January 6, 2009
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Summer 1994 Vol. 3 No. 2
The Passive-Aggressive Paradox of On-Line Discourse
By Crawford Kilian
Something is wrong on line.
For all the hype about information highways and the explosive growth of the Internet, not many educators are using computers for genuine communication. This is due in part to lack of knowledge and opportunity, but, even when educators have access to cyberspace, depressing numbers of them are engaged at only a trivial level. Larger and still more depressing numbers are consciously avoiding the medium altogether, and for good reasons.
On-line communication is often addictive, but not always rewarding. Discussions sink into “flame wars” of insults, nitpicking, and abuse. Or they veer off into aimless debate. “Hijackers” take over, uploading torrents of incoherent drivel. It doesn't happen all the time, but it does occur often enough to frustrate users who want to use cyberspace seriously.
At the local level, electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) offer a sense of community to schools and interest groups. Yet here, too, something can go wrong. Discussion turns into abuse; a few dominate the board while everyone else lurks silently, reading but not contributing. I call this the passive-aggressive syndrome. Most teachers and students who go on line are passive readers of other people's postings; they rarely, if ever, respond to what they read. That leaves the aggressives in charge—teachers and students who post often and, of course, have only one another to respond to.
Another problem is that BBS e-mail is far from private—whoever is running a BBS has the power to get into every mail-box and to monitor every exchange of information. That is enough to keep many potential users from even getting started, as I saw when I tried to introduce a colleague to Capilano College's new BBS. Since she's on various college committees that often deal with sensitive information, she instantly decided the risks far outweighed the advantages and opted not to use the BBS.
These problems reflect in part the attitudes of the pioneers attracted to the medium. Other factors include mistaken attitudes and habits that we bring from other kinds of communication. The pioneers tend to be not only aggressive but also rational, ritualistic, addictive, and solitary. I am not, I hope, using these terms judgmentally or universally. In any case, I'll wear the shoe if it fits.
The computer demands its own arbitrary rationality: If A, then B; if not A, then B doesn't happen. Getting from A to B is a matter of ritual: Hit the right keys in the right sequence, and you get the desired response. That response, in turn, becomes the purpose of the ritual. The sequence of keystrokes or mouse clicks delivers a jolt, an event on the monitor that rewards the user: A window pops open, a text scrolls into view, a file downloads. This leads to further jolts: The window displays a nude, the text mentions one's own name, the file does something surprising and interesting (maybe even useful). Like lab rats with electrodes wired into their brains' pleasure centers, some computer users keep looking for more and bigger jolts: A flame from a debating opponent, a faster response to a command, the illicit thrill of reading banned or private information.
Furthermore, the activity that produces these jolts is solitary. The user sits at home or at a workstation, engaging with other people at a distance. One is not, despite all the hype, part of a community when one communicates on line; one is profoundly isolated.
Because we do not yet understand the circumstances under which we telecommunicate, we risk another problem. It's not enough to write in the reader's language; we must also write in the proper register. In this context, the word “register” is a linguistic term. If dialect is the vocabulary and grammar I use most comfortably, register is the way I use my dialect in different circumstances. Register reflects the subject under discussion. It also differs if we're using speech or writing and according to the social relations between the participants. I do not speak the same way, or about the same topics, at a neighborhood barbecue as I do at a neighbor's funeral. I don't write about science as casually as I talk about it, and what I say depends on whether I'm dealing with a roomful of scientists or one young student.
We educators have not yet found the right register for most on-line writing. We read and write at our computers in solitude, which tends to make our messages more intimate, so we may expose more of ourselves than we would if we were speaking in a crowded church or classroom. But our messages are public (either overtly, or at least open to scrutiny by the system's operators). The effect can be like saying “Darling, I love you” over the PA system of a crowded hockey rink or “That ought to hold the little bastards” over a radio microphone we think is dead.
On
line, we often write quickly. We are really trying to emulate speech, which
is a sloppier, vaguer, much more redundant form of communication than formal
writing. But writing that is sloppy, vague, and redundant is in the wrong
register. We expect, when we read words on paper, to see the result of care
and organization. When the message on the computer screen looks like the transcript
of a drunken monologue, reading becomes harder and misunderstanding much easier.
The response is equally sloppy, vague, and redundant—and the ratio of
signal to noise drops rapidly.
Like any other frontier, cyberspace will grow more welcoming as serious settlers begin to outnumber the rough-hewn pioneers. Educators are in a position to encourage settlement, but we must prepare our students and colleagues carefully. For example, I talk about register with my computer-using students and try to show how it can affect communication. I also go on line to comment on the subject, and I try to keep my remarks in the right register. The student reader may be at home on a Sunday evening or in class on a Monday morning, but, in either case, I'm still the teacher; I can't throw my weight around and expect to get worthwhile responses.
Most of my students accept the idea of proper register, though some of the younger ones (all pretty aggressive posters) think I'm calling for a needless courtesy, or “netiquette.” Such students think that having an argument is the same as making an argument. I'm not making much progress with them, and their presence is keeping some of their classmates among the passive lurkers.
With fellow teachers, the outcome is similar. On a local school-district bulletin board, I post my weekly newspaper column and answer any comments it may provoke. The BBS uses First Class, a system that records who has read a given message. Judging from the number of readers versus the number of responders, most teachers are still shying away from involvement.
In general, my strategy on line is close to the one I use in the classroom: I try to react positively and entertainingly to every response, while inviting further questions. I usually invite open-ended responses, and sometimes the results are rewarding. Not long ago, knowing that some of the school district's trustees also use this BBS, I invited them specifically to come on line to explain why they had recently taken their board out of the provincial trustees' association. One trustee did so, with a thoughtful posting that illuminated the issue.
In working on line, the classroom analogy is probably a useful one. We know we'll always have some class clowns, some disruptive types, and some quiet but capable students. The trick is to keep the clowns and disrupters from monopolizing everyone's attention and to welcome the shy offerings of the quiet types.
Cyberspace democracy, like the classroom itself, will need to rely for a time on teacher domination of the medium—not to bloat the ego of the teacher but to ensure that a disinterested moderator is there to look after the interests of the less aggressive. (The French term for “moderator” is animateur—and the teacher, like any good host, must animate as well as moderate.)
The issue of privacy is serious. Many more educators would use the computer if they felt their messages were truly secure. And much of the information that educators deal in should indeed be secure from casual snooping. More effective encryption programs may help. Failing that, we must simply learn to post on line only what we'd be willing to see printed in our local newspaper.
Finally, we need to get beyond mere netiquette to find the real registers of on-line communication. Are we alone, able to speak freely about intimacies? Or are we in a public place like Tiananmen Square, our speech limited to public abstractions? The sooner we educators find acceptable answers to those questions, the sooner our students and colleagues will follow us into this extraordinary new world.
Cartoon by Dave Coverly.
Crawford Kilian teaches interactive writing in the Applied Information Technology program at Capilano College in North Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of 10 science fiction and fantasy novels. Kilian's essay “On-Line Education: The Forums of Anarchy” appeared in the Fall 1993 issue of TECHNOS. He can be reached at his e-mail address: ckilian@cln.etc.bc.ca.