Paula Rosinski

Ubiquitous Writing, Technologies, and the Social Practice of Literacies of Coordination

This article shares results from a multi-institutional study of the role of writing in college students’ lives. Using case studies built from a larger population survey along with interviews, diaries, and a daily SMS texting protocol, we found that students report SMS texting, lecture notes, and emails to be the most frequent writing practices in college student experience and that these writing practices are often highly valued by students as well. Our data suggest that college students position these pervasive and important writing practices as coordinative acts that create social alignment. Writing to coordinate people and things is more than an instrumental practice: through this activity, college students not only operate within established social collectives that shape literacy but also actively participate in building relationships that support them. In this regard, our study of writing as it functions in everyday use helps us understand contemporary forms of social interaction.

Book Review: The Impact of the Internet on Our Moral Lives

The Impact of the Internet on Our Moral Lives, edited by Robert J. Cavalier, is an engaging collection of essays examining the effects of new information technologies on an array of ethical issues in our social, cultural, legal, and personal lives. The collection draws on a range of philosophical traditions (from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Habermas) and probes a wide variety of topics (from privacy and intellectual property concerns to globalization, open-source software, and pornography). The chapters are relatively even, and many of them refer to important works (e.g., Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and Negroponte’s Being Digital) and well-known events, such as Napster’s legal woes and Kevin Warwick’s experimental computer-chip implantation, that you might expect to find in such a collection. As a book that is really about philosophy, and especially ethics, it seems most appropriate for administrators, scholars, and graduate students. This is not an undergraduate text in the vein of Vitanza’s (1999) Cyberreader or a textbook like Tavani’s (2004) Ethics & Technology, and it examines a wider range of topics than do Hamelink’s (2000) Ethics of Cyberspace and Spinello’s (2002) Regulating Cyberspace, which focus more narrowly on the ethics of Internet governance. What is unique about this collection is that it is united by an Aristotelian philosophical (not rhetorical) perspective. Cavalier explains in his introduction that