I’m not on blogging duties this week, so i’m just posting notes.

Gurak – Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace

Chapter One – Introduction:  Persuasion, Community, and Cyberspace

• This study deals with two online protests which “dealt with computers, privacy, and the shape of communication technology and society in the 21^st century” (1)
• Self-selection of what to put onto the internet vs. your information being controlled by media or government conglomerates on the internet is a central tension.
• Fundamental tension between the internet as 1) potential danger in monetary and social aspects or; 2) a community builder and humanity engenderer. (3)
• The author is providing an empirical analysis of life on the Internet that has real evidence to support its claims but that is broader than a discrete experiment because of its use of rhetorical criticism – an approach that has been traditionally highly empirical (Halloran 1984) but which retains the critical and somewhat broad lens of a narrative or literary critic (5).
• Gurak argues that the protest communities in her study used language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in a new social space that is virtual.  Community ethos and the new delivery system of communication over computer networks is central to maintaining the shared rhetorical vision in the face of physical absence.
• Community in the absence of physical place is a main concern.
• In the absence of physical presence, the metaphor of the interpretive community or a group of individuals who share “habits of mind” is useful to think about in the digital community.
• Online communities allow people to “lurk” without participation.  They also allow fine-tuning toward particular groups.  Is this a good thing?  Are we only getting the “preaching to the choir” aspect when we seek out specific online gatherings of folks who share our “habits of mind?”
• Ethos can have a double meaning – the ethos of an individual person or the ethos of a particular type of person.  (14)
• Delivery in the digital sense means that it is intrinsically bound up not just in the speaker but in the medium (forum, IM) of the delivery (16).

Chapter Two – The Case of Lotus MarketPlace

• The Lotus MarketPlace model simply didn’t understand that for folks to be willing to give up their information they needed to give something back in return so that the population would be complicity – ENTER FACEBOOK.
• Lotus was really unprepared to “fight the internet” and the wildfire reaction that occurred over CMC related to MarketPlace.  Funny!

Chapter Three – The Case of the Clipper Chip

• At heart, privacy advocates wanted the two-part encryption key to be divided between a governmental and a non-governmental agency.  The government (obviously) wanted it to remain in the family (39).
• The Clipper controversy demonstrates that the power of vox populi must be carefully tempered with “considerations of the greater social and political forces at work” (43).
• The ethos and electronic delivery powerful in the Lotus case – mostly due to the private, profit-oriented nature of the company trying to move forward – didn’t hold a lot of weight in a sphere of government agencies and presidential decisions (43).

Chapter Four – Exigence in Cyberspace

• This chapter considers the events and forces behind the mobilization of online resistance against MarketPlace and Clipper.
• The immediacy, two-way communication, and proliferation of the internet make it a rather unique rhetorical sphere.  Now, just how to get heard. (44).
• “In the cases of MarketPlace and Clipper, the exigence involved a technology that many perceived as imperfect and dangerous, and this exigence was defined and focused through the dynamics of communication in cyberspace” (45).
• CMC increased the speed of the urgency of imperfection.  This is important for discussions of the possibility of a public sphere of sorts – information needs to travel fast.
• Exigence was the result of three forces:
  • General concern of the public about computer privacy
  • Speed and reach of online delivery spread information quickly
  • CMC protestors enjoyed a shared ethos that was hostile, authoritative and technologically sure of itself.
    • The instant ethos granted by the internet forum gets straight to the argument without spending too much time building up the speaker – good or bad?  Ethos is now created on forums though with different status’ (noobs, moderators, etc.)
    • The exponential quality of CMC is what makes it really quick moving
    • Great example of how to do close conversational analysis of CMC texts (59)

Chapter Five:  Structures of Online Communication

• This chapter looks at the texts that are representative of the debates surrounding online protest (66).
• Gurak makes the argument that human exigency can get us beyond discussions of technological determinism in that external organizational and social forces are always at work in the interaction of an individual with CMC/CMTechnologies.  As such, we are certainly shaped by the way we communicate, but we can also resist it (67).  To demonstrate this, she shows how the protests of MarketPlace were bottom-up; however, the Clipper debate were top-down affairs sponsored by organizations in the act of mobilizing forces (is this due to the higher-tech nature of the Clipper problem? YES.  Sorry, she answers in next paragraph)
• Gurak is also concerned with the following questions: 1)  How does online communication flatten hierarchies (gets beyond brick and mortar in email directly to person – or at least a person’s proxy); and 2) trust in online communities (this notes the self-selection of giving information out across the internet in these cases – it also draws attention to trusting the information that is sent to you in these communities that you inhabit – in Gurak’s case, the online privacy advocacy community).

Chapter Six:  Ethos, Flaming, and Inaccuracy

• The dominance of certain textual types – like petitions – is the result of a desire for ethos in online communication environments.
• As I noted before, the fracturing into smaller communities where ethos is assumed allows for the proliferation of inaccurate information due to a lack of criticality.
• Flaming – while it increases ethos – surely might detract from the ability of rhetors to engage in critical-rational debate.
• Gurak notes that dominance vis-à-vis ethos is a common problem toward a liberatarian, all-democratizing concept of the internet because once an individual is operating in a specific imagined community, they are no longer inclined to be critical – in a sence, they are preaching to the choir. 
• Bottom-up movements can be uncritical and top-down movements can stifle argumentation/creativity because of organizational – rather than individual – authority.  Top-down models also carry the problem of activist-spam or the old “like/dislike” binary without critical engagement on the part of the petition signer.
• Folks on the “other side” of the dominant ethos in community forums often won’t pipe up for fear of being flamed.

Chapter Seven:  Gender in Cyberspace

• Reasons why women weren’t as prominent in these online protests:
  • Access – professionally, socioeconomically.  Also, because the internet was created by men, the language needed to negotiate it is very phallocentric.
  • Misogynist ethos of shared communities on the internet (think the Denning debates) (109).
  • Women’s way of communicating is different from men’s.  Because it’s not as forceful and argumentative, it’s not given as much weight (yet, or at least in these forums at the time – this point is likely still extant, but a little diminished in light of the proliferation of so many small internet communities that are gendered).

Chapter Eight:  Big Brother the Corporation and Big Brother the Government

• Corporations responded differently than the government to online protest – is this because of the market imperative?
• The “coordinated” response of the corporation to the protest was exactly the problem – this sort of structuring can’t attend to the proliferation of information across CMC networks – where do you start?!?
• The corporation was also successful because of the “hard-facts” appeals it made – in other words, the corporate ethos wasn’t an effective persuasion to the ethos of the privacy advocate groups in online communities.  Facts vs. emotions (anger)
• The government sponsored Clipper chip moved forward in this way:
  • Popular support – because of the technological sophistication of the technology – was minimal.
  • The government didn’t participate in the forums of discussion.
  • They enacted the Clipper and EES standard despite the signatures and petition.
  • Gurak is visionary when she notes that corporations haven’t yet realized the potential marketing possibilities of communities in cyberspace (FACEBOOK).