Paul T. Riddell hasn’t looked around much. If he had, he might have noticed the great explosion in online education and E-commerce. And if he had noticed them, he might not have been so quick to rank on a major in English.

I speak from the perspective of a professional in higher education-in English, even-whose students fumble towards me across phone and fax lines, and who appear on my computer screen at all hours of the day and night. This is neither Lovecraftian nightmare nor erotic fantasy. I teach college classes online, full-time and, I have to say that, from where I sit, English, or more properly, English and its parent discipline of Rhetoric, offer the most desperately needed tools for human interaction in cyberspace.

The reason for this is simple, and lies in the nature of the Internet. It is not “space,” cyber or other. It is not an electronic frontier. It is not the Brave New World.

The possibilities of the Internet lie in its unique nature: it is a living text, collectively written and only moderately bound by physical constraints (becoming less so as computers become both ubiquitous and wireless). The Internet offers the potential for abstraction found in the finest texts, coupled with a connectivity allowing people to interact across time and space.

In these interactions, as in any human interaction, the techne allowing the interaction matters, but the ethos of the participants matters far more. However, since these interactions are textual, and repeatedly mediated, the ethical and interpretive challenges of online interaction are far subtler than they are in the meat world, where we were raised. Instead, we are trying to find our way through a multi-dimensional space in which ethical black holes suck us down like the credit card offers Riddell so rightfully lances. Edus, dot coms, orgs, and nets are the gravitational bodies pulling on us in this space, and the ether through which these seductive pulls are broadcast is none other than a living field of rhetorical authority.

To rephrase this slightly, each one of these virtual entities calls to us, and responding to many of the calls would be, if not deadly, at least stupefying and destructive. But unlike Odysseus, who at least had friends to lash him to the mast when he negotiated his way between Scylla and Charybdis, we try to go it alone as we tack between the pulls of E-Bay and Amazon.com. And Riddell? You know what? People are pouring money into online brokerages faster than they did into their credit cards in college, and with less excuse; they aren’t even going to get laid for having a thousand more virtual dollars, the way they thought they would if they bought the stereo twenty years ago.

However, they’re doing this within exactly the same rhetorical frame that they charged the cards up: society has told them they’re competent to deal with the challenges of credit on their own, just as it tells them now they are smart enough to go mano-a-mano with Wall Street.

In my classes, students have often purchased a similar bill of goods--the lure of convenience. “With online classes, you can have anywhere/anytime education! Take classes while you work full-time! You don’t have to leave the comfort of your living room!” Then they get in here and they find that it’s a lot like school, but without the support network; that anywhere/anytime education means there is ALWAYS something they should be doing, reading, typing, surfing.

They weren’t up to reading the fine print in the offer, or in any offer, and that’s what they need most. They need a sophist, or better, a cyber-sophist, who will take them in hand (virtually, to better dodge sexual harassment suits), and show them how to parse the logic and play matador to the rhetorical charges thundering towards them.

It isn’t traditional rhetoric, because I have to take into account a spectrum of physicality and economics; some challenges arise because students are on slow modems, or dealing with badly designed sites, and so on. And it is more variegated than traditional rhetoric, since some of the appeals to a-logical authority use flashing icons and slick design and biased search engines to pull them in. But most often, what I teach them is adapted Aristotle, augmented, most often by Bourdieu and de Certeau.

Each of these men taught different ways to pierce the veil words can cast over social reality, so that we can glimpse, now and again, the social framework operating beneath it all. What they offer isn’t complete. We need a new rhetoric, one that draws on the frenetic improvisation of jazz to add a consideration of motion and revision to our understanding of textual authority. We need something John Coltrane is going to father on I.A. Richards. It ain’t gonna happen soon, and when it gets here, we won’t recognize it for a while, because it will be new.

But when it does, it will do exactly what rhetoric has always done: expose the flow of power in words, and empower individual rhetors. These tools will look strange, but they will have a very old lineage. They will be liberal arts for the information age, and they will be our lifeline, our stay against confusion.

Copyright © 1999 Greg Beatty

Greg Beatty lives in North Carolina, where he is completing a PhD in English at the University of Iowa. His dissertation is on serial killer novels. To keep body and soul plugged in, he teaches online.