I just re-read Julian Dibbell’s “Rape in Cyberspace” followed by Judith Donath’s “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community,” and paid a heck of a lot closer attention to the Donath article because of that. It’s interesting how readings play off of each other to make one notice them more acutely. The first time I read Donarth, I was rather captivated by the descriptions of Usenet and starting thinking about my newbie forays into the web during graduate school. This time around, I paid much closer attention to her research on online ethos, and wondered why I had never referred to this while doing research on ethos in composition in general a few years back.

Let me toss this out for consideration: Online communication forums (CMC) remediate ethos, situated ethos. In the same way that it remediates the embodied subject (as is shown so dramatically in Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace”), it remediates the rhetorical subject, albeit differently. In both cases, the subject becomes less transparent, somewhat in the way that modern art makes its media come into focus (rather than it just being a means to representation). In both cases, the embodied subject behind the online one has deliberately chosen elements to represent themselves online (their avatar, their constructed profile and actions in the MOO, the documentation that contributes to their reputation in a USENET group). Constructed identities push the older, “natural” subject up a notch as those older identities become more visible, more scrutinized–less transparent.

So what happens in this process of “remediating” the “human” presence? What are we making? What are we abstracting here?

Here’s Donath:

Identity also plays a key role in motivating people to actively participate in newsgroup discussions. It is easy to imagine why people may seek information on the net: they have a problem and would like a solution. What prompts someone to answer? Why take the effort to help an unknown and distant person? Altruism is often cited: people feel a desire or obligation to help individuals and to contribute to the group [Constant et al. 95]. Yet selfless goodwill alone does not sustain the thousands of discussions: building reputation and establishing one’s online identity provides a great deal of motivation. There are people who expend enormous amounts of energy on a newsgroup: answering questions, quelling arguments, maintaining FAQs [1]. Their names – and reputations – are well-known to the readers of the group: other writers may defer to their judgement, or recommend that their ideas be sought in an argument. In most newsgroups, reputation is enhanced by posting intelligent and interesting comments, while in some others it is enhanced by posting rude flames or snide and cutting observations. Though the rules of conduct are different, the ultimate effect is the same: reputation is enhanced by contributing remarks of the type admired by the group. To the writer seeking to be better known, a clearly recognizable display of identity is especially important. No matter how brilliant the posting, there is no gain in reputation if the readers are oblivious to whom the author is.

It gets really interesting when she talks about deception on the Internet by observing parallels among deception in animal societies, and wonders why, since deception can be useful for survival, it doesn’t occur more frequently:

Why don’t more harmless butterflies mimic the bad-tasting monarch? And why don’t weak, undesirable mates just pretend to be strong, desirable ones?There is not a simple answer to this question; there is not even agreement among biologists as to how common, or effective, is deception. If a signal becomes very unreliable due to excessive cheating it ceases to convey information – it stops being a signal. Yet there are stable systems of deception, where the percentage of deceivers does not overwhelm the population, and the signal remains information-bearing, however imperfectly. And there are signals that are inherently reliable: signals that are difficult, or impossible, to cheat.

Here we are again talking about information systems, not present or absent groupings of bodies. If there is some deception going on in animal societies, that can contribute to survival, but if there is too much of this “noise,” the society/system itself seems to break down.  So perhaps some of this “noise” (to recall Hayles) is actually good for the system or society, invigorates it, allows it to reorganize on a higher level.