Thoughts on Warnick

There is a lot to comment on in our readings, but I think I’ll focus on Barbara Warnick. This 1998 article is quite outdated and on pg. 75 her complaints about web usability really irritated me until I realized this.

At the top of pg. 77 she asks some really fabulous and pertinent questions. I am most interested in the first one, “What sorts of roles are being enacted?” I think this may hit at a lot of the controversy we’ve seen lately. CMC has a degree of anonymity that makes people feel comfortable to not just be themselves and let it all hang out (confessional writing), but to experiment with other personas. In terms of authorship, you could say that everyone has a pseudonym. Who knew so many people were so eager to have one?

I’d also like to comment on her remarks about the way that CMC seems encourage conformity on page 81; this also has to do with roles being enacted. It may just be that this data is old and she didn’t think of this, but I have to wonder what the goals were of the groups that were examined. Did they just meet to casually chat? People love to feel that they are right, and to be able to anonymously “flame” those who disagree is a catharsis many will never find outside of a CMC environment. Backing up those who think the way you do and ganging up on those who do not is prohibited in our society in person, but it is an instinct (although perhaps that’s not the best word) that many people still feel, and are able to indulge in a computer mediated environment without social repercussions.

Contrarily, a blog like ours is intended for scholarly discussion, which (in my humble opinion) is only interesting when it includes well-founded disagreements and debates. I hope that Warnick wouldn’t find the same tendencies in our group as she did in those early groups.

It was my instinct to kid mrehill when he said one of his goals was to not make people cry. I wanted to say, “Why? Is that something you find yourself doing very often?” But it’s true that it is very easy to be harsh and overly critical when you’re not face-to-face with someone—or at least to come off that way when you can’t use body language to soften your words. I’m not an overly nice person in person; perhaps this is a goal I should consciously take up as well.