JAC Volume 17 Issue 2

This off-line response to e-mail reflects the experience of an African American college student who had recently discovered the joys of e-mailing. Yet the literature on computers and composition rarely documents her experience—an experience colored by her feelings about her African American English (AAE), her status as a racial minority, and her sense of community. As Gail Hawisher and Charles Moran noted in 1993, there is still a dearth of research about the effects of e-mail on African American students (632).

Some researchers might wonder why they should pursue such a racial agenda. Why should e-mail affect African American students differently from other students? Are we making much ado about race? We think not. Extending Lev Vygotsky's Mediation Theory, Christina Haas has shown that, although a computer writing technology (such as e-mail) can influence people profoundly, its effects are "not unitary, easily predicted, immediate, or consistent across contexts" (Haas 16). We should expect, then, that the effects of e-mail might differ in an African American context, just as language use does.

Besides ethnic differences, we might expect different effects when African Americans e-mail in a classroom vs. a nonacademic context such as a public listserv. Kathleen Yancey compares the two:

Clearly, because of their classroom context and ethnic background, the experiences of African Americans in networked classes merit special attention.

Below, we will examine theory and research on networked classes, what that scholarship predicts about African American students on line, and what published research and our own studies have revealed. In our review of the literature, we will consider a variety of networked classes, whether the students accessed the network solely in the classroom or anywhere, anytime. We will also refer to research on diverse forms of electronic mail—asynchronous messages left for readers in "file time" as well as synchronous "chat" in "real time," private dialogues as well as multi-voiced computer conferences in which every student can access every classmate's messages.

However, our own data are limited to dyadic e-mail sent asynchronously from one student to another according to the teacher's guidelines. Many messages were assigned, although students usually sent unsolicited messages too (especially replies). In addition, because the e-mail satisfied a course requirement, students had to "cc:" each message to the teacher. Our survey of 20 freshmen reveals that the cc: requirement led some students (40%) to write more "formal" messages, but most students (55%) reported that it barely affected them: they just made sure they addressed the assigned topic.

Our data include three sets of e-mail transcripts and two surveys:

Although all of Redd's students were Black, four came from the Caribbean, one from Canada, and the rest from the United States. Virtually all of them spoke Standard English to the teacher during class discussions. However, while collaborating with peer groups in the classroom, most occasionally spoke African American English. Moreover, from time to time features of AAE grammar and rhetoric (see details below) surfaced in some of their essays and other handwritten assignments. Their speech and writing revealed not only an AAE influence but an acute awareness of ethnic differences. For instance, most expressed a sense of solidarity with the Black community and a feeling that Blacks have been and continue to be victimized in White American society.

As we analyze these students' writing and the work of other scholars, we will test three popular claims about e-mail that could have special implications for African American students. First, we will explore claims about the orality of e-mail and its significance for African American students. If e-mail does infuse orality into writing, will AAE speakers incorporate into their e-mail features from their oral tradition? Second, we will assess the claim that e-mail fosters a sense of community. If it does, can e-mail help White and African American students build a discourse community that strengthens intercultural communication? Finally, we will review claims that e-mail leads to the enfranchisement of writers. If it does, will it empower African American student writers who feel marginalized in the classroom or in society? In this article, we will consider whether these claims hold promise for African American students or whether they are nothing more than the inflated "rhetoric of technology" (Hawisher and Selfe 56).

E-Mail and Orality

Theory and Research on E-mail and Orality

Much of the last two decades' research on computer-mediated communication has addressed its conversational style (see Olsen), its similarity to talking on the telephone (see Spooner and Yancey), its interactive nature, its orality in graphic form (see Wilkins). Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of primary (unmediated spoken) utterances and secondary (complex and mostly written) utterances implies a spoken/written opposition into which e-mail is difficult to fit. Poststructuralist theory deconstructs the opposition of speech and writing, partially by arguing that spoken language is no less "mediated" than written language and that both lack "presence." However, this Poststructuralist position seems to delete the space needed to study contrasts between the spoken and written word that seem patently obvious to teachers of composition. On the other hand, Deborah Tannen, writing from the perspective of a linguist, proposes not an opposition but a continuum of oral and written features.

Attempts to place communication conducted via computer on a Tannenesque oral/written continuum often offer a utopian vision of the benefits for student writers. These benefits flow from the immediacy, personal involvement and lack of self-consciousness presumably shared by oral communication and by e-mail and the Internet. In his self-described "sales pitch," Daniel Goodman writes that "No other medium combines the fluidity of conversation with the structure of writing in such high degree" and "promotes fluency while exacting clarity" (32, 28).

Harriet Wilkins finds many oral features in the computer conversations she studies. For example, she cites abundant examples from the Internet of the personal involvement of the participants in computer discourse that would be expected in oral conversation. She illustrates Internet participants' mutual validation through the use of names as they directly address one another at the beginning and throughout their messages. Her study builds upon Wallace Chafe's theory of spoken, or interactive, discourse. Wilkins provides numerous illustrations of the three types of involvement discussed by Chafe: (1) ego involvement, indicated by reference to one's mental processes and the use of first-person pronouns; (2) hearer involvement, signaled by the use of second-person pronouns and by the asking of non-rhetorical questions; and (3) lively interest, shown by exclamations and vivid language (67-68).

In addition to personal involvement, other features of orality that are frequently considered typical of both speech and e-mail are the informal and formal grammatical features of language. For example, Wilkins documents the presence of the disfluencies, false starts and neologisms common to speech in the computer-mediated discourse she observes (69). Michael Spooner and Kathleen Yancey's influential "electronic essay" not only discusses many of the oral features of this type of writing, it also exemplifies them. The essay itself includes the use of contractions, slang, sentence fragments, neologisms and disfluencies, and it quotes a student's use of "gotta" in an e-mail entry. Denise Murray also notes that language on the Internet and in conversation share a preference for certain more characteristically spoken forms, such as active voice and personal pronouns.

Predictions about African American Students On Line

If electronic communication possesses many of the features of oral communication, we should find orality effects in the e-mail communications of African American students as well. Since both African American English and African American rhetoric are primarily oral traditions, the orality of e-mail predicts that AAE speakers will incorporate African American linguistic and rhetorical features into their e-mail.

The oral nature of e-mail should free students who use African American grammatical forms and vocabulary in speech to choose to use these forms in their electronic communications. Walter Wolfram, William Labov, Victoria Massey and other linguists have researched certain grammatical features that tend to be used by speakers of African American English. These features include, among others, the following five:

Moreover, theories of the orality of e-mail predict that African American students will manipulate language through the rhetorical devices that Molefi Asante calls "styling." These devices, analyzed and categorized by Geneva Smitherman (94-100), include, among others, the following six:

Research on African American Students On-Line

Our 1996 survey of African American freshmen reveals attitudes about the conversational nature of e-mail that differ significantly from those frequently expressed in the literature. Almost half (45%) of the students said that they found classroom e-mail to be more like writing letters than like talking on the telephone. Jason writes (by e-mail), "I write E-mail messages more like I write a letter because you can't have a real conversation through e-mail." Bruce responds, "The almighty pen (now available in digital form) earns more respect than my speech patterns. I would never write letters or e-mail the same way I talk. All of my written essays are more coherent and use a wider range of vocabulary than any conversation I have ever had."

One fourth of the students responded that they consider talking on the phone and writing personal letters to be equivalent activities, and these students placed e-mail in the same category. Only 15% considered e-mail to be more like talking than like writing letters, while an additional 15% commented that e-mail combines the features of talking and writing. Writes Marah, "E-mailing is more like written conversation." Janessa comments that "E-mail is a cross between talking on the phone and writing letters. It is difficult because I e-mail freely just as I talk but I have to check for spelling and grammatical errors just as I write."

We also asked Redd's students whether they proofread their e-mail messages before sending them. The majority of the students (65%) said yes and that they correct any errors that they find. Stewart writes that he rereads his e-mail: "I change any grammatical errors because they give the impression that you talk the same way you write and errors make you look unlearned." Another 5% said that they proofread depending on the intended audience, while 30% said that they generally do not reread their messages. "I don't usually re erad my e-mail messages before) send them, unless i have big mistakes in them which i can notice in a glance over," writes Jackson. None of the students, however, failed to express concern to avoid errors. Even those who do not proofread said that they do correct any errors they notice as they write.

Our study does support the claim that communicating by electronic mail is more fluid than other forms of writing, at least with respect to spelling and typographical errors and punctuation. The 1996 transcripts show many more examples of unedited spellings, typos and comma errors than they do of any other type of mistake. For example, Kenneth writes in response to Jay Ford's essay "20/20 Hindsight" that individualism "creates a hiderence in thought. A hinderance that causes people to believe that to help someone else is to hurt yourself." After reading Gloria Naylor's "Mommy, What Does `Nigger' Mean?" Martin writes, "But, I can't say that I know a single person who would not get very angry at a little white boy who called you a nigger." Similarly, one of Keith's entries reads "Most people have no idea of the contributions, to modern society blacks have made." These mistakes suggest that the students write rapidly and fluently.

This study of African American students' use of e-mail also confirms the presence of Chafe's three signs of personal involvement. For example, Bruce says, "I didn't see what Malcom's essay on his regrets about getting a `conk' had to do with his methods of protest." In this entry, Bruce indicates ego involvement with the first-person pronoun and a "psychological" verb referring to his own mental processes. LaRita frequently uses the first-person pronoun to refer to her own mental processes when she says, "In my opinion, the American way is what the white society has made it. . . . We as black Americans need to become unified and support each other." Marah says, "I think that in many ways, the African way is better . . ." and "The essay `20/20 Hindsight' provides good examples as to why I feel that way." Shanea's entry illustrates Chafe's second characteristic of interactive conversation, hearer involvement, through the second-person pronoun when she writes to Jason, "I would have written you sooner, but the computer lab was on some kind of `melt down' everytime I tried to `mail' you." Third, Sherenda shows lively interest in her topic when she says, "If I had a dollar for every time a black person was harrassed by the police for no reason, I would be richer than Donald Trump or Ross Perot ever will be."

In addition to predicting that students on-line will be personally involved with each other and their topics, the theory of the oral nature of e-mail also leads us to expect instances of African American grammatical forms. Yet our students' transcripts reveal surprisingly few examples of AAE. The feature that is most prevalent in our students' e-mail is the absent or differently marked agreement between subject and verb, and even this grammatical form occurs once each in the messages of only 3 of the students from Redd's Fall 1996 freshman class. JohnnaKay illustrates this pattern when she refers to "the contributions blacks has made to everyday life." Obasanja comments, "The articles on the achievements of Africans is not a new concept to me." Finally, Helena writes, "Each one of these incidents have stood out in a negative way. . . ."

Despite our expectations, we found only one example of a double comparative and one of a double superlative. For example, one of Kenneth's entries reads, "It is appearant from the readings that African cultures are far more better than American and other western cultures. . . ." Adela says that "If you walk into one of the most poorest neighborhood in Africa, they will welcome you and offer you all they have until you are saticefied."

We found no examples of the remaining characteristics of AAE grammar. The past tense morpheme is always expressed on verbs, indicating past action; however, when an adjective is derived from the past participle, the suffix is occasionally omitted. Tia, for example, refers to "White police, at least the prejudice one's. . . ." Moreover, all of our students used "there" as an expletive, never choosing "it." Shanea writes, "It does give you reassurance that there are no limits that you don't set yourself and there have already been some Afro-American men and women that put a lot into this field." Nor did we find any examples of the use of invariant aspectual "be."

Given the presumed oral nature of e-mail, we expected to find not only examples of African American grammar, but also examples of African American rhetoric in our students' computer conversations. Although a number of students did exploit some of the six types of African American rhetoric listed above, styling is found in surprisingly few entries. We found no examples of exaggerated language and only a handful of instances of rather mild mimicry. For example, Adela says that the attitude of white police officers toward African Americans "might be `what are these blacks doing in this neighborhood? Oh it must be something wrong.'" Jackson writes that "it seems everyone in the US is about `gettin' money' and getting it any way they can."

The transcripts we studied contain only a few aphorisms and a few instances of word play. Kim's message, also on the subject of the relationship between African Americans and white police officers, offers the aphoristic advice that "you just need to be `like a midget on a urinal, and be on your toes,' when dealing with them." In response to another student's message about being the target of a racist incident, Shanea writes, "If @$$holes could fly the world would be covered with airports." Keith comments that "it takes two to make a thing go bad. If people don't figure out that it takes two to make a thing go right, it's going to be hell on all of us." Word play, such as puns or neologisms, is scarcely more prevalent. For example, Obasanja refers to a "saggy pants-hilfiger-polo-sketchers-wearing person," while Jackson says that he has "made the word [nigger] into an acronym for something positive. N-ot l-gnorant G-rowing G-etting E-ternal (or E-verlasting) R-espect." Image-making occurs a bit more frequently in our students' e-mail. This type of styling is illustrated by Bruce's observation that in "Africa technological advancement may be slower than a turtle walking uphill on a slip `n' slide, but EVERYONE is headed in the same direction." A second example of image-making is Sherenda's comment that "many forget that their skin is as brown as topsoil." Bruce comments that "this injustice is a rolling snowball. . . ." Finally, Kendella calls herself "one of a few specks in a se of white faces within every classroom I entered."

Our transcripts suggest that our students employ the device of tonal semantics—alliteration, rhyme and especially repetition—more frequently than they do any other type of styling. We cite two of the many possible examples. Jason uses lexical repetition when he explains that on hearing of police violence toward blacks, he gets "this sick feeling in my stomach. A feeling that reminds me that these officers do pass judgement. . . . A feeling of mistrust. . . ." Kendella writes that Zora Neale Hurston "is not viewing her blackness as an excuse, as a handicap, or as a negative but she sees blackness as something very positive, something that sets her apart from everyone else, something empowering, something encouraging, and above all else, something SPECIAL."

These preliminary results are especially interesting in terms of the spoken/written continuum. They suggest that as the "literary" nature of a form of styling increases, so does its rate of occurrence. Mimicry and exaggeration, of which we found either few or no examples, depend more on paralinguistic features, such as intonation and gesture, than do the other styling devices. On the other hand, tonal semantics, although by definition based on tone or sound, is the most literary of the rhetorical devices we considered. Given our other results, it is not surprising that this device is employed more frequently and by more students than any other. This trend toward the literary is consistent with our students' comments that on the whole they view computer-mediated communication more like writing than talking, but a little like both.

E-Mail and Community

Theory and Research on Community-Building Via E-mail

Influenced by the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Thomas Kuhn, composition specialists have become increasingly interested in how writers construct meaning within discourse communities.² As Ann Duin and Craig Hansen explain, these discourse communities "bound by shared experiences or interests, build meaning through an ongoing process of communication, interpretation, and negotiation" (90). Having embraced this Social Constructionist position, many compositionists agree that student writers need opportunities to construct meaning by interacting with communities of writers and readers.

According to Cynthia Selfe and Paul Meyer, the growing interest of compositionists in the social construction of meaning has spurred recent research on computer networks (163). Attention has focused on the network because the network can catalyze social interaction. Via a network, composition students exchange far more essays and commentary than they would exchange through traditional peer critiques and group activities (Barker and Kemp 17). In fact, Delores Shriner and William Rice report that in the 15 classes they observed each student produced approximately 50 double-spaced pages of e-mail in addition to class assignments during the semester (473). "These transactions," Thomas Barker and Fred Kemp contend, "encourage a sense of group knowledge, a sense that every transactor influences and is influenced by such group knowledge, and a sense that such group knowledge is properly malleable" (15). Thus, with so many student-to-student transactions, the computer network offers tantalizing possibilities for building a dynamic discourse community.

Research suggests that e-mail builds productive discourse communities in three ways:

How does e-mail foster such intimacy? Skubrowski and Elder's data suggest that students became so close because e-mail allowed them to write fluid and uninterrupted messages. One student explains, "we are able to have unbiased conversations through the computer because one person writes all of his ideas (without interruption) and then the responding person gets a complete picture and may respond" (94). On the other hand, Harriet Wilkins claims that the "stops, starts, and repetitions" of most e-mail, especially synchronous messages, "may carry a particularly powerful quality of self-disclosure and with it the basis for a sense of intimacy" (72). This intimacy may also stem from what Mary Flores calls "shared-experience discussions" on the network (112). She points out that in the classroom students rarely have a chance to share personal experiences because most teachers do not want to "waste" precious class time discussing personal matters (12). Such discussions can more readily take place outside class via e-mail.

Predictions about African American Students On Line

The preceding studies suggest that e-mail fosters a sense of community because it encourages students to collaborate and negotiate openly and intimately with real audiences. If we apply this Social Constructionist view of e-mail to African American students, we might expect not only a greater sense of community among African American correspondents but also between African American and White American students. This sense of community should, in turn, lead to more effective intercultural communication.

We would like to explore the topic of intercultural communication because a common goal of Internet projects is to establish integrated discourse communities—"to bring together students separated by distance, nationality, or economic status" (Bowen 1 15). Confronted with the diverse voices of the Internet, these students should find themselves—in Linda Flower's words—"negotiating the meaning of difference" (44). Flower proposes in her Negotiation Theory that such negotiation arises from "conflicts among multiple, competing voices, which writers may arbitrate or navigate among, in a process . . . that leads to the construction of a new, if provisional, resolution" (68). Thus, we would expect African American and White American students, grappling with their conflicting voices on the Internet, to negotiate new understandings of controversial topics.

The studies cited earlier suggest that students should enter these negotiations with a degree of openness and closeness one would not expect in a classroom discussion. This intimacy should facilitate "communal knowledge-making, a negotiation of meanings" (Barker and Kemp 15). According to intercultural communication specialists, this convergence should manifest itself not only in a growing consensus about an issue but through identification with one another (Koester and Holmberg 126-27). For instance, intercultural partners may even mimic one another's speech or writing styles (Gallois, et al. 117).

Research on African American Students On Line

Considering the potential of e-mail to build communities, we pose the following questions: Does e-mail foster a sense of community among African American and White American students? Does it help them develop an open and personal online relationship? Does it encourage the two groups to negotiate new under standings? Research on Internet exchanges reveals that the answers to these questions are not so simple. As Michael Spooner observes, the "community-enhancing qualities of the net seem more `assumed' in the work on computers and composition than demonstrated" (260). To illustrate his point, Spooner cites two telling comments from a public listserv:

While the Intercultural Learning Network, Breadnet, and others have sponsored cross-cultural links between schools in and outside the United States, there is sparse research on Internet exchanges between African American and White American composition students.³ However, we have gained some insight into Black-White exchanges from the Internet link between Howard University and Montana State University students in the fall of 1994.

The Howard-Montana exchange arose from Stephanie Newman-James' desire to break her students out of their cultural isolation in Bozeman, Montana. According to Newman-James, "MSU students, 98% of whom are Montana residents, are often more familiar with land, horses, and cattle than people"—especially black people (Redd in press). (In 1990, the Census Bureau reported that less than three tenths of a percent of Montana's population was black.) On the other hand, Teresa Redd's students were black and mainly urban, living on a campus surrounded by neighborhoods that were infested with rats and roaches, wings and addicts, pimps and gangs. Newman-James and Redd encouraged their students to bridge this gap by collaborating on a publication about racism: the Howard students would author essays about racism, and the MSU students would critique and illustrate them (Redd in press). Ultimately, the teachers hoped, the students would forge an online community that was dynamic enough and intimate enough to negotiate new meanings of racism.

As the teachers had anticipated, many of their students wrote candidly about racism, and some did "construct new, negotiated meanings" of racism, both verbally and visually. In response to the MSU feedback, Howard students provided missing explanations, stronger arguments, and more effective language. Thus, in one of his last e-mail messages, Sonny reflects, "It's interesting what ya'll think of my essay. When I wrote it I saw it only a cerain way, but after talking to ya'll I see in a whole bunch of different ways." Some HU students attempted to see the issue in different ways because they were collaborating—not just communicating—with the MSU students. Thus, Sheila replies to an MSU reader:

Other students, like Jameela, entered negotiations with the MSU students as a result of conflict (as Flower's Negotiation Theory would have predicted). For instance, after three of her readers accused her of overgeneralizing about the white race, she confesses in her journal:

As for the MSU students, the frank and frequent exchanges also opened their eyes, minds, and hearts as the following e-mail messages reveal:

And so it did. The e-mail exchange affected not only some MSU students' mental representations of the black experience but their visual representations as well. For example, as she came to know her Howard client, one MSU artist's "figures became less stereotypical and cartoony" (Blumenstyk 35). We even found a few linguistic representations of convergence in the e-mail entries. For instance, Maurice characteristically starts his message with "Meg, it's good to hear from you." After receiving several messages with this opening line, Meg follows suit: "Hi, Maurice," her message begins. "Always good to hear from you!" However, the most striking example of linguistic convergence appears in the following e-mail exchange between Sonny and Fiona:

However, despite these signs of community-building, there are also signs of resistance. For instance, Arnice withdrew in the face of conflict. After an MSU student said that her essay needed more facts and less emotion, she announces via e-mail, "Dear fellow students I am very happy with your suggestions and techniques for revision, but I am pleased with my essay now and I intend to keep it the way it stands." Later, in her journal, she explains her decision: "These people are critiquing my paper and they have no experience in criti[ci]sm." Since the MSU students were not professional critics (see English teachers), Arnice questions their right to critique her essay. On the other hand, Rashid questions the students' authority to "speak" on the issue. Acknowledging that their feedback was "appreciated but not used," he observes in his journal, "They cant understand where I'm coming from." Thus, for Rashid the barriers we had sought to knock down still loomed before him.

It is not surprising then that the students' publication On (the color) Line: Networking to End Racism reflects the heteroglossia of their Internet exchange. Inspired by e-mail, the MSU students designed the publication so that, while uniting each essay and illustration, it displays the dynamic e-mail debate between the author and the illustrators in the margins of the pages. Like the electronic conferencing transcripts Paul Taylor analyzed, On (the color) Line is "a communal text that exhibits a coherent consensus while actively incorporating dissenting viewpoints" (136).

Taylor proposes that Chaos Theory, rather than Social Construction, offers us a model that helps us understand the nature of consensus in such a text. From a Social Constructionist perspective, consensus "often emphasizes a final state in which all participants agree," Taylor explains, "—either two (or more) viewpoints compromise dialectically into a third, higher viewpoint, or else everyone is eventually won over to one of the original viewpoints" (136). However, from Taylor's perspective of Chaos Theory, "consensus is more like an uneasy truce in which individuals with conflicting interest and values agree to cooperate for a period of time in order to achieve some goal. Their cooperation means that the group actually gets something done, but it does not mean that their opposing perspectives disappear" (136).⁴ On (the color) Line captures these opposing perspectives, and so do the transcripts of many computer conferences.

In this light, should we claim that e-mail fostered a sense of community between Howard and MSU students, improving intercultural communication? Not necessarily, if we are referring to traditional notions of consensus. But, yes, if we are referring to heightened audience awareness, candid discussion, and successful collaboration. The level of communication the students achieved was no small accomplishment, especially when we compare this Internet exchange with the 1996 Howard-Montana exchange about racism. Without a common goal (for example, producing a joint publication), communication during the 1996 exchange was sporadic and often perfunctory. "I was hardly aware of the person in Montana," one freshman admits. "To me it was just an assignment." Apparently, a joint task played a critical role in the success of intercultural communication.

E-Mail and Enfranchisement

Theory and Research on the Democratizing Power of E-mail

Much of the euphoria about e-mail arises from the belief that computer networks liberate student writers. Viewing networks through the lens of postmodern or feminist theory, advocates see them as powerful tools to enfranchise students. Theoretically, computer networks "democratize" the classroom in two ways: (1) by investing students with more authority vis-a-vis their teachers and (2) by allowing students to participate in academic discourse, uninhibited by constraints of time, access, form, and social identity. Let us examine each of these claims more closely.

1. E-mail tips the balance of power in the classroom from the teacher toward the students.

Writing from a postmodern perspective, Thomas Barker and Fred Kemp argue that networks alter the balance of power because they focus on the students' texts rather than the teacher's evaluation (24). According to Barker and Kemp's Network Theory, as students share essays and critiques via the network, the classroom becomes less teacher-centered and the process of knowledge-making becomes more communal (26). The teacher's "removal from the position of authority at the front and from the role of transactional switchboard greatly emphasizes the role of individual students as knowledge makers and empowered participants in the discourse of the community," explain Barker and Kemp (17). Gail Hawisher and Charles Moran concur in their "Notes Toward an E-mail Pedagogy": "Because of the potential volume of correspondence, the teacher will find it impossible to `stay up' or control the flow and will perforce move out of the center of the activity, making the e-mail classroom one in which students have a great deal of authority" (633).

Studies have shown that network pedagogy can reduce the dominance of the teacher. For instance in their two-year study of asynchronous computer conferences, Marilyn Cooper and Cynthia Selfe found that the conferences permitted students to interact in ways that challenged the teacher's authority. Cooper and Selfe report, "[Students learned] how to resist the interpretation of facts we present in classroom discussion, how to form their own opinions of the experts we introduce them to in the course, and how to dissent even against the traditionally accepted conventions of a university education" (859). This "disruptive" behavior helped the students develop powerful strategies for learning and thinking. At the same time, the clash of disparate discourses on line helped students shape their own perspectives (866-67).

2. E-mail frees students from personal and social constraints.

While e-mail can help students take charge of their education, it may also help them overcome personal limitations and social bias. From a feminist perspective, e-mail and other forms of computer networking invite more students into academic conversations, while encouraging them "to participate in different, and perhaps more egalitarian, ways than might be possible using more traditional media" (Selfe 122). Thus, through networks, Daniel Goodman declares, "students who have been silenced or marginalized can find their voice in a low-risk environment where their status depends chiefly on how well they express themselves" (29).

E-mail encourages reticient students to "speak up" because it liberates them from constraints of access, time, and form. Students need not "compete for the floor," they can "talk" as long as they wish without interruption, and they can adopt the "expressive, informal language" of the Net (Cooper and Selfe 848). In addition, e-mail enables marginalized students to reconstruct their social identity. "We can assume any guise we like," Goodman remarks, "as long as we sustain it through language"(29). Thus, students may don masks—alter egos with outrageous names and "made-for-the-Net" lingos. Or students may simply filter out intrusive or stigmatizing features of face-to-face communication, such as "body language, intimidating or distracting appearances, voice and intonation, aggressive or distracting speech mannerisms, quick or slow-wittedness" (Barker and Kemp 21).

Researchers have discovered that, along with the other freedoms of the Internet, such "psychological filtering" encourages some shy students to participate more often and more boldly (see Barker and Kemp; Bump; Faigley; Mabrito). For instance, Mary Flores tells the poignant story of a stuttering student who shied away from courses that featured class discussion until he discovered computer conferencing (111). Equally memorable is the message of an anonymous e-mailer who writes, "Could I get back to you by e-mail? I'm not comfortable dealing with you in voice mode" (Spooner and Yancey 265). "This relative anonymity," Cooper and Selfe conclude, after observing their students' computer conferences, "not only contributes to the egalitarian nature of the conferences but also shifts the level of competition from that of personality to that of ideas" (852-53).

Predictions about African American Students On Line

If we extend network theory and research to African American students, we might predict that e-mail will empower African American student writers who feel marginalized in the classroom or in the larger society by giving them a more active role and authoritative voice in academic discourse.

Given the democratizing power of networks, e-mail should particularly assist African American students who are marginalized in classes led by racially biased teachers, for it can serve as a platform to challenge a biased teacher's interpretation. Moreover, e-mail exchanges with unfamiliar white classmates and with strangers outside their schools should allow African American students to "talk" with a newfound freedom. As a Hispanic student in Lester Faigley's class remarked, "the computer has only one color" (307). Therefore, students of color should enjoy a rare opportunity to "converse" without being prejudged on the basis of their race. Theoretically, e-mail should encourage such students to speak up more often and more boldly, especially if they use pseudonyms.

Research on African American Students On Line

At first glance, our data on African American students seem to support the preceding prediction. Our survey of 20 African American freshmen suggests that e-mail can alleviate some of their anxiety about writing and speaking: nearly half of Redd's class (45%) felt more uninhibited writing on line than on paper, while 50% reported that it was easier to e-mail than to speak up in class. Among the remaining students, no one felt that e-mail was more inhibiting than writing on paper or speaking in class. However, our survey focused on one all-African American class. How do African American students in multicultural classrooms respond?

So far we have not seen any studies that systematically investigate this issue. However, our studies of intercultural networking, as well as related research, do not paint such a rosy picture for African Americans and other minorities. First of all, there is no guarantee that networking will empower students vis-a-vis the teacher. Citing several studies, Ann Duin and Craig Hansen demonstrate that networking will not necessarily diminish the teacher's authority or increase student-to-student interaction (104). Dominating teachers, restricted computer access, lack of e-mail privacy, among other factors, may limit the democratizing potential of the network. In fact, networks can easily become what Michel Foucault identifies as a disciplinary technology: Because students on line do not know when their teacher is "lurking," many may "self-discipline themselves and their prose in ways they consider socially and educationally appropriate" (Hawisher and Selfe 62-63; see also Sirc and Reynolds 147). Therefore, even on line, African American students might feel intimidated by a racially biased teacher.

Second, African American students may find that the freedom "to be all that they can be" on line is illusory. Bias persists, despite the anonymity of the network, because networks do not erase enough identity cues, especially in cross-regional and cross-cultural exchanges. For example, Betsy Bowen writes that "teachers on the network have occasionally reported that students remain highly sensitive to differences in ability and even social background of network participants. While networks mask some social cues, they force students to confront differences—in ability, race, or class—that they might not otherwise encounter in relatively homogeneous classrooms" (128).

In our own studies of cross-cultural telecommunications, the racial identity of all participants was known beforehand, so Redd's African American students and their white correspondents in Montana were forced to confront their differences. There were no opportunities for "color-blind" communication. However, the literature suggests that this is normally the case in cross-cultural school exchanges. Moreover, even if the Montana students had not been informed, they could have figured out the race of some of Redd's students because of occasional AAE markers in the e-mail, and many of Redd's students realized this: they were well aware that language—not just appearance—would construct their racial identity.

This awareness produced varied reactions. Interestingly enough, Sonny presented a persona to the Montana audience that was more culturally identifiable than the persona he presented in his all-Black class. His e-mail persona was a rapper, ready with the latest AAE slang or rhyme, as the following e-mail excerpts reveal:

Sonny's flamboyance was an isolated case. Most of Redd's students were more inhibited when writing to their Montana readers. For example, in his journal Ahmed admits that he chose his words and punctuation carefully because he did not want the white students to think he was "some `ignorant ghetto negro.'"

So far we have discussed barriers to the enfranchisement of African American students who are on line. But even some of the staunchest promoters of computer networks (see Selfe) now recognize that true enfranchisement cannot occur as long as so many African American students are "off line." Minorities have limited access to computers, as Mary Louise Gomez has documented (318-22), and access to on-line services is far worse (Slater 96-99). According to Cynthia and Richard Selfe, the Internet's "electronic spaces—which are subject to increasing legislation and control—are at the same time becoming more expensive and more rigidly aligned along the related axes of class privilege and capitalism" (488). Since a disproportionate number of African Americans are poor and attend underfunded schools, their future access to the Internet looks dismal indeed.

Besides access, the use of computers will determine whether e-mail pedagogy can ever enfranchise African American students. So far, computers have been used in a discriminatory fashion. Sheingold et al. report that "in schools with large minority enrollments computers are used primarily to provide basic skills instruction delivered by drill-and-practice software. . . . In contrast computer use in majority schools is characterized by its emphasis on the use of computers as tools to develop higher order literary and cognitive skills as objects of study" (89).

Finally, we wonder how egalitarian computer networks can be when the computer interfaces are discriminatory. Faigley's student observed that "the computer has only one color," but it is not brown. Citing the Macintosh's pointer (a white hand) and desktop configuration (Why not a kitchen counter?), Selfe and Selfe contend that the interfaces promote the values of "white, male, middle- and upper-class professionals" in an English-speaking, capitalist society (487). Menus and style checkers, they add, tend to "devalue linguistic diversity and inscribe nonstandard language users as Other within the interface, the classroom, the educational system, and the culture" (489). Thus, instead of enfranchising African Americans, they conclude, "our uses of computers in English classrooms certainly seem capable of supporting what Henry Giroux calls `imperialist master narratives' of colonial dominance, even as they make the promise of technological liberation and progress" (494).

To sum up, for African American students, e-mail is not the Great Liberator it is reputed to be. Networking does not necessarily limit the power of a racially biased teacher or obscure a student's racial identity from other Internet correspondents. Moreover, true liberation cannot occur as long as African Americans face discriminatory patterns of computer access, use, and interface design.

Conclusion

Our results indicate that much of the rhetoric about electronic writing is inflated when we consider African American students in networked classrooms. Even though their messages share some of the fluidity and personal involvement of conversation, our students treated e-mailing more like writing. They used fewer features of the African American oral tradition than we expected, fewer AAE grammatical forms and fewer "styling" devices. In fact, the only feature of AAE rhetoric that consistently appears in their e-mail is tonal semantics, the most literary type of styling. These findings are consistent with our students' view that electronic writing is not simply, as Harriet Wilkins suagests, "interactive discourse—now in graphic form" (57).

Our study argues for a closer look at what we mean by "orality," whether we refer to the ends of the spectrum as spoken/written, unmediated/mediated, interactive/autonomous or contextualized/decontextualized. The hybrid nature of e-mail highlights the fact that these pairs of terms are not synonymous, and it offers new opportunities to understand language and its uses. Does writing, as Walter Ong argues, restructure consciousness such that our "thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing" (78)? Or is writing merely a linguistic register or code? Our students' e-mail messages argue against an either/or approach to these questions and reveal a mixture of orality and writing that we call "spoken literacy": complex cognitive ways of organizing information into knowledge using both oral and written conventions. The concept of spoken literacy goes beyond Murray's claim that e-mail moves "back and forth between writer-style and talker-style" on the spoken/written continuum (224) to suggest that it can be in both places at once. To explore this issue further, researchers should test the effects on African American students of synchronous mail, pseudonyms, and multi-user computer-conferencing. Through controlled experiments, they might also examine the use of AAE in paper vs. electronic journals. In addition, through case studies, they might compare a student's AAE use in conversation, handwritten assignments, and e-mail.

Researchers also need to conduct more studies of cross-cultural communication with African American students, especially in predominantly white classrooms. As expected, e-mail helped many of our students build an effective multicultural discourse community when they and their MSU partners collaborated on a task: It heightened audience awareness, stimulated candid discussion, and facilitated cooperation. Yet it did not necessarily produce consensus. Since our intercultural studies lasted no more than a month, perhaps a long-term, internet exchange would lead to greater consensus. We wonder, however, if consensus should be the standard by which we judge intercultural communication. As Duin and Hansen point out, "there is no reason to believe that consensus per se is a good thing. . . . The consensus-building process is surely affected by existing power distributions, which may cause it to maintain the status quo and exclude dissenting and marginalized voices" (97).

With or without consensus, some "dissenting and marginalized voices" of African American students may never reverberate through computer networks because of discriminatory pattems of computer access, use, and interface design. Moreover, those students may be silenced by their fear that their racially biased teacher is "lurking" on the network or that prejudiced Internet users will discover and attack their "Blackness."

Clearly, these issues call for further investigation if African American students are to compete in the race on the information superhighway. As Bruce warns a classmate, "In America, if you are struggling to keep up with its feverish pace, then you are left in the dust (which is why we are communicating through e-mail right now!)."