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Dissertation Information for Jacqueline Lambiase

NAME:
- Jacqueline Lambiase

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- [No Discipline Recorded]

SCHOOL:
- University of Texas, Arlington (USA) (1997)

ADVISORS:
- C. Jan Swearingen

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Susan J. Hekman
- Christopher Morris
- Carolyn A. Barros
- Hans Kellner

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Who speaks in cyberspace: Powerful discourse, media muscle, and sources of knowledge on the Internet

Abstract: This investigation's overall argument is that computing and communications technology, like rhetoric, are neither good nor bad, but that technology is tekhne, that is, a tool for personal communication. Computer technology more often has attracted personification and been given agency since humans use these machines as a kind of artificial dream intelligence to confront problems too difficult to solve in face-to-face negotiations. Scholars, including George Landow and others, link cyberspace to the postmodern condition, while popular culture images link the internet to democratic ideals. Cyberspace has in many fields drawn utopian visioning of all sorts. In this, I propose, cyberspace also resembles an Enlightenment project, a new colony for exploitation, a land rush, even a rape. Cyberspace's relationship with technology and its starring role in many salvation narratives may be perpetuating modernist tendencies in language, culture, economics, and politics.

Throughout, this study examines how technological iconography carries messages of domination and authority that have been embraced by journalists and their audiences alike. I examine patterns of discourse in cyberspace and about cyberspace through rhetorical and ethnographic analysis of mass media reports (chapter 1) and a linguistic analysis of a public electronic discussion (chapter 2). Also explored are rules of participation and gender roles, as well as the extension into cyberspace of the binary tales of death and killing (chapter 3). Gender scholarship provides perspectives about computer-mediated communication and its continued immersion in modernist traditions, while literary and historical criticism enable study of images and icons in journalistic and fictional discourse. Rhetorical analysis of the texts of cyberphilosophers calls into question their claims about electronic discourse's ability to provide more egalitarian environments (chapter 4). Considered with these disputed claims is the news media's infatuation with technological hype and the impact of this hyperbolic discourse on culture. In all, this project seeks to question and analyze the constrained narratives constructed online and off-line about cyberspace, in order to suggest alternative discursive settings and styles that are: egalitarian; non-modernist; and not reliant on stereotyped, gendered performances or ritualized patriarchal conflict.

MPACT Scores for Jacqueline Lambiase

A = 0
C = 2
A+C = 2
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2012-08-19 15:07:01

Advisors and Advisees Graph