Dialogue on the Internet: Language, Civic Identity, and Computer-Mediated Communication

Richard Holt draws on his extensive experience in discourse analysis and Web design to present a picture of the Internet as a potentially powerful tool of civic discourse in the third millennium. Beginning with background on two of the Internet's most prevalent communication forms, email discussion messages and Web pages/sites, the book introduces the concepts of monologism and dialogism. Holt advocates a method of discursive analysis called dual reading, in which Internet utterance is analyzed first monologically and then, dialogically. This method is demonstrated by analyzing email discussions that deal with such varied topics as media, espionage, sexual identity, presidential politics, hate speech, and hate crimes.

This volume contains a multidisciplinary approach, involving a wide range of specializations, from computer science to philosophy. It will appeal to students, teachers, practitioners, and lay readers who are interested in Internet communication, politics, and popular culture. In contrast to many of the doom and gloom accounts of the deficiencies of the Internet, it offers a hopeful vision of the Internet as a means of civic discourse.

Holt (communication, Northern Illinois U.) analyzes civic discourse on the Internet from the perspective of "dialogism," which sees meaning as established by the struggle of representations conducted between that write, read, and represent written messages. He explains the development of "dialogism" from the standpoints of five intellectual traditions (Vico, pragmatism, phenomenology, Vygotsky, and Bakhtin) and contrasts it whit "monological" perspectives. He then uses both perspectives to conduct alternative readings of e-mail discussion threads dealing with the spy case of Los Alamos engineer Wen Ho Lee and the radio personality Laura Schlessinger, as well as Web pages of US presidential candidates and a social activist exposing and combatting anti-Semitism. In the end, he argues, his readings point the way towards emancipating discourse analysis from an overreliance on regularities of structural functional explanations or the idiosyncracies of critical-cultural explanations. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

RICHARD HOLT is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University.