume the autonomous and wholly-contained self, whereas my conception of immediate rhetorical situation begins with the postmodern assumption that the self is multiplicitous and fragmented. On the Internet role-playing and re-visioning of identity on-line are well-known and accepted practices in many environments and have even been the subject of humor in the mainstream press. Figure Seven is a well-known and particularly appropriate cartoon that appeared originally in the New Yorker in 1993. Even though we probably don't need to worry about our pets mastering language or keyboarding skills, the conditions implied in this cartoon are quite accurate: there is no way of knowing if Internet participants are representing themselves in a fashion that corresponds to their identities in "real life."
While individuals presumably do not misrepresent themselves in such extreme ways on professionally-oriented discussion forums like the ACW-L listserv, Internet users participating in more socially-oriented forums frequently play with such basic components of identity as gender, appearance, age, and occupation. Allucquere Rosanne Stone begins her essay "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures" with an anecdote about "Julie," an unusual member of a women's discussion forum. "Julie was a totally disabled older woman, but she could push the keys of a computer with her headstick. The personality she projected into the 'net'. . . was huge. On the net, Julie's disability was invisible and irrelevant" (83). Her presence in the group was a warm and welcome one for years. Then, after one of "Juile's devoted admirers" finally tracked her down, it turned out that in reality, "Julie" was a middle-aged male psychiatrist who stumbled across the forum and enjoyed the conversation. Stone writes that while the women of the group felt cheated, violated, and betrayed, "The computer engineers, the people who wrote the programs by means of which the nets exist, just smiled tiredly. They had understood from the beginning the radical changes in social conversations that nets implied" (83). Stone argues that the story of "Julie" is evidence that computer network-facilitated forums represent a new and different "social space" where previous assumptions about the stability of individual identities are altered. As Stone puts it, "[C]oncepts like distance, inside/outside, and even the physical body take on new and frequently disturbing meanings" (84).
Of course, even when identity is not blatantly or opportunistically misrepresented, the conception of a unifying "self" on the Internet is problematic. For example, while the ACW-L listserv community is made up of college-level teachers, there are few divisions made between graduate students and faculty members. In fact, because a substantial portion of college-level writing teachers are graduate students and because computer-mediated writing instruction is a relatively new field, many of the most vocal and knowledgeable members of the listserv are in "real life" graduate students. As a result, first-year graduate teaching assistants are often mistaken as experienced faculty members and vice-versa. In other words, while the differences are subtle, I think individual identities within the community of a listserv are frequently different than the same individuals in "real life." I also think this "confusion" of identity is also evidence of the always fragmented nature of identity and "self" within the postmodern condition.
Besides complicating the way individual identities are perceived/presented in electronic forums like USENET newsgroups and listservs, I think the multiplicitious and fragmented selves characteristic of immediate rhetorical situations are also exemplified and created on the WWW. This is particularly true of personal "home pages," WWW pages that are depictions of the individuals that produce them. Figure four in chapter three on page 104 is an example of my homepage, which emphasizes my professional and scholarly "selves." For example, my homepage has links to courses that I have taught, WWW resources on rhetoric that I've found useful, and some of my scholarly writing. But I also have several WWW pages of a less than professional and scholarly nature. For example, my "Bowling Hell" WWW page is a satirical look at my and my wife's lives in Bowling Green, Ohio, which includes pictures, descriptions I wrote, and a list of reasons why I think Bowling Green is "hell." I also have written and made available the "Scream" page, which is about Edvard Munch's famous painting and the wide variety of humorous depictions of this angst-ridden image. In other words, my "self" is depicted and inevitably interpreted in multiple ways on the WWW.
This multiplicity of pages and selves is consistent with the numerous ways individuals represent themselves and their identities on WWW pages. Sherry Turkle, whose book Life on the Screen is about the multiplicity of identity on the Internet (particularly on MUDs and MOOs), offers this description of WWW "homes":
On the Web, the idiom for constructing a "home" identity is to assemble a "home page" of virtual objects that correspond to one's interests. One constructs a home page by composing or "pasting" on it words, images, and sounds, and by making connections between it and other sites on the Internet or the Web. . . . People link their home page to pages about such things as music, paintings, television shows, cities, books, photographs, comic strips, and fashion models (258).
As Turkle suggests, WWW home pages represent "one recent and dramatic illustration of new notions of identity as multiple yet coherent" (259) in the sense that their creators attempt to not only tell an autobiographical narrative, they also try to literally connect their selves to many other WWW pages and texts. In short, the WWW exemplifies and creates the sort of fragmented and simulated "selves" apparent within the postmodern condition and in immediate rhetorical situations.
Because of the fluidity of their components, immediate rhetorical situations are volatile and unpredictable. As I suggested in chapter two, immediate rhetorical situations are dangerous in the sense that their lack of definitive roles and boundaries makes social action and productive meaning difficult. Immediate rhetorical situations distance us from the "real" through a never-ending series of chaotic and meaningless simulations. At the same time, immediate rhetorical situations--because of the blurred boundaries between constituents within the situation--are creative and dynamic opportunities for intimacy between participants within any given situation. In other words, like the presumptions concerning the postmodern condition that frames immediacy, the implications of the discourses that take place within immediate rhetorical situations are closely tied to specific contexts and interpretations.
On the one hand, a wide variety of observers, writers, and critics have argued that the sort of communications that take place in advanced-technological mediums like the Internet are extremely dangerous. Because the power of authoritative rhetors is greatly diminished in situations like listservs and newsgroups, the reliability of information exchanged is frequently questionable. In fact, arguments without the possibility of an appeal to "definitive" authority in the classical or modernistic sense--like the ACW-L "MAC vs. DOS (again)" thread--are one of the unending frustrations of discourse on the Internet. Further, because it is so easy to "speak" in listservs, newsgroups, and other forums, it is easy to view this discourse as an irrelevant and wasteful sea of voices without any connection to one another.
At the same time, this break-down of assumed hierarchies offers opportunities for those who would previously not have been allowed to speak. Because listservs and newsgroups encourage a high degree of participation and thwart modernistic constraints on the authority of the rhetor, individuals can discuss multiple topics in a more egalitarian atmosphere. Many of those who would have been silenced in the traditional, linear model of discourse have not only the opportunity to speak but also be heard by a large audience. As a result, the roles of "audience" and "rhetor" become more closely entwined, and the relationship between the two becomes more intimate and interpersonal. My own readings and writings on listservs like ACW-L are an example of my opportunity to make connections--both personal and professional--with a community of individuals united by a common interest. While I may never meet many of the members of this group in "real life," I still am able to communicate with them much more intimately than I could in such modern rhetorical situations as a professional conference presentation or a traditional print journal article or book. After all, conference presentations are generally linear affairs where audience members are only allowed a few questions, and traditional print offers virtually no opportunity for the direct sort of participation facilitated by listservs and other Internet components.
Another dangerous and chaotic potential apparent on the Internet comes from the lack of clear borders, endings, or distinctions between readers and writers, which can render texts as disorienting, vertigo-inducing, and meaningless. One of the most frequent complaints readers have in navigating hypertextual spaces such as Gophers and the WWW is the inability to find meaningful information in this realm seemingly absent even the most basic organizing rules or principles. And, as David Charney points out in his essay "The Effect of Hypertext on Processes of Reading and Writing," it is not always desirable or possible for readers to take on the active role of discovering and making meaning that hypertext demands. "In addition to suffering the frustrations of disorientation or cognitive overload that hypertext designers already acknowledge," Charney writes, "readers may come away with a false or incomplete representation of the texts in the network or even the information relevant to their topics" (250). Obviously, this incomprehension can be devastating because a wide variety of discourses--everything from complex medical or legal advice to directions on how to bake a cake--are difficult to understand when the roles of rhetors and audiences are indistinguishable.
However, because the definitions of "audience" and "rhetor" blur on the Internet and because hypertexts like Gopher and the WWW demand an active reader, I think it's also possible that active readers can reach "understanding" in new and dynamic ways. As I've suggested throughout this chapter, the active role readers and audience members need to take on in order to navigate hypertexts necessarily places them in a more intimate relationship with writers and rhetors, again problematizing the hierarchies of classical and modern rhetorical situations. Further, as the technology for indexing and navigating Internet-based hypertexts improves, it will become increasingly easier for readers to gain the accurate knowledge they are seeking without the need to appeal to an "authoritative" and separate rhetor. The WWW already supports many "key word" searches and indexing services (such as "Lycos" and "Yahoo!"), and, as Steve G. Steinberg reported in the May 1996 WIRED magazine, more information retrieval systems are coming soon.
In other words, hypertext changes what it means to be a rhetor or an audience member in a rhetorical situation from a hierarchy where audiences depend on rhetors for the "proper" information to one of collaboration and cooperation. As Stuart Moulthrop said as quoted in Johndan Johnson-Eilola's essay "Reading and Writing Hypertext," "The changes that have come to the technology of writing take us out of the realm of self-validating truths and decrees and place us instead in a context that requires negotiation, cross-reference, and a constant awareness of diversity" (206). I think this interaction is another means of creating new and more intimate and positive relationships between participants in discourse.
Another criticism leveled by theorists concerned about the dangerous potential of Internet discourse is that the indeterminate nature of the Internet's "place" and "time" is a direct threat to "community" as we know it. Turkle points out quite accurately that "Many of the institutions that used to bring people together--a main street, a union hall, a town meeting-- no longer work as before. Many people spend most of their day alone at the screen of a television or a computer" (178). Richard E. Sclove describes in some detail how these institutions that foster community are made irrelevant by technologies in his essay "Making Technology Democratic." He begins with an anecdote about a small village in Spain where running water wasn't installed until the early 1970s. Before plumbing, the public fountain was the location for vigorous community involvement; after plumbing, the public fountain was deserted and the bonds of the community weakened. Similarly, Scolve contends that the gatherings facilitated by advanced technologies like the Internet will potentially have the same unintended effect: "[I]mprovements in productivity or addressing basic social needs are nonetheless associated with further unintended declines in political engagement, attenuation of community bonds, experimental divorce of nature, individual purposelessness, and expanding disparities in wealth" (87). In other words, in the quest to bring efficiency and advancement through technologies like the Internet, we may inadvertently damage our communities.
Yet it also seems true that the notion of "community" is changing on the Internet and different types of communities are being created and fostered. Internet communities are not based on geographic location, but rather on an "affinity" users have with one another. This is certainly the case with many forums like ACW-L. Through this group, I am in constant contact with a community of college writing teachers who are interested in one of the things that I am interested in: how to better use computer technologies to teach the writing process. Absent the technologies of the Internet and the fluidity afforded within immediate rhetorical situations, this relationship simply wouldn't be possible within the smaller and geographically restricted "real life" community of Bowling Green, Ohio.
Along these lines, I think the "new" communities being fostered on-line raise interesting questions about the nature of communities in more traditional settings. As Steven G. Jones points out in his article "Understanding Community in the Information Age," the notion that the face-to-face communication in traditional communities is idealic should be interrogated. "Face-to-face interaction does not necessarily break down boundaries, and to adopt it as an ideal will likewise not necessarily facilitate communication, community building, or understanding among people" (29). In other words, the different and unique characteristics of communities fostered in immediate rhetorical situations may in fact offer an improved alternative to the romanticized ideal of traditional communities.
Finally, many critics have suggested that all of the problems exemplified and created by the immediate rhetorical situation of the Internet--the lack of clear borders and the difficulty of authoritative texts, the difficulties of understanding, the destruction of local communities--also present significant challenges to the possibilities of democracy within a larger society. In his seminal work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-Franç ois Lyotard argues that "In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government" (9). Gaining and controlling information and knowledge within this fragmented setting will be the goal of authoritative nation-states "just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwords for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor" (5). Increasingly, Lyotard argues, "the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made" (14). Indeed, as I suggest in chapter three and as Spooner and Yancey note in their essay, the access issues associated with the Internet are dangerous threats to the possibilities of community and democracy:
One could argue that computer literacy lives within an even more elite socioeconomic hierarchy than does print literacy. But this is often quite forgotten by the users. Leaving merely 90% of Americans disenfranchised. And how many Mexicans? How many Somalis and Burmese? In what may be a watershed article, even Selfe and Selfe, who have often led the optimism in the field of computers and composition, are now sounding a much-needed sobering note: 'The rhetoric of technology obscures the fact that [computers] are not necessarily serving democratic ends' (484). (270)
The Internet thus fosters a society divided into "haves" and "have nots," one where those with the power and access to read and write on the computer networks are separated from and empowered over those who don't.
Yet despite the gloomy predictions of Lyotard and those who share his concerns, many contend that the Internet's movement away from modernist conceptions of definitive hierarchies, borders, and rules of interaction will not endanger democracy but will, in fact, enrich it. Richard A. Lanham argues throughout his book The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts that "it is the convergence of technology, the arts, and letters, and the democratizing of higher education that poses our paramount cultural and educational explandum" (100, italics his)--that is, Lanham believes that the communicative technologies of the Internet will foster democratic ideals. Even Lyotard, after discussing the problems of state control of knowledge possible within the postmodern condition, ultimately concludes that democracy could benefit from the proliferation of communication technologies like the Internet:
We are finally in a position to understand how the computerization of society affects this problematic. It could become the "dream" instrument for controlling and regulating the market system, extended to include knowledge itself and governed exclusively by the performativity principle. In that case, it would inevitably involve the use of terror. But it could also aid groups discussing metaprescriptive by supplying them with the information they usually lack for making knowledgeable decisions. The line to follow for computerization to take the second of these two paths is, in principle, quite simple: give the public free access to the memory and data banks (67).
Of course, Lyotard originally wrote these words in 1979, before the Internet was the global phenomenon it is now. Still, I think it is easy to argue that Internet closely resembles this "simple" ideal. Thus, the ability for rhetors and audiences to simultaneously and equally participate in immediate rhetorical situations like the Internet holds tremendous promise for bringing previously disenfranchised people together, to create vital and important communities, and to foster a dynamic and empowering democracy.
Ultimately, as I discussed in chapter two, I think viewing the Internet as an immediate rhetorical situation problematizes the dichotomy of "positive" and "negative" implications. Because the position that the Internet is dangerous and chaotic and the position that the Internet is dynamic and intimate are both potentially "true" and because my conception of immediacy attempts to move away from such simple dichotomies, I think the implications of immediate rhetorical situations are themselves dynamic and must be continually reevaluated within their own contexts. Such reevaluations are vital if we are to to recognize the complexity of implications possible in immediate rhetorical situations. Immediacy suggests that it's not possible or productive to label the Internet as a "good" or "bad" thing; rather, we need to see the Internet as a series of fluid immediate rhetorical situations that defy easy dichotomies. Absent the appeals to the authoritative and objective truth, postmodern theories like immediacy ultimately must make and find meaning within their own contexts.
While I certainly wouldn't want to suggest that viewing the Internet as an immediate rhetorical situation completely resolves the questions that open this chapter, I do think seeing the Internet as an example and creator of immediate rhetorical situations does further our understanding of the medium in ways not possible with classical or modern interpretations of context and situation. To understand how the Internet functions as discourse, I think we need view it through a lense like the one I have constructed here. Through my lense of immediacy, I think it's clearer that the distinctions between rhetors, audiences, and messages assumed in traditional rhetorical contexts are actually blurred and re(con)figured as dynamic and interrelated components, and the modernistic and unified themes of time, place, and identity are overturned. In other words, as I believe I have shown here, I think the first step to considering this highly volatile rhetorical situation is to revise our definitions of rhetorical situations.