Is There a Chilling of Digital Communication?: The Dissertation

I've finished a complete copy of my dissertation and submitted it to the committee.

http://sites.google.com/site/martinecourantrife/

An abstract for the 300+ page document appears below.

ABSTRACT

IS THERE A CHILLING OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION? EXPLORING HOW KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF FAIR USE INFLUENCE WEB COMPOSING

The study explores copyright law’s mediational influence on digital composing using a sequential transformative mixed methods research design. The author conducted a digital survey and discourse-based interviews with digital writers regarding how they factored in copyright law and fair use in their composing decisions. The study is framed with activity theory, rhetoric theory, and also draws upon Foucault’s notion of the author-function. Three main areas of inquiry in the study include examining the status of knowledge and understanding of copyright law in the field of technical and professional writing (TPW) as well as in professional writers. A second research goal is to investigate the creative thinking processes, or rhetorical invention, of writers in these programs composing webtexts in light of copyright law. A third research goal is to examine what happens to mediational means as writers leverage them in digital contexts.

The study’s six major findings are that 1) web spaces are sites of cultural collision, or commonplaces, where students occupy sometimes conflicting positions such that the very notion of “studentness” is inverted. Web spaces as commonplace challenge existing concepts such as “author” and “originality”; 2) The intertextuality of web-space-writing provides support for Foucault’s theory that the single author is an ideological production representing the opposite of its historical function, i.e. the “author-function,” in the larger culture. “When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production” (Foucault, 1984, p. 119). No support was found for a human culture existing without an “author-function,” whether it is a workplace culture or even a more community-knowledge-focused culture as exists in India. Yet, “the author” switches in and out of a subject position in relationship to human and non-human actors; 3) For this group of writers, digital speech was not chilled. Copyright law as a system of invention organized by rhetoric, produces knowledge; 4) Rhetorical topics congeal as a heuristic mediating the digital composing process of writers. This study provides a small and incomplete snapshot of this heuristic structure; 5) When we consider the hierarchical and embedded nature of rhetorical topics that mediate digital composing choices, for this group of writers, ethics trumped the law; 6) While the study supports the idea that laws have agency, as knowledge and understanding increase, that agency is increasingly diminished by the human actor. The agency of the law is connected to where the law ends up on the AT triangle.

The author ends the study by calling for more research in the area of copyright law’s agency in the composing process, suggesting that drawing upon Actor Network Theory and its notion of radical symmetry might prove helpful for future studies.