was education, technology; now online discourse

[Bill Barowy <xmcageek@comcast.net>]

On Friday 12 November 2004 9:08 am, Phil Chappell wrote:
> ensuing battles and all!

Yeah, that's the way it appeared to me.  There's a violent discursive move 
I've come to call "X-jacking" after the medium in which i first encountered 
it.  X-jacking is not the introduction of a parallel topic thread (that could 
occur simultaneously online) but a forced topic change, recentering the 
discourse toward the perpetrator's intent, "jacking" it away from that which 
preceeded it, by taking away it's content, essentially victimizing it.  Kind 
of makes the inclination for sharing difficult to maintain.

I think status and power and motive have a lot to do with it.  Unlike a 
similar move, "talking out", which Jay Lemke describes in his book, status is 
more ill defined in this medium.  There is far less clear social status here 
than in the classroom, although I argue that those members of xmca that do 
know of each other well do recognize relative status among each other.  
Obtaining status, maintaining status, etc.

On another level, the unit being discourse topic, and drawing upon Durkheim, 
there is a sort of suicide that happens to online conversations when the 
medium has a low level of regulation.  In this last exchange block, unable to 
adapt to the shifting field, the call for a critical cultural historical 
analysis, the conversation just went belly up.  And it could not have 
adjusted.  Cultural historical analysis is a data-laden inquiry. It takes a 
lot of time and effort and, I argue, such a topic is not sustainable in an 
online medium in which there are rapid shifts to the center.


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bb