In “Threaded Discussion on the Internet and in the Classroom, Erik Simpson explores the reason behind a lack of student participation in threaded discussions required for their classes. Simpson posits that the reason for this student apathy emerges from the structure required within class message boards that force students to focus on a specific topic for only a specific amount of time. In the article, written by a college English instructor for other English instructors, Simpson attempts to explain the phenomenon of minimal participation and provide a means of improving this participation. To aid teachers in creating more active discussion threads, Simpson demonstrates that allowing students more flexibility in their posting by mimicking the open forum of online discussions provides better responses.

Though Simpson’s article is intriguing and posits an important point in the development of classroom skills, this study does not correlate to my research in any fashion. Working with message boards is a similar concept to what he discusses in the article, but these boards are not terminal, so the work in Simpson’s article does not advance my scholarship.

Chun’s introduction focuses on the ideas of control and power as they apply to the Internet. Examining Deleuze’s and Foucault’s ideas of control societies and the differences between control societies and disciplinary societies. Chun looks at the ways in which control and power, in the terms of the Internet, always relate to ideas of sexuality and how these relationships led to the early means in which censors sought to quash the Internet and how early examinations of MUDs and MOOs clenched Foucault’s argument on discursive sexuality. As she wraps up the examination of the friction that exists among forms of Internet control and power, Chun concludes that these two ideals are not opposites, but are, in fact opposite sides of the same coin.

Chapter One: Why Cyberspace

n “Why Cyberspace,” Chun explores the idea behind the term “cyberspace” as a term used in relation to the Internet. The term “cyberspace” first appeared in William Gibson’s _Neuromancer,_ but looked there nothing like our perception of cyberspace. Chun also discusses how the term “cyberspace” is misleading since the actual idea of cyberspace “erases all reference to content, apparatus, process or form, offering instead a metaphor and a mirage, for cyberspace is not spatial” (39). She look closely at how communications and Internet browsing do not actually take place in space, but term was found by judges to be more appropriate since it allowed legislation to look at the various “areas” of the Internet. Additionally, Chun compares the lack of space and place that occur when a person is online to the specific space and place of the television. She explains that with television a program comes on at a certain time (space) and on a certain channel (place) and no “back” button exists to return a viewer to a previous space and place. However, cyberspace functions as a form of “time travel” since viewers can be in multiple places at the same time and can skip back to a page they viewed in the literal past without disrupting time continuums. It is for this reason, asserts Chun, that Foucault’s idea of a heterotopia exists in cyberspace. Since viewers are neither in a specific place or time, they have the ability to be anywhere, public or private. Finally, Chun looks at the variations of people who can exist in cyberspace and, as with the name cyberspace, many of these people come from SciFi novels. For example, she discusses the era of the cyerpunk, Benjamin’s rubbernecker, and Baudeleire’s flaneur. Through these classifications, Chun looks carefully at the various types of users in cyberspace and how each one functions in the see and be seen relationship that pervades cyberspace.

Chapter Two: Screening Pornography

Asserting that cyberporn is another of Foucault’s technologies of the self and that it, therefore, requires the entire social body to place themselves under surveillance and pay close attention to the movements they make as individuals in the world of Internet and Internet pornography, Chun raises the question of for whom or to whom we are to place ourselves under surveillance. Then, with this question looming unanswered, Chun shifts into the history of cyberspace and pornography. She frames the chapter, largely, around early writings on Internet pornography by Elmer-Dewitt. Chun continues through the analysis of the works of these two cyberporn scholars and the impact this work had on bringing cyberporn into the eyes of the public, thus making it appear even worse than it truly was.

Additionally, Chun looks at the work of the CDA and COPA to eliminate access to porn by those 18 and under. The CDA passed an act that threatened up to $100,000 and two years in prison to anybody who, in any way, attempted to pass cyberporn along to a minor.

Two of the most interesting points that Chun makes in this point are in relation to the idea of “control” and the Internet. Chun points out, first, that many of the fears parents have about their children viewing pornography in cyberspace stems from their own feeling of powerlessness in relation to the use of the Internet. Chun asserts that since parents were unable to fully control the Internet and the sites that they were viewing (i.e. were not able to prevent pornography pop-ups or, for that matter, any form of pop-up), they transferred their fear from their own powerlessness to the powerlessness of their children since this allows them to ignore their own powerlessness. The other point that Chun makes is in relation to Foucault’s ideas of power and how this can be asserted by the viewer in cyberspace. Chun asserts that Internet users who interact with the amateur models on webcams are feeling that they actually control the moves of these models, thus allowing the voyeur the chance to feel they are in control and, therefore, assert the power over these women.

Chapter Three: Scenes of Empowerment

In this chapter, Chun discusses the ways that advertisers sought to change the face of the Internet. Advertisements by ISPs in the 1990s desperately sought to change the viewer and user’s concept of the Internet from one of uncontrollable pornography to one of a Utopian community blind to the constraints that separate us in reality.

Chun looks specifically at how MCI’s 1997 “Anthem” commercial sought to promote the Internet as a “medium of minds” (131) as opposed to a medium concerned with race, color, creed, gender, or disability. Chun discusses how the Internet provided users with the idea that they could sign in and become whoever they wanted to be without being questioned. She examines how the focus on the Internet in the MCI commercial was on masking your identity to obliterate standard classifications, and how MCI portrayed the Internet as a place that masks the user but never hints that as the user is lying to others about their own self, they too are being lied to about other users’ identities. In addition, Chun looks at the way that the Internet’s intention to obliterate race did not obliterate the idea of racism on the Internet. She reveals that the message of the Internet is not anti-discrimination based, but rather racism avoidance.

Through the chapter, Chun looks at several images in the commercial as presenting the Internet as user friendly for all users. She focuses on the image of the elderly man, the young girl, and the African-American businessman to demonstrate MCI’s goal to present the Internet as user-friendly, not race-specific. In addition, her look at the father and daughter using the Internet together examines how the Internet is family friendly, a far cry from the previous arguments on the pervasiveness of pornography that would pollute the minds of children.

Also, Chun looks at the attempts of sites like MongrelX to obliterate pornography on the Internet. Chun explains how the search engine MongrelX does not function as a typical search engine and simply send users to the pages they want to see, but how it links racist search terms and redirects the user to webpages devised to begin eliminating racism on the Internet. In this section, Chun looks at several of MongrelX’s web pages including hte Natural Selection page which demands readers question their racist beliefs. Another site that Chun looks at is the Venus Fly Killer site that appears when users type racist slang into the search engine. This site pulls up a page with multiple racist slang terms and forces the reader to continue to grapple with pop-up boxes that ask questions such as “Is this what you think of me?”

Overall, Chun is examining the way that ISPs touted the Internet as a place to overcome the racist and digital divide compared to how the Internet is actually working to overcome these divides. In all, a very interesting chapter that kept me reading throughout. I was, however, disappointed to find out that the Venus Fly Killer site is no longer linked to MongrelX and is, apparently, no longer on the Internet.

Chapter Four: Orienting the Future

In this chapter, Chun analyzes the text of William Gibson’s Neuromancer to seek an answer to the question: “To what extent is cyberpunk a symptom of or a diagnosis of our ‘present’ condition and to what extent is Neuromancer really postmodern?” (174). Chun asserts that cyberspace is not the origin of what we understand as cyberspace, but rather a conflation of what we understand cyberspace to be. Looking closely at the text and comparing it to Mamoru Oshii’s anime feature Ghost in the Shell, Chun examines the concept of high-tech Orientalism put forth in both works and ties this trend to the East-West rhetorical division that erases the majority of Asia and conflates the continent into thee bustling nation of Japan. By creating this Japanified future, Chun writes, “cyberspace appears to be a Western frontier in which U.S. ingenuity wins over Japanese corporate assimilation, for cyberspace allows for piracy and autonomy” (187). She relates the characters and settings in cyberpunk, specifically in Neuromancer, to the U.S frontier filled with cowboys attempting to tame and conquor the land. The difference between the cybercowboys and the traditional cowboys of the Old West, according to Chun, is that cybercowboys cannot survive without Japanese products.

Chun uses Ghost in the Shell, an anime, to demonstrate how cyberpunk has impacted the anime genres popular in Japan and the U.S. In both genres, an Asian landscape, traditionally either Japan or Hong Kong, is inhabited by people comprised of both human and computer parts living in a futuristic world in which everyone “has turned Japanese” (211). Interestingly, the characters in many anime works are not specifically Japanese, but rather Japanese characters with features they idealize from their western counterparts. These Japanese characters often have accentuated round eyes, red hair, long legs, and thin bodies (Chun 214). Often, the main characters of the anime genre, much like the cyberpunk genre, are females or transgendered males. Because of this orientation, characters are not jacking into cyberspace, but rather being jacked into by cyberspace. It is this concept, the freedom of intercourse provided when one is jacked into cyberspace, that is the ultimate protest of the legislators who posit the dangers of the Internet lie in the availability of “sex and pornography” on the Internet. Their true fear is not in this availability, but in the freedom of the intercourse, in all senses of the world, that takes place after one has jacked in.

Chapter Five: Control and Freedom

In Chapter five, Chun looks closely at the ideas of paranoia, freedom and control as they relate to the Internet. She first discusses Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage as a theory easily related to our real lives and e-lives. In this section, she discusses how e-lives are, in essence, a mirror of our own real identity and how we follow through the various stages of infatuation and jealousy with our e-lives much as we do with our mirror selves.

One of the strongest points that Chun makes in this chapter is the fact that paranoia stems from a desire to compensate for a perceived weakness in symbolic authority. While Chun scratches the surface with this idea it is easy to relate this to her earlier ideas on parents wanting to censor the internet so that their children don’t get access to them. Ultimately, the parents become paranoid because they do not have the authority to deny their children complete access to these sights. This theory can also be seen in companies who ban their employees from blogging or fire them when they discover they blog. There is not anything specifically wrong with their employees keeping a blog. The only problem behind this media is that the bosses have no control over what the employee is writing. Chun connects this idea of paranoi directly to William Burroughs’ concept that control occurs through words.
Chun’s next area of focus is that in the online world, doing something without being controlled is doing something “freely.” She relates this idea specifically to the idea of online porn web-cams and the girls who “act” for these cameras. These girls subvert the idea of a panopticon by asking users to place them under surveillance. Instead of being controlled by the voyeurs who watch these cameras, the girls exhibit their own freedom by deciding, often against the wishes of their voyeurs, what clothing to remove, how they will act and all other components of their actions on their own.

As I experimented successfully with blogging in the classroom, I began contemplating it as a dissertation topic. When I found out I was teaching developmental writing this fall, I was enthused. I was waiting patiently for a chance to experiment with blogging at such an important level.

But then the other shoe dropped. We’ve been going through some “changes” in our department this semester. We have an enthusiastic and open-minded new director that can infuse some life into our FYC classes. We have a new common syllabus that we’re allowed some flexibility with. We have random new rules. And, apparently, we have security rules too. When all this newness began, I was polite enough to ask about using blogs in the class. Now, I did this because they have gone as far as telling us to refuse to answer emails sent from students using an email address not assigned to them through the school. It had to do with “privacy” and “security.” It doesn’t make sense to me. I usually use my Gmail account because no other server that I am familiar with allows me to 1)be alerted the minute I have email, 2)keep conversations together instead of having to sift through individual emails with the same topic and 3)allowed me to make my life as simple as 54 categories in one mailbox. But, I changed.

And, in addition to changing, I was polite enough to ask if I could use blogs. Yes, I know the saying “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” but I was being nice and trying, in the long run, to save my job.

So, a week later, I get an email back telling me that the word has come down the foodchain that no blogs can be used that are not hosted on the school server. Well, in essence, the school just said that I could not blog. Why? We have one way to access a blog–through Blackboard. Not that this would be a problem, but this aspect of Blackboard is currently only available to distance learning instructors. So, I’m left with no blog.

Okay, I can work with this. I have plans once we get through this semester. But what’s really bugging me–in much the same way that I was bothered with the fact that my students could watch YouTube videos in class but nowhere else on campus–is that the reason I have been forbidden to allow my students to use a blog in the classroom is apparently for their security.

Now, understand that when I emailed about this originally, I was clear to explain the safety to the blogsite I wanted to use–this one. I also explained how blogs could be set as private and all that jazz. But no, this site is not secure enough for the school. Okay, I can see them denying it. But there should be larger concerns if they’re going to play the security card. Facebook and Myspace are still available to students from their dorm rooms, computer labs, library and even from the computers they use in the classroom.

It’s starting to sound, to me, as though this is not a privacy issue, but rather a freedom issue. We were told when they required us to use only our school email (which we can’t even forward to another account that will allow us to answer back using the school email) that this was because they could keep the emails on the main server even if we deleted them. That way, if we needed them later, we could have access to them. I’m assuming that means that they can also read any of them at any time. And, by forcing students to use only school sponsored sites, they have the ability to censor anything we say. (In fact, you should check out the changes to my “About Me” page.)

All in all, it sounds like a nice big panopticon where the administration has the ability to quash our freedom of speech, invade our privacy and censor as they wish. If you will excuse me, there’s a link I need to delete from my page before I call it a night.