Reading Questions V, Module B
Student Name:
Lab Section (Wednesday/2pm/Sophie Dewitt)
Honor Code Pledge: “The following answers represent my own, personal work and thought. I have neither
received nor given other classmates assistance beyond clarifying my understanding of what the questions
are asking for.”
Signature:
Directions: These RQ’s are due at the beginning of lecture on Tuesday, November 17.
Reading assignment for today: • Re-Read Social Practice section of “Introduction to Conversation: Concept, Social
Practice, Art” • “The War Against Online Trolls,” New York Times Room for Debate Blog: Read the
Introduction to it as well as all seven short op-ed pieces (by Citron, Coleman, Tillman,
Milner, Dooling, Phillips, and Manivannan) http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/
2014/08/19/the-war-against-online-trolls • Sally Kohn, “Don’t Feed the Trolls? Cult • ivating Civility Online” https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/sally-kohn/dontfeed-trolls-cultivating-civility-online
• Elizabeth Stoker, “Beware Twitter’s Civility Police” http://theweek.com/articles/443212/
beware-twitters-civility-police • Amanda Hess, “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet” http://www.psmag.com/
health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170
Introduction: This week we will return to the idea of conversation as a social practice and explore ways that
it plays out in online media environments. To that end, we ask you to go back and re-read the Social
Practice section of the “Introduction to Conversation” course document, re-visiting how that “terministic
screen” offers a framework and array of questions to ask about interactions as the occur in the real world.
In addition, we are assigning a series of shorter, online essays that make arguments about civility, incivility,
and harassment in online communication environments as an important topic in their own right and a way
to apply the earlier lessons and frameworks. That gives us a chance to apply stasis theory to sorting out
disagreements and determining openings to weigh in ourselves.
1. Read the seven online essays about trolling in the New York Times “Room for
Debate” blog as well as the essays by Kohn and Stoker about civility.
a. Apply Stasis Theory to the entire group of essays (as a whole). First
identify the main issues of fact, definition, quality, and policy that you find
across them (put it in question form). Then identify competing claims that
you find across the seven essays that represent claims of fact, definition,
quality, and policy.

b. Which of the four stases is the site of the greatest disagreement in the
essays, in your view? What position on it do you most disagree with?
Outline a 4-step refutation of that position.
c. Re-read “Conversation as a Social Practice” (pp. 5-9 of course document
from Week 1) and reflect on how the ideas of norms and appropriateness
are discussed in these readings. What do you think appropriateness
actually means to people in online communication that involves
anonymity (question of fact)? What do you think it should mean (question
of policy)?
2. Discuss how the following boldfaced ideas from “Conversation as Social
Practice” can be applied to Amanda Hess’s article, “Why Women Aren’t Welcome
on the Internet.” (Write at least three sentences for each of the letters).
a) Conversation as a way to relate to one another and perform identities.
b) The ethics of conversation
c) The politics of conversation and power over/power to
d) The reproduction of broader patterns within a culture