"The Future of Rational-critical Debate in Online Public Spheres"

Professor of English at St. Cloud University (St. Cloud, Minnesota), Matt Barton's research interests include videogame theory and history, digital rhetorics, rhetorics and public culture, and new media. He's published two books on videogame history and co-edited a book on wiki-writing with Bill Cummings. He facilitates a website called Armchair Arcade with Bill Loquidice that explores "the complete history of videogames, computers, gadgets and gizmos" and also hosts "Mattchat": "a weekly Youtube show dedicated to classic videogames for all systems." He's also done some recent scholarship on reward systems in videogames and the opportunities for applying these systems to wiki assessment.

Barton's done some interesting things with wikis in the classroom: including the development of Rhetoric and Composition textbook he collaboratively authors with students. Along with another presenter, Carra Leah Hood, Barton and I presented a panel at CCCC 2012 which dealt with implementation and assessment of wiki writing assignments in the comp. classroom. He's also just published an article in Technical Communication which provides a nuanced assessment model for wiki assignments, one which takes an "archaeological approach" to grading the writing that (should) happen on wikis: discussion and collaboration. So he's someone that I like and his work has very much influenced my interests.

The article I chose for us to discuss, "The Future of Rational-critical Debate in Online Public Spheres," was published in a 2005 issue of Computers and Composition, around the time Barton was finishing up his Ph.D. at South Florida. I imagine he was working on it as a student, under the direction of Joe Moxley (those who were in a previous course with Dr. Rouzie might remember an article I presented on by this guy, who has also done a lot of work with online discourse and new media.). In 2005, Web 2.0 was a relatively new(er) concept, especially in fields Digital Rhetorics/Digital Composition. So it might be useful to remember that Barton's work on these "writing technologies" (discussion boards, blogs, wikis) has been influential. That is, the exigencies and impulses of this article, as they apply to Web 2.0, continue to be reiterated in more recent work.

One thing that really interests me about this article is the "technological utopianism" or technotopia at work in Barton's impulse to promote these writing technologies as capable of producing critical-rational public spheres:

My purpose here is to pay attention to three online technologies that, if strategically embraced by teachers of writing, have the potential to reinforce the principles inherent in a true democracy and thwart the corporate interest. (178)

This kind of rhetoric really allows for a strong realization of exigency, but not the only one we might complicate in our discussion. The corporate interest Barton talks about here is another clear call for action, and Barton uses the work of Jurgen Habermas to create a problem' in current public communication: the debilitating effect of mass media and the (eventual) descent of the Internet from a more open, democratic structure to one which is more strictly controlled and regulated by corporate entities:

Habermas’ story ends on a sad note; the public writing environments that he argued were so essential to the formation of a critical public sphere failed as commercialism and mass media diminished the role of the community and private persons. It is not hard to see that the same diminishment is happening in today’s online communities, yet it is not too late to start paying attention. We can indeed learn from the mistakes of the past—specifically, by considering the rise and fall of the newspaper as a platform for rational critical debate. (179)\

By calling attention to these exigencies (which play into these larger technotopic and technophobic narratives), I do not mean to invalidate Barton's claims. But I do want us to consider how genre and discourse ecology governs what Barton is saying. His "evidence" for the degradation of the Internet makes sense. Here are two quotes from the article that further speak to this situation:

The Internet is losing its democraticizing features and is becoming everyday more like our newspapers and television, controlled from above by powerful multinational corporations, who demand passivity from an audience of total consumers. (177) 

In short, the more complex and expensive the process of creating a professional web site becomes, the fewer people will be able to do so. The workers are being gradually, yet effectively, separated from the means of intellectual production. (178)

What we might ask here, though, is this: Was the Internet ever a pure democratic, "rational-critical" space in which multiple participants could shape and reshape the discourse and resist hegemonic discourses and narratives? We can ask the same question of Habermas' work, in which Barton finds a theoretical framework. As appropriated by Barton, Habermas locates these public spheres in early print media such as the newspaper

At this early incarnation, the newspaper was apolitical; it was just a collection of “pure news,” and the publisher saw it as a purely a matter of business. This changed when newspapers took on “ideologies and viewpoints;” newspapers began publishing editorials, and newspapers became“carriers and leaders of public opinion, and instruments in the arsenal of party politics” (p.182). (180-181)

as well as in bourgeois public spheres of the late 18th century. Did such spheres, in which individuals could “freely” debate, ever actually exist?  British coffee houses “allowed only men and were often visited by powerful and influential nobility” (Barton, 180). But what about media or technologies? Can they ever be purely “apolitical”?

A feminist critique of Habermas would take issue with his idealization of the “bourgeois public sphere of the late eighteenth century” as allowing empowering private critique of political and public authorities as well as his assertion that the “patriarchal conjugal family” empowers a critical private sphere (179). Such narratives obviously silence/omit multiple subjectivities from rational-critical debate, as Barton is careful to acknowledge:

In principle, anyone with reason and the willingness to learn was “able to participate” in these societies (p. 37). Of course, in practice there were many people altogether excluded, yet the idea of universal access and equality was highly influential in bourgeois thinking of this time. (180)

With this acknowledgement, the question should then be turned to Barton's application of Habermas to Internet writing technologies. Even if these technologies do allow for critical-rational debate, Who is silenced in Web 2.0? Who is left out of the discourse? And is the discourse capable of defending itself from corporate entities?

Barton's article ends on an optimistic (and extremely idealistic) note: "Perhaps an upcoming generation finding subjectivity in blogs, developing rational-critical debating skills in online bulletin boards, and building a critical public sphere with the help of wikis will help "remediate culture" and restore true democracy to the public" (180). One final question: Habermas and Barton both employ C.W. Mills’ definitions of “public” and “mass” communications? (181) Can these be applied to academic cultures? Are academic journals and books representative of “public” or “mass” communications? How do you think Barton would respond to the idea that academics do more work in public online spaces?