Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature

Bret Benjamin and Christopher Busiel
Department of English
Parlin 108
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 7831-1164

1. Because Macintosh Internet applications are generally easy to use, and because they make available a great amount of formal information and a wide array of discourse (of varying degrees of formality), they can be quite useful in the rhetoric and composition classroom. In this essay, we will examine closely one Internet application in particular--NewsWatcher, a news reading program--which is a useful model for examining the incorporation of any number of Internet software applications into a computer-assisted composition classroom. Teaching in such a classroom provides instructors and students the opportunity to access on-line information, including library catalogs around the world, archives of government documents and other electronic texts, and any number of topic-specific newsgroups and newslists. This prospect, although extremely seductive, also presents certain pedagogical problems. Instructors are often confused about the methods available for accessing information, frustrated by the size and scope of the Internet, and unsure about how to provide specific instructions to aid a class full of students who are all looking for different types of information. However, the potential pedagogical value of electronic research and communication over the Internet outweighs these occasional drawbacks.

2. There are two general characteristics of the Internet--that vast network of networks and storehouse of untold amounts of data-- which are important to keep in mind as one begins to think about how to incorporate various Internet research tools into the classroom and the syllabus. The first is the tremendous proliferation of sites, and the wildly fluctuating "quality" of the materials stored on them. Both student and instructor should be aware that not everything on a particular topic will serve well as a source for a research paper. However, a number of sources (including some quite good ones) will almost assuredly be available on even the most "obscure" of issues. Secondly, we must note the lack of any unified standards on the Internet for information storage, compression or search functions, and the lack of any seeming logic as to why certain materials are available through one application and not another. Some estimates are that the volume of messages transferred through the Internet grows 20 percent a month (for more information on internet statistics see the ISOC site). Literally millions of computers in hundreds of countries around the world are able to share information via Internet lines. This extraordinary rate of expansion makes the research process much less stable than the electronic library catalogs with which students are accustomed, so ideally, students should be well-trained enough (and have adequate work time on the computers) to try searches for materials through a variety of means and with a number of different applications.

3. Commentary on the Internet often makes grand claims about the democratization of information and discourse via network connections. This view, of course, fails to take into account the level of wealth (personal, institutional, or national) required in order for individuals to gain access to computer hardware. Although, for example, more people have access to television sets than to the Internet, the number of Internet users is substantially higher than the number of people who might be able to publish books or articles. Without claiming that the Internet is a space of discourse to which all voices can find an equal availability, we feel that it does give an ever-increasing amount of access despite its material limitations. Attending conferences such as Computers and Writing and the Conference of College Composition and Communication has made us aware of the fact that not all colleges and universities have the resources to which we are accustomed at a well-funded state institution: many lack a centralized computation center that monitors a local area network and its connections to the net, and that distributes freeware and shareware Internet resource applications. For students at the better funded institutions, fortunately, the primary concern will not be the material issue of finding access to a computer connected to the Net, but rather the narrowing of focus from among the materials available. In this essay we explore the applications and resources that are available to us and to instructors at similar universities, but we are trying generally to become acquainted with the choices available at less endowed institutions, and to stay abreast of public policy decisions which attempt to rectify the disparities of access to electronic information in our society.

4. We would like to address broadly three issues that we feel the Internet, as observable with our example NewsWatcher, raises in our rhetoric and composition classes. First, the amount and variety of information found on the net provides an excellent source of material for student papers. Secondly, the unique format of on-line materials raises important questions about the evaluation of sources and the need for critical reading skills. And lastly, the Internet provides students with the ability to communicate with and receive feedback from a discourse community that stretches far beyond the classroom.

5. Before we extend our analysis too far, however, we should discuss what a newsgroup is, and how it differs from other Internet sources of information. Usenet News is a collection of topic-specific discussion groups, differing from so-called "listserve" groups in that the messages are not transmitted via e-mail; rather, because of high traffic, the messages in the groups remain on a server. They may be moderated (where the information that is posted is screened by a moderator) or discussion oriented (where anyone can post to the group). Some newsgroups are locally produced and moderated (for example Austin "for sale" or a group created for our freshman composition courses, "utexas.class.e306."), while others have a broader scope, and actually appear on our computers as a result of having been subscribed to by the libraries, computation center, or University administration (for example "Clarinet," a series of news groups in the more traditional sense, feeding information directly off the international news wire services and arranging it by topic). These newsgroups can be accessed either from a Mac or a PC by a type of application generally known as a newsreader. Choices for the Macintosh include Nuntius and NewsWatcher.

6. Figures One and Two illustrate the differences in the interfaces of these two programs. NewsWatcher (figure two) shows all of the newsgroups in a continuous list, while Nuntius (figure one) uses a hierarchical system of folders, with each period in the newsgroup name designating a hierarchical level (for example, all the newsgroups beginning 'clari.' would be contained in a single folder, at the same hierarchical level as 'soc.' or 'alt.', with 'clari.news.' an example of a folder at the next hierarchical level, containing further folders and newsgroups). Although the Nuntius interface is more neatly organized than NewsWatcher's, the continuous list of the latter program allows for easier browsing. Unless the user knows the name of a specific newsgroup, the concealed layers of the Nuntius folder system make locating groups more difficult. Another important delineator is the search feature available on NewsWatcher, which searches not only subject lines but the entire body of messages in either a selected group of newsgroups, or all of them (if one has the means and the time to let the computer process this search for several hours). Because of the more accessible listing of groups and the search feature (shown in Figure Two), which benefits the research process so much, NewsWatcher was a clear choice for our classrooms.

7. With this description of newsgroups and NewsWatcher established, we would like to turn to the first of our three major issues; the vast array of information, which because of its sheer bulk and easy accessibility, provides obvious benefits to the rhetoric and composition classroom. Because of 1994 U.S. invasion of Haiti, we thought we would structure our illustration around this quite viable topic for a student essay. One of the distinct benefits of Internet sources lies in the fact that there is significantly more international news, especially for "third world" issues, available on-line than in traditional news sources.

8. Newsgroups offer a significant amount of alternative information that often is absent from main-stream news sources and they can provide extremely current information from any number of sectors of the national and international communities. For example, along with international news feeds on the Chiapas uprising in January of 1994, newsgroups have provided the text of political pamphlets from the region which were scanned and posted to the net. With the crucial intermediary of someone to gather this information who has computer access at a university or other facility, discourses which are immediate both in time and place to a particular event are now available to interested readers around the world.

9. One of our assignments this past semester asked students to research a complex issue facing a "Third World" country and then to write an ethical argument taking into consideration their respective positions as citizens of the "First World." Figure Three shows the group window created for this class, to focus students' attention. Again, clicking on any of the items in the window will connect students to the most current update of this newsgroup, and having all of them together in this form will save them the time of searching around for applicable material. Using newsgroup sources to provide historical and political information, our students were able to contextualize the issues that they chose by following the various debates on the groups. Thinking back to our earlier discussion of accessibility, we should note that a number of these newsgroups are in languages other than English. Students who have multi-lingual skills, therefore, are able to situate themselves in further discourse communities which provide an especially interesting angle on an essay investigating notions of obligation as they concern the problematic split between the "developed" and "under-developed" nations of the world.

10. Even within the English language groups, however, NewsWatcher facilitates the process of gathering information which represents various perspectives on the same issue. Messages found within the same "thread" often comment on, critique and/or revise other messages in the same thread. Figure Four shows an example of a thread, a group of messages on the same subject (but not necessarily received in consecutive order) which the computer sorts all under the same heading. Threads such as this can be used to demonstrate the fundamentals of critical reading--the need to give the writer as much credibility as possible, while keeping in mind opposing points of view and possible points of rebuttal. Instead of giving students a single article on an issue, or two pieces which rhetorically oppose one another, instructors might suggest they look at an entire thread in a newsgroup, which will present multiple viewpoints on an issue. This process will introduce them almost immediately to possible points of rebuttal which they take to any particular item in the group, developing thereby a strategy for critical reading.

11. The bulk of information, representing such an array of perspectives, presents certain problems for researchers and highlights the need for a pedagogy that stresses evaluation and critical reading skills. The absence of a filtering process like that provided by most large presses (censoring material which, for various reasons, does not meet the press's standards) allows for the "publication" of excellent materials that would otherwise only find space in small, low circulation presses, or as the Chiapas pamphlets suggest, in local distribution situations. At the same time, however, because anyone with access to a modem can post information and arguments to the net, the material can often be problematic for student research papers. This disparity in the "quality" of information that is available provides excellent opportunities for teaching evaluation skills and demands that students scrutinize information and read sources critically rather than blindly insert information into their work.

12. In some senses the newsgroups constitute a paradox-- a source of information which becomes both less reliable and more reliable than sources such as journal articles with which we are more familiar. The sense in which they may be less reliable is clear. Students just beginning to learn how to use sources effectively in their research often relate a certain authority to the written word. Hastily written opinions or "flames" (as illustrated in Figure Five), which have not undergone any kind of rigorous screening processes, present students with "published" information that may or may not provide them with viable arguments, accurate information or effective rhetorical models (poor ethos, for example). Contrasting this type of potentially problematic message are items like the two other types that we have shown. Figure Six from the Clarinet Newsgroup service gives an example of the items found in wire service feeds such as Associated Press or Reuters, whose messages may be almost identical to items in, for example, the University of Texas' student newspaper, the Daily Texan-- but only if the Texan has chosen to cover that story, of course. Lastly, Figure Seven illustrates what we might describe as `alternative news stories,' pieces which are quite extensive in their scope and use of detailed research, appearing in groups such as `misc.activism.progressive' but are absent from mainstream media.

13. What is significant about newsgroups is that there is no concise distinction made between all these various types of messages, a distinction print maintains by marginalizing less "authoritative" responses. What one can see on closer reflection, however, is that the newsgroups take on a kind of rhetorical reliability which is quite different from that surrounding the printed source. When a user enters a thread of discussion in a newsgroup such as `soc.culture.africa' where one would expect to find the most polemical, least reliable information, the user is instantly surrounded by a number of divergent voices and opinions, all pulling against one another in a variety of ways. Through a careful process of critical reading, this user might actually come to a more reliable sense of the full complexity of an issue than he or she might reach after reading a single printed source. The singular authority of the printed text, although more traditionally reliable for reasons such as the cultural capital surrounding the business of publishing, often cannot acknowledge the full range of other positions and voices which surround it in a public debate. Reading newsgroups, one gets the sense that even if all the users are hackers, or hacks, or both, we must appreciate the extent to which even hacks define the terminology of a debate, its boundaries, its stakes.

14. The third and final advantage of using NewsWatcher in the classroom involves the importance of communication and an awareness of audience in the process of improving student composition skills. By providing an opportunity for students to communicate with a larger and more varied discourse community, newsgroups give students concrete examples of rhetorical situations in which different audiences demand different argumentative strategies and different modes of presentation. The feedback students receive from audiences which stretch far beyond the classroom helps shape their understanding of writing as a socially defined act and pushes them to focus on communicating ideas and exchanging information rather than 'making a grade' on an English paper. We have noticed that these skills often come out of personal newsgroup correspondence as well as academic work, and we encourage our students to read and post messages on groups that interest them for reasons unrelated to their assignments. For example, a Taiwanese student last semester became very involved in a newsgroup that dealt with issues facing Taiwanese-Americans. It was clear that he was deeply invested in the group's discussion and he spent a great deal of time posting numerous messages in which he raised questions and argued positions on issues which he felt pertained to him. This type of writing, although certainly less formal than a graded essay assignment, still involves principles of argumentation fundamental to the class and provides students with a set of meaningful issues to discuss and, perhaps, a more comfortable forum in which they can address an audience that is ultimately interested in dialogue rather than judgment.

15. This type of exchange can be achieved in projects that relate directly to class assignments as well. For instance our two classes, along with another composition section, were working on a common assignment last semester analyzing the film Thunderheart. The three classes used the 'utexas.class.e306' newsgroup which we created as a collaborative forum to exchange information, citations and ideas about the assignment. The group provided a space in which arguments could be tested and refined through discussion by a large and varied audience of interested students who often came at the same questions from very different perspectives. Similar exercises can push class boundaries (so to speak) far beyond the collaboration of different sections of the same course. Student postings can request information, ask for sources, gauge opinions, or provide their own arguments to the thousands of topic specific newsgroups with an enormous international readership (Figure Eight). The feedback that these posts may garner will almost certainly exceed the material that a single instructor or even a full class could provide. At the same time, students learn that poorly argued or unclearly expressed statements will often be challenged or critiqued by other readers. The inherent discursive situation of a newsgroup, in which writing can comfortably be used as a tool for dialogue, encourages a responsibility on the part of students to be aware of the audiences that they are addressing and to be conscious of the fact that clear writing is vital for effective communication.

16. We have tried to suggest in this paper several practical methods by which Newsgroups can effectively be incorporated into the composition classroom. Along with providing access to a wealth of material for student research projects, these applications give rise to a number of questions that are fundamental to our understanding of the process of writing and the process of teaching writing. We use Newsgroups both in short-term, in-class exercises (which, for example, might analyze a causal argument in a posting, or discuss the importance of ethos by looking at a flame and an A.P. article), as well as the more extended, in-depth conversations about the function of writing and the importance of critical reading and evaluation. Newsgroups and the Internet have become essential elements of our classroom practice, and we feel that the questions and complexities which they bring to light about the nature of writing contribute immensely to our teaching of rhetorical principles and the elements of argumentation.