Chris Boese's Portfolio

Montana Journalism Review: Ethical issues between blogging and journalism

I just heard a terrific NPR "All Things Considered" piece on George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," and since that essay and Orwell's other writings influenced my piece in the Summer 2006 Montana Journalism Review below, it seemed like a good time to post this up here. The odd numbers floating in the text are references to the Endnotes at the very end of the document.

Here's the full bib citation:

Boese, C. (2006) "Challenging the Power Structure." Montana Journalism Review. Summer 2006, Number 35. pp. 8-10.

 

Challenging the Power Structure

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. George Orwell

By Christine Boese

Picture the prototypical American "town square," the idealistic vision of Jeffersonian democracy: gathering places that people used to pass through almost every day, places that were the center of community life. Announcements and ideas were disseminated in these spaces. Anyone could set up a soapbox and start talking, although, as Clem Work has found in his research into the enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Act in Missoula in the early 20th century, there were very real attempts to squelch certain kinds of talk in some public squares.

Where do people gather to participate in their communities now? Aside from street festivals and parades, the few civic gatherings that remain take place in restricted or private spaces, in schools, churches, shopping malls, sports arenas. We have protections in the Constitution not only for speech, but also for the right to assemble. Activists of many stripes are bemoaning the loss of the true "commons," spaces that are set aside as the public domain, shared spaces that belong to all.

Journalists often have an explicit goal to cover community activities, and as such, they monitor and report on what happens in the "commons." But as the commons disappear, more often than not, journalists seek entry into the private spaces where decisions that affect communities are made. One unintended result of this shift is that journalists focus less on their communities and instead become willing satellites circling a class of power brokers, somewhat like the courtiers during Shakespeare's time.

A journalist has an ethical obligation to go where people are exercising their right to assemble, to monitor and cover the community, even if that community is a "global village." While face-to-face commons are disappearing, there still are places where people gather, discussing the events that affect their lives, participating in democracy in a most direct way.

And in the online "blogosphere," people are gathering. They're writing and editing their own customized interactive "newspapers" with headline readers and research they've done on their own, weighing and analyzing, making up their own minds instead of letting some editor they never voted for in the employ of some mass media conglomerate tell them what to think.

While the term "blog" was accepted into the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2004,1 few people profess to know very much about weblogs or the blog movement. If they do have an impression, it's often of self-obsessed teenagers putting too much private information online, or of anonymous and irresponsible talk radio-style ranting of the far right and left.

The problem is that blog software and the blog movement are two very different things. Blog software is a tool that can be used for a wide range of purposes. The "blog movement" is a social phenomenon having a very real impact at this moment in history.

The vast majority of what's being put online using blog software has very little to do with the "blog movement" per se. There are cooking recipe group blogs. About.com was converted to blog software several years ago. The University of Minnesota library is giving students blog space for learning, a project called UThink.2 Harvard Law School is using blogs to supplement teaching and discussions on legal issues.3 I have a poetry blog, my own idiosyncratic Norton Anthology, if you will.4

I often tell people that blog software is a poor person's content management system. It's like an empty coffee cup. What you pour into the cup is only bound by the limits of your imagination.

The database behind blog software is a terrific tool to hold all kinds of information for collaborative interactive access. I believe blog software will gobble up the entire Web because of the power of syndication (RSS) and headline feed readers.5

The "blog movement" is another thing altogether, and it's having considerable impact on journalism and journalistic ethics.

The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution

Originally published in the 2004 University of Minnesota edited collection: Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs.

Download FreireBlogland04.pdf

Reprinted here with permission.

Full Citation:

Boese, C. (2004). The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution. In L.J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the blogosphere: Rhetoric, community, and culture of weblogs. Retrieved April 30, 2006, from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/the_spirit_of_paulo_freire.html.

By Christine Boese, Independent researcher

Abstract

Weblogs and knowledge-logs, or “blogs” and “klogs,” have emerged into the post-dot.com bubble online world as a notable (and often non-commercial) social phenomenon. While some hear echoes of Web homepage voices from the mid-1990s, the blogging phenomenon during the Iraq war may have taken Web cybercultures in new directions. This qualitative and exploratory research considers the viability and social effects of the altered web page phenomenon of blogs and klogs as they affect the lives of information workers, in public Internet spaces, and with implications for private intranets. It combines ethnographic observations from a single case within the Iraq warblog phenomenon with the   standpoints and personal observations from the author’s professional experience launching a klog inside CNN Headline News shortly after the war. It seeks to gain insight into the utopian and often unnecessarily technologically deterministic promise of a knowledge-log revolution and find points where the movement falls far short of that promise. While knowledge-logs can appear as efficient groupware   tools for organizations, klog interface features allow political openings to change corporate cultures in ways most groupware never intended, with a goal of a dialogic, critical pedagogy through workers helping and teaching other workers outside the realm of “official policy.” Personal blog sites of journalists in the employ of large, knowledge-commodity organizations such as Time Warner release this same tension into public spaces and reveal the very real disruption on a large scale that klogs can create on a small scale. Ideas and models presented by Paulo Freire and Michel de Certeau are used as a lens for one possible interpretation of the events studied from March to November 2003.

ACM Hypertext 2000: Making a Successful Case for a Hypertextual Doctoral Dissertation

Presented at: Proceedings of the Eleventh Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia May 30  – June 4, 2000 San Antonio, Texas, USA.

Published in conference proceedings: New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2000. 232-233.

At this same conference, I also presented the following material in a poster session:

Download "Adventures in Alternative Hypertext Structuring: Research, Professional, and Classroom Uses"

Download "Making a Successful Case for a Hypertextual Doctoral Dissertation" ACM offprint

Find this article in its original location here.

Making a Successful Case
for a Hypertextual Doctoral Dissertation

Christine Boese
Department of English
Clemson University
Clemson, SC USA  29634

ABSTRACT

In August, 1998 the first hypertextual dissertation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was accepted (http://www.nutball.com/dissertation),  a case study applying methods of rhetorical analysis and cultural critique to the online phenomenon called the “Xenaverse,” the cyberspaces devoted to the cult following of the syndicated television program Xena, Warrior Princess. The hypertextual research site, a vital online culture, seemed to demand a new kind of scholarship to describe and analyze it. Still, there were many hurdles to getting such an unorthodox presentation form accepted by the dissertation committee and the Graduate School.

This paper summarizes a few of the justifying arguments that led to the successful acceptance this dissertation, a hypertext that could not be reproduced in any way on paper. In showing how one case for a hypertextual dissertation was successfully argued, I hope to help other scholars make similar cases at other institutions, perhaps leading to further debate on the ways arguments and epistemologies will be defined in the future.

KEYWORDS: hypertext dissertation electronic scholarship online cultural studies library archives University Microfilms graduate school Xenaverse Xena

The rest of the text version is available at the "Continue" link below.

The Virtual Locker Room in Classroom Electronic Chat Spaces: The Politics of Men as Other

This research first appeared as a chapter in the following peer-reviewed book:

Boese, C. (1999). The Virtual Locker Room in Classroom Electronic Chat Spaces: The Politics of Men as Other. In P. Takayoshi & K. Blair (Eds.), Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces. Ablex Publishers.

 

By Christine Boese, Ph.D.

With the increased use of electronic classrooms, collaborative software tools, and the Internet with its interactive forums, a great deal of scholarly speculation has turned to new social contexts this technology may create.  Many have suggested that electronic tools and forums have a democratizing influence, at least for those granted access (Bolter 1991, Flores 1990, Selfe 1990, Selfe & Selfe 1994). Some feminist theorists have recently examined this assumption in light of the ways women and men participate in news groups on the Internet, and have found subtle effects of "silencing," a de facto kind of censorship which seems to reinforce inequalities of power and influence based on gender (Herring 1993, Herring 1992, Herring, Johnson, & Dibenedetto 1992).  While many teachers of introductory writing classes are turning to feminist pedagogies (Jarratt 1992, Hollis 1992, Eichhorn et al 1992), others are incorporating features of feminist and radical pedagogies into computer versions of writing classes (Selfe & Selfe 1994, Selfe 1990).

    At issue then is whether these computer forums can serve the goals of various feminist pedagogical practices in writing classrooms.  Is this technology fair and democratizing, or is it simply a forum which reproduces the biases and inequalities of the dominant society, despite anonymity and equal access to the "conversational floor?"  And if the answer is the latter, does that mean that the technology is unsuitable for use by teachers employing feminist pedagogies?  Should feminist teachers be using a computer tool which allows men to continue to dominate and oppress women?

    To examine these questions, I brought synchronous conferences or chat rooms into my electronic classroom, incorporating the forums into prewriting activities and peer review sessions.  Due to unusual circumstances of registration in 1994, I was able to compare variables of gender in electronic chats for pedagogical purposes, with interesting results for rhetoric and composition research as well.

    I held four comparative real-time electronic conferences, two simultaneously in the same class in Spring Semester 1994, and two simultaneously in the same class in Fall Semester 1994.  Each conference occurred in connection with the same assignment in an electronic classroom section of Expository Writing: Language and Culture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  Each semester the class was divided into conference groups of approximately six to seven members. One group used their real first names and one group used anonymous nicknames.

    Because Rensselaer is an eighty percent male engineering school, there was only one woman regularly attending my class both in the spring and the fall semesters.  In Spring 1994, the woman participated in the Real Name Group.  In Fall 1994, the woman participated in the Nickname Group.

    Each semester two distinct types of virtual cultures emerged, independent of a condition of anonymity.  One became an inflammatory, abusive, sexist, racist, and homophobic environment, the Virtual Locker Room, while the other remained serious and focused in its discussion.  Each semester the differentiating factor appeared to be the known absence or presence of a woman in the group.

    Captured texts of the conferences and student journal responses afterward reveal how the Virtual Locker Room culture was created, and show how gendered communication was affected by the absence or presence of one woman, who became a "normalizing" force in the online culture.  For a feminist frame to examine these texts, I want to look at this electronic communication by men as something "Other," putting a reverse spin on conventional assumptions of alterity.

    I also want to consider whether such an exercise has any classroom value, and whether the electronic forums can be productively integrated with the ideals of feminist pedagogies.  In this class, the discussion and introspection generated from an oppressive locker room atmosphere provided a gateway to higher understanding of the politicized contexts of language and culture.  Particularly interesting was how nearly all-male classes responded to their own debate texts as course readings, analyzing the culture space they had created in ways which are consistent with the goals of most feminist pedagogies.  My research, then, validates a contradiction between the egalitarian ideals for CMC and the effects of conflict in computer-mediated spaces, and uses this contradiction directly, for feminist, consciousness-raising purposes.