Disembodied Discourse and the Failure of Internet Discussion
Disclaimer: I rarely if ever post things to this blog in "rough" form, but I've been stewing over this for a few weeks now and finally want to eject it out into the world. If anyone out there in academia would like to collaborate to further aspects of this, I am completely game. These thoughts are admittedly rough, but I feel have potential somewhere.
Even though the phenomena is nothing new, recently there has been a spate of commentary concerning...well...commentary on the internet. The problem is that it isn't working. Any look at the comments section of nearly any online publication will reveal that actual discussion is not taking place. Instead, it is mostly a pit of name calling, racism, shouting, and worse. This puts a damper on many of the hopes we had for the internet. It was supposed to be democratic. It was supposed to provide space for more voices to be heard. It was supposed to increase our awareness of issues. It was supposed to, in short, make the world better. And, in some small isolated ways, these things have occurred. But on a large scale, these hopes have largely proven to be a mirage of an oasis. Increasingly, we have begun to reach the oasis promised to us only to find more sand in a desolate environment.
Where educators, journalists, web advocates, technologists, bloggers, and nearly everyone else have erred is a misunderstanding of the role of the body in discourse. In short, the body matters. To remove the body from the equation removes the possibility of communication. The body is its own powerful and absolutely necessary rhetoric. Without the body, it is not discussion or communication that occurs, but rather pure routinized performance of big "D" Discourse.
We can explain this phenomena in even simpler terms. Any look over the un-moderated comments of a newspaper online will reveal little to no listening. In place of that, we have pure replication of "talking-points" that are often appropriated wholesale from other sources from media outlets to community values to racist, sexist, and classist convictions. Additionally, these comments are not employed in order to interact. Instead, these comments are employed and exist simply to be seen, hence their monologic character. The danger of this is extreme. Instead of discussion and hence public opinion rapidly modifying itself to adapt to current situations, we have static opinions and beliefs that prevent adaptation to new situations. Instead of entering into conversation and discussion so that we may change our own ideas as well as those of others, we simply seek to shut out all competing ideas. We become trapped by the past in a radically different present.
There are two deeper issues at play here. First is yet another reassertion of a profoundly troublesome metaphysical dualistic split between the mind and the body. With internet discourse, it is all too often tacitly assumed that there is no need for the body, as written communication falls within the realm of "the mind," and as such needs only an open space to exist. This assumption not only fails on a theoretical level, but fails on a practical level as well. It allows the commenter the ability to abstract the affects of meaning beyond the point where the impact on the community and people around them can be understood. Or, in other words, it's dangerously easy to forget that ideas actually do change the world and have real consequences to other people. The presence of the body in communication in no small way provides its own extra-linguistic rhetorical force. The body is necessary because it is only through the body that meaning can be responsive to an ever evolving world. The body is the nexus through which ideas interact with the environment, both natural and social. This nexus is critical since we live our lives in this environment, not outside it. To disassociate the two is to throw our own livelihood into peril in which we are helpless to respond to a constantly evolving environment.
But what about books? Are they not a form of asynchronous communication as well? To this I would say that is correct, and further that they fall victim to the same fallacy as well. This fallacy has not gone unnoticed, as it was Plato himself who noted this problem with literacy way back in the early days of writing. As he noted in a very famous section of The Phaedrus, "writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence." Plato's issue with writing is, in short, that it cannot respond to questions. It can only speak; it cannot listen and respond.
Of course, Plato is himself a major source of the mind/body dualism that has plagued Western thought for over 2,000 years. For Plato to plug this gap, he had to refer to idealistic forms that language, when True, referred to. But we can reconstruct Plato's charge without referring to idealism and metaphysics. Instead of written discourse lacking a direct connection to "the Good," we can say that written discourse on its own lacks a connection to the body. It is only through the body that ideas have a direct connection to the natural world and thus reality. Words require speakers, texts require writers. And the audience or the reader is always a material reality as well. To be able to utilize texts we must first have a habit of interaction which helps us see this interdependence at work.
So books fall just as short as comments on the internet do in terms of realizing actual communication, except for one small difference: responses and discussions to print required actual face to face discussion. It is here that we may see the solution to what looks like an unresolvable trap. What is often forgotten when looking at things such as "academic discourse" is the unbelievable amount of time academics spend in conversation with colleagues, students, friends, and community members. Unfortunately, once again due to the mind/body split, these aspects of academic discourse are valued so little that they are not even recognized in most cases. But, in fact, the conversational genesis of much academic work is the most important part.
The second issue is a historical one. In no small way, patterns of discourse were a by-product of a print only culture in regards to "traditional" journalism. The biggest difference between print journalism and online journalism is the fact that online journalism provides its own space for "commentary" that does not require any sort of physical presence. Prior to this electronically mediated aspect of journalistic discourse, readers would have to actually find other actual, physical bodies to engage in discussion over a text. So habits of interaction in regards to how we treat texts were created accidently as an unforeseen off-shoot of the limits of print technology. It wasn't until the internet came along that this form of interaction became apparent simply because until that point, we had no other option. It happened "automatically." Now, though, that is no longer the case and these habits must be formed if they are to exist.
Because of this, it may seem like the way out is to simply remove the "comments" aspect of online print journalism. Business considerations aside, the reason this move will not work is that readers can simply move somewhere else on the internet to find an outlet for disembodied discourse. Or, in other words, if they can't do it in the comments, they'll just do it on someone's blog. Additionally, moderating comments will provide temporary at best relief simply because it is not addressing the underlying causes. Admonishing readers to "act civil" will not, as we have seen time and time again, compel readers to act in civil ways.
I used to think that if "journalists" were truly serious about authentic discourse in response to articles, newspapers would help foster venues for individuals to get together and converse with each other and close down their comments sections. The idea would be that newspapers still valued the participation and interaction with the readers, but would only do so in productive ways.
Of course, newspaper owners will not do this because there is a shrewd business move being made here to assure advertisers that they do in fact have readership. However, the more convincing root of the problems is that we have now popularized habits of interaction with each other which make the above nearly impossible. Nowhere is this more evident than the town hall fiasco in the current health care reform debate. What is striking to me about these town hall meetings with all their "shouters" is how familiar it feels. These town halls have actually mimicked the type of discussion commonly seen in comment forums. In a bizarre and tragic reversal, we have actually embodied disembodied discourse.
The answer, unfortunately, is the long and far more complex answer. Asynchronous and electronically mediated communication can be dialogic if and only if we have habits of interaction that compel us to see and understand that bodies are involved even in online textual interaction. This, then, becomes an educational problem, and one in which education in the past 50 years has shied away from in order to focus on curriculum and content instead of habits of interaction. It was, as mentioned before, a pure accident that "democratic discourse" in regards to textual artifacts occured. In no small sense, the inability to have meaningful conversation on important issues both online and in town hall meetings represents the chickens coming home to roost due to misplaced priorities and thoughtless educational policies for many generations in America. We've spent so much time being absolutely captivated by standards of correctness in communication that we've virtually ignored any discussion with students concerning the social role of writing and speaking. Or, to put that more bluntly, we cared more about spelling correctly than about what it means to participate in community life. The state of public discourse today, then, should be absolutely no surprise to us. We as a culture have primed the pump for this situation and it is high time we take responsibility for it in regards to making sure it doesn't happen in the future.
Simply providing an open space on the internet and hoping for the best will not cut it. The problem has not and will not be the internet itself; the problem is how we use it. The "internet," however we wish to conceive of it, does not come with its own instruction manual. The ways we utilize the internet are things we learn, and if we are unhappy with aspects of it, we should see the internet only as the messenger and not the message. It is true that there is much potential with the internet. We can isolate examples of productive use of the internet to further democratic discourse. However, as of now, these instances happen by random chance and accident. Because of this, they are and will continue to be a woefully inadequate exception to the rule.
These are things that must be reconsidered in the wake of a rush to "technologize" the classroom, where students spend an alarmingly increasing amount of time discussing "online" and less and less time talking face to face with other students. In what are often very bald moves to increase revenue, universities are supporting much research in terms of "online" classrooms. Unfortunately, many well meaning people in academia have jumped uncritically on this bandwagon, often doing so simply to bolster their credentials with "technological" aspects on their CV, something which is in high demand at the moment. But, we have to ask, at what cost? An estimated 46 million Americans are without health insurance right now. It is time to leverage the immense power higher-education has on educational agendas in total. If the result of 12-16 years of education produces students who are willing and able to productively involve themselves in social issues, what more can we ask of ourselves? If businesses have issues with a supposed lack of "skills," then maybe it is the business world who has a problem and not our students.