Rhetorical criticism of public discourse on the internet: Theoretical implications

The Internet and access to it have grown exponentially in the past three years. Georgia Tech's Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center reports that, since January 1994 when its first survey of Internet users was conducted, the Internet has grown from 1250 servers to over one million servers. There are over thirty million users of the Internet in the United States alone (Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center). The versatility of the medium has increased along with its size, as the addition of Java technology and other features has increased the dynamism and interactivity of Web sites and as conveyance via television has increased access. Mass communications scholars and our colleagues in interpersonal, organizational, and small group communication have been studying computer-mediated communication [CMC] for some time. Mass communications researchers have been concerned with a number of questions-how First Amendment protections and intellectual and property rights transfer from print to CMC; what factors play a role in attracting audiences to Internet sites; what strategies can be used to determine accuracy of information on the Internet; and so forth (McChesney; Morris and Ogan; Reeves and Nass). Interpersonal communication researchers have studied the development and maintenance of relationships online (Walther; Parks and Floyd), while small group researchers have examined the dynamics of group process in computer-mediated environments (Savicki, Lingenfelter, and Kelley; Rafaeli and Sudweeks). In addition to these, there have been many other forms of communication research studying Internet discourse and interaction. But rhetorical critics and theorists are latecomers to the scene. There are many possible reasons for this. Many humanists have been slow to take up interest in discourse in electronic environments, perhaps because they suspect that critical work and critical theory will need to be changed to suit the new communication environments, and this is true because in a hypertext environment, author, audience, and text are dispersed. While such dispersion can and does occur in other modalities, computer-mediated discourse is particularly prone to it. The function of the author as originator of a message can be suppressed in groupauthored, disguised, or anonymous Internet postings. As I will show later, identifying the nature and reactions of audiences is made more difficult in computer-mediated environments. And when text becomes hypertext, the text itself is dispersed and assimilated and loses its stability. As Ted Friedman (73) noted,