That reality and consciousness are socially constructed through language is not a new idea. Criticism in composition has suggested that language construction, rhetoric, may be the primary epistemic activity. Social-epistemic is the name that James Berlin has given to this rhetoric. For social epistemic rhetoric, language activity constructs the primary reality, "the observer, the discourse community, and the material conditions of existence are all verbal constructs." This dialectical relationship relies somewhat on traditional dualisms, "Our consciousness is in large part the product of our material conditions. But our material conditions are also in part the products of our consciousness." The subject object dilemma is bridged with language in a dialectic process which locates a historically and socially specific rhetorically constructed reality.
Kenneth Bruffee's social constructionism does much the same thing. In Social Construction, Language and Knowledge, he explains, "Social construction understands reality, knowledge, thought, facts, texts, selves, and so on as community-generated and community-maintained linguistic entities--..." (774).
By beginning with an assumption that reality is socially constructed through language, social-epistemic and social constructionist rhetoric seem well adapted for considering MUDs. Bruffee, for example, draws upon the work of Michael Ignatief, to envision a language that would be adequate to contemporary times, a language offering "a community vernacular that in some world encompassing way will delineate a 'home' for our 'claims of difference,' so that 'our common identity as human beings together can 'begin to find its voice.'" This sounds much like the descriptions assigned to MUDs by recent critics such as Amy Bruckman. Bruckman, for example considers MUDs to be "constructionist environments in which people build personally meaningful artifacts"(Programming for Fun).
The penchant to see MUDs as textual worlds and MUD building as world building at first seems to place MUDs as an explicit example illustrating social constructionist claims. Howard Rheingold, although seemingly confident in the distinction between cyberspace and reality, when considering MUDs sounds somewhat like a social constructionist might, when he states that "By creating your identity you help create a world." Rheingold also uses linguistic models to discuss MUDs, seeking a "grammar" of cyberspace and a "syntax" of identity.
There are, however, some interesting distinctions between social constructionist models and thinking about MUDs. Note the way in which Bruckman continues her comparison of MUDs to constructionist environments: "But unlike many constructionist environments, MUDs place special emphasis on collaboration, encouraging construction within a social setting;" The language envisioned by Bruffee, in which community and social beings work together does seem to correspond to MUDs, but the contrast delineated by Bruckman between this type of MUD environment and most constructionist realms suggests a point of dispute.
For me the ideological struggle inherent in the social construction of reality comes to mind. Berlin, for example, sees social-epistemic rhetoric as revealing the way in which power relationships "are inscribed in the discursive practices of daily experience"(479). For Berlin, ideology may permeate reality through discourse in a variety of ways, but nevertheless, "the overall effect of these permutations tends to support the hegemony of the dominant class"( Rhetoric and Ideology...479).
While power relationships do exist in MUDs, these ideological struggles are much less a part of the conversation about them. In a social MUD, if one wants to build a subversive cabaret, she creates and describes it. Of students sent into the MediaMOO environment, Bruckman says, "they were all supported in their efforts by the presence of other people in the virtual world to ask for help. In these worlds on the network, learning is a collaborative, community activity."
As a point of consideration, lets suppose for a moment that this more democratic assessment of MUD environments holds true. If social constructionism posits a medium of language through which hegemonic power is conveyed, and MUDs are explicit examples of a language medium marked by collaboration, then power does not work through the MUD language medium the way social constructionism suggests it might.
This potential disparity prompts some interrogation. Perhaps a socially linguistically constructed consciousness mediates both the larger world and MUDs, and so distinguishing between the sense of collaboration felt in MUDs and that of confrontation issuing through social language becomes unclear; a consciousness which is linguistically constructed with the workings of power in mind, might be built so that perceptions of what's democratic, or hegemonic work to reinforce the dominant ideology, or are somehow irreducible.
The problem with this interpretation is that it re-introduces individual subjectivity into the social constructionist scheme, and-- however much social constructionism mentions individuals within dialectics or as elements of a constructionist matrix--agency of individual consciousness is something which at some level undermines the social construction of reality. In addition, allowing linguistically constructed and determining consciousness into consideration eventually elides difference between elements considered by that consciousness.
In this way, those who say that MUDs offer the subject an authentic reality are correct, for within individual consciousness, the subject engages the world as such and MUDs on the same level, as sensations present to an individual mind. A MUD classroom and a lecture hall in Missouri, perceived by a linguistically determined and determinating consciousness are both valid realities. The price one pays for this linguistic epistemic consciousness is, however, determined by its location. Despite claims to the contrary, reality and knowledge created on the level, or partaking of the level of individual consciousness will always remain in whole or in part on the level of individual consciousness. This may account for some of the sense of double-gesture felt in Berlin's depiction of consciousness as part the product and part the producer of material conditions. This egg and hatchling model is consciousness's version of the idea that language, the medium of reality, will influence and is at the same time influenced by the reality it constructs. Both require causal and temporal explanation which is to say the least problematic. The problem is that individual consciousness will always be unverifiable to anyone except the individual, and material conditions, even existence, in social constructionist schemes requires social verification.
We might also consider any disparity between MUD and social constructionist environments to be the product of the competing voices which make up a socially and linguistically constructed reality. For Berlin, "a given historical moment [will display] a variety of competing ideologies"(479); call them languages. The difficulty is in determining where they are displayed. If a given historical moment is composed of competing voices, then any evaluation of another historical moment which seeks to delineate the construction of the varying voices may be nothing more than an interested voice speaking in the initial given historical moment. The competing voice of society becomes a variable, which changes with each society, so that, not only does self-examination lack objective distance, any examination of another constructed society will operate using different variables. Social constructionism can mark the competing voices, but if it is to remain truly self critical, It must acknowledge those marks to be its own.
Berlin attests that the social constructionist scheme "does not lead to an anarchic relativism"(489). This is true; despite the difficulty, we continue, and should continue, to consider and assign certain values to specific and general social constructions. The scheme may not lead to anarchic relativism. It does, however, because unable to finally deal with individual consciousness or combined social and self critique, partake of epistemic relativism.
This is not to say that social constructionism is an invalid theory; rather it only restates the principle on which social construction is initially founded; because there is no transcendent, universal knowable self or reality, that which we do know is socially constructed. The danger comes from trying to transcendentalize, or universalize any of these potential constructions, including social constructionism itself. Thus, the difficulty, of the claims to "self- consciousness" often associated with social constructionism. For Berlin, for example, "social-epistemic rhetoric contains within it the means for self criticism and self-revision"(490). I'm skeptical. The social-epistemic self is constructed of language. To criticize implies a certain distance necessary for evaluation. If, however, the subject is constructed of language, and any critique will also be made of language, then self criticism becomes impossible, or at least operates without the distance necessary for any real angle of critique.
Much of social construction, particularly the work of Bruffee cited here, draws upon the philosophy of Richard Rorty. Of the so called linguistic turn in philosophy, Rorty says, "the substitution of 'language' for 'thought' or 'mind' or 'reason' has permitted the philosopher to take the relativity of knowledge and culture to conceptual frameworks, paradigms and pictures more seriously than such relativity has ever been taken before"(104). The implication is that social construction taken in linguistic terms is invaluable, but not, however, epistemic. In an interview with Gary Olson, Jacques Derrida is questioned about social constructionism, and cautions that he "would be very suspicious of what [he] would call 'rhetoricism'--a way of giving rhetoric all the power, thinking that everything depends on rhetoric..."(15). Language permeates life and reality, but can never by itself encapsulate it.
So, if theories which posit social construction of reality entirely through the determining power of language do not coincide with the linguistic construction explicitly taking place in MUDs, then perhaps these theories do not entirely account for the construction of reality, or at least if they do account for it, they should maintain their allegiance to their existence as accounts of and not actual social constructions or epistemic. The same can be said of claims for the constructive power of MUDs and cyberspace. Certainly they will be a medium for contesting ideas and competing interests, perhaps oppressing or liberating. However, they probably won't by themselves construct the central core of people's existence. Penicillin may be more powerful than the pen for many societies.
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And yet, I've been devil's advocating throughout most of this talk. MUDs may highlight the evasion of individual consciousness possible in social constructionist theories, as well as the variable nature of competing voices and the difficulties they present to social evaluation. Yet, perhaps the most interesting comparison between social constructionist and social MUD realities describes their similarities. It is true that collaboration takes place in MUDs, as it does in the social constructionist world. So does initiation, social grouping, and alienation. In addition, a self engaged in a MUD as well as in a mountain stream, or waxing a car can realize moments of true epistemic force. MUDs as conceptual and social activities are powerful and world building in both the cyber and the entire sense of the word. One area demanding further exploration, as Rheingold points out for cyberspace in general, is the claim for democratic voicing in the language of MUDs. Perhaps the purported democracy of MUDs and the social constructionist's power relationship are merely competing voices in this linguistically and socially constructed institutional reality. I've discussed "social" MUDs--applied my terms and blanketed MUDs with my own intellectual and whatever institutional apparatus were needed to describe them here. As a social constructionist exercise, this paper says a lot about our voices and our reality. New ideas are social exfoliation, yet the unresolved paradoxes of social constructionism and our own convictions should ask us to temper the idea that languages, talk, even MUD collaboration, will build a new world, with the consideration that they won't. Dale Spindler spoke at the Computers and Writing confernece about the "ladies with laptops." Women were given personal computers and liberated. But the medium of emancipation was still the perhaps male constructed mass of circuits and software. Changes in medium or talk about mediums may have been less important than direct social action.
To conclude, let me confess that I've asked rather than answered questions here. I've used a large brush with material I'm not that familiar with. Many of the subtleties of social constructionism I've left unfocused in order to make a point. The point is that there may be more to life than language and at the same time the more and the life, though epistemically problematic, can be constructed of and felt through numerous languages. Rorty cautions that while relying on terms like language frees us from metaphysical necessities of concept and reality, this freedom eventually eliminates the need for formal concepts like language. Languages can not be the arbiters of truth or reality. Nevertheless, they can open some doors.
Rene Berger has suggested that the ability of computers to convert knowledge to binary code, has transformed language: "For the first time, concepts are no longer subject to the rules of language."(Jubilatory virtual, 2). Berger might fit into a group which is trying to describe a technological epistemic. I would suggest, however, that the concepts and language have not been transcended; they have simply been translated into a new language. In tinymush programming language to create a room one uses the @dig command. As software the command constructs a certain world, the grammar and syntax of which also demand examination. Within its language, the command synthesizes the technical and the linguistic; the technical @ symbol is followed by the stopped at the pallet [d] phoneme of the letter d beginning the word dig, which starts high and forward in the mouth, then shovels backward toward the guttural [g] sound; dig, dig, forward and back the sounds shovel, articulating their own non-epistemic, though world building linguistic make-up. @dig is a powerful word in a powerful language, blending sight, sound, textual, technological, and even non-textual forces which sometimes declare themselves not to be, but to be felt as utterly satisfying. But @dig is just part of one among many languages. The program. The poem. Mudspeke--myself a newbie. The breathing sweeps of ocean. Stone. All language. All expressed here in language, but satisfying, if satisfying, beyond words.
So, I want to open a metaphor for you, a wordoor. Suppose the door lurches to a stop in front of you, here; it is made of two sections, each containing elongated ovals of Plexiglas wrapped by rubber gaskets. It is the door of a bus. It opens. You step on. The bus travels past corrugated tin shacks or silos. Or snowed over continental plates thrust above timberline and contemplating. Beige velvet. Beard stubble. Fields of wheat. Whatever. The bus hisses. Stops. The door opens. We hesitate before knowing we must step off. The bus is language.