Messy Rhetoric: Identity Performance as Rhetorical Agency in Online Public Forums

Abstract

Our essay draws from a study of interaction in a large and active online public forum. Studying rhetorical activity in open forums presents a number of methodological and conceptual challenges because the interactions are persistent and nonlinear in terms of when and how participants engage, and engagement often happens via textual fragments. We take up two related issues in this essay: one is the methodological challenge of how to study engagement in open digital places. We take up that issue by way of the example study featured here. The second issue is more conceptual and concerns how identity is leveraged as a form of rhetorical agency in these conversations. We argue that in the context of open forums like Science Buzz these identity performances are crucial as rhetorical agencies, creating space as they function to move discussion.

Acknowledgment

This project is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Notes

¹More than fifteen comments and three unique participants constituted our minimum criteria for a thread with enough interaction to be considered for analysis.

²We computed simple agreement for each code combination for a sub-sample of threads. By code combination, we mean that we expected agreement not at the level of the category “building an argument,” for instance, but rather at the level of the discourse move within the category (“building an argument, claim”). Agreement was well above 90% on most codes.

³This audience will correctly note that the argument theory used as the conceptual grounding for the larger project is narrowly construed. It is based on how argument is understood and used in the learning sciences and in places in philosophy where reasoning and learning overlap. This is one reason why the category for “argument” in the coding scheme is limited (see Table 1). However, one of the key arguments of the Take 2 project is that this approach to argument in the learning sciences is misguided (the National Academies report makes similar arguments). The claim we make to other audiences—much like the claim we make here—is that argument and reasoning in discourse require the moves that we associate with identity and community. In short, we cannot think and learn without feeling and connecting. Therefore, the claim of the Take 2 project is that both argument and learning as it is enacted in discourse must account for a fuller range of moves as represented across the entire coding scheme provided in Table 1. Therefore, we intend our analytical approach to provide a more complex account of online argumentation than has generally been available in prior empirical work.

⁴Line numbers in this discussion refer to the line numbers in our formed data set. We leave them in our discussion here to help readers maintain a sense of sequence and time. Readers will not be able to use these line numbers to locate these passages in the actual online thread.

⁵ Buzz threads are moderated, so staff bloggers are attentive to the presence of explicitly incorrect information and will write to correct it.