As an assistant professor of English at a Historically Black University, I'm particularly intrigued by the sense of empowerment that minority students experience in learning and practicing computer-based research methods and composition strategies--taken broadly to include hypermedia and web page design. By mastering the stereotypically "white, male" world of computer technology, minority and non-minority students and professors find a common ground on which to test racial and gender coded ideologies; they also experiment with ways to temper global electronic communication with various "personal" and/or ethno-tech modalities (hip hop, rap, digitalized sound and image synthesis, chat rooms and E-mail, etc.). Electronic communications media, specifically the Internet, is a means of (re)staging the traditional classroom by opening a dialogic space for expanded cultural and self comprehension; selected web sites become the basis for an interactive event reverberating back from the "machine" through the immediate audience/participants.

The material field of the essay consists of interactive sessions conducted in my upper-level writing courses at Savannah State University; these sessions are revealing in terms of issues such as the value of popular culture on the Net (as it relates to luring students into an electronic environment) and the function of the networked classroom (or interactive lab session), as well as the virtual environment of the Net itself, as a "contact zone" (Mary Louise Pratt). I am especially interested in what takes place during a "cruising" session and how such pedagogic "happenings" can build communities of discourse among students and teachers.

In order to collect data for the article, I asked my students to complete the following exercise in an informal lab setting.

Cruising and Critiquing the Net

• Select a subject.
• Choose a search engine and enter your subject choice (don't forget to place quotation marks around the subject phrase)
• "Cruise" the Net (about one hour).
• "Bookmark" interesting sites.

The point of the assignment is to predispose students to adapt a critical/analytical stance toward electronic media, to put the media, and their relation to it--in personal and public domains--"in process/on trial" (Kristeva): a fundamental first step in achieving self-empowerment vis a vis various academic and nonacademic materializations of ideology--in this case, the cultural encodings and information configurations of cyber space. The Net is at once one of the most rigorously (binarily) structured, yet diverse, openended, and fluid semiotic fields postmodern culture has to offer. Hypermedia structure (the basis of the World Wide Web) is simultaneously arborescent (depending on nesting and recursion) and syntagmatically rhizomatic (spreading in all directions), potentially able to bring an infinite variety of data clusters together in moments of imaginative awareness. But even the loosely delimited form of the "cluster" is a reductive image, since it implies an entitativeness or at least integrity of groupings--it's better to think of Net-work as an always ongoing process of clustering, rather than the structuration of defined (however loosely or tentatively) clusters. I say "potentially" because, in practice, there are only a set number of (pre)scripted links. Yet users exploring these links can generate and (re)generate such a wide variety of "texts" on topics and issues as to give a sense--a (self)image--of mastery and maneuverability through various discourse territories.

Which brings us back again to the "assignment" (presented above) and the concrete situation--the academic classroom--in which it is administered. Think of the typical composition class essay assignment, based around selection from a list of preworded (pre-scribed) topics with (more or less explicit) presentational (formal and structural) requirements. Though students may be asked to "come up with" her/his "own thesis," enough has been pre-established--as well as excluded--as to effectively contain and discharge the sense of empowerment that should come with the act of building one's "own" conceptual structure(s). Students can freewrite, loop, list, and cluster, but they are dependent on us--an "us" that is really the Us of the textbook discourse that swallows us (the academic community) all--for the rules and what, exactly, to freewrite toward.

I suggested above that the typical essay assignment at once gives too much and not enough. A writing instructor, attempting to give students maximum freedom over their inscriptions, can say "write about whatever you want," but this doesn't alter their sense of the configuration of the academic power structure; thrown back on their own resources, they will frequently feel inadequate to the (more or less specifically conceived, presumed or explicit) demands of the discourse they feel compelled to enter.

Enter the electronic "library" in the form of the Internet, as a body both of information and multiple discourses within which students become "field" researchers and can set their own terms. A student's work with electronic media will be more productive and empowering if she/he is oriented toward it, initially, in a way that exploits its rhizomatic (rather than arborescent) potential and encourages critical thinking.

In Interface Culture (1997), Steven Johnson warns that the jargon associated with Internet use can be misleading, creating a false image of the experience of Web searching. Thus "surfing" evokes the aimless, bored, passive world of TV channel hopping, whereas in actuality "a Web surfer clicks on a link because she's interested"; "The links that join... various destinations are links of association, not randomness" (109). My choice of "cruising" instead of "surfing" to connote the psycho-social impact of Web exploration was instinctive. "Cruising" has less to do with the monotonous driving around in circles past the local hamburger joint, and more with the seeking of pleasure (of a sensual encounter) with an unknown other as one potential node of a circuit involving careful observation (scanning) of the territory one passes through. "Cruise," in its current formation in English, is closer to its Dutch than its Spanish, Portuguese, and French signing: to cross (and recross) a fluid body (i.e., the sea) "to and fro... without making for a particular port or landing place," but to be "on the look out" for other ships for profit or pleasure (OED). (Those "other ships," of course, can be the concurrent discoveries of other classmates during a Web session and the electronic "wake" of previous cruisers, as well as one's own sit(sight)ings.) To cruise is an act of wary traversal, to be alert and ready for what comes and to experience an energizing jouissance in the rapid crossing and commingling of discourse territories and siftings through the wealth of data.

Cruising as a group, in a networked classroom, we become co-voyagers on a global (WWW) adventure. Though Net cruising is ideally world-information tourism without class advantage (or, at least, in an open admissions, affordable institution of higher education like SSU, with minimum class advantage), race, economic class, and gender differentiation are not elided in the excitement of sharing our Net findings, but become the ground for the flux-field of diversity we co-create on our 60 minute, timeless voyage. In "Electronic Literacy, Critical Pedagogy, and Collaboration" (1995), Carol Winkelmann emphasizes the "radical democratization and multivocality" (432) that collaborative writing instruction produces; she grounds her classroom experiences in producing collaborative (or "corporate") texts in cyborg feminism, which she defines as a "fusion of contradictions, differences, and dependencies... a celebration of a multipolar set of combinations " that "guarantees our dynamism and interdependence as human beings in affinity and community" (434). Our unexpected encounters while cruising data fields have a similar socio-pedagogical effect. Speaking from particular social-historical positions, through the cultural (especially popcultural) material on the Net, we temporarily converge as a multivoiced discourse community--a confluence of voices.

The effect of such experiences, then, outlasts the duration of the classroom or laboratory exercise. Though the technique of Net cruising is simple and "user friendly" (a comment many students made), it helps students feel connected to the realm of high technology--"technologically enabled"--and hence to a globally-based, academic and socio-cultural knowledge market. Writing up their responses to our cruising session, some students felt that competency as a Net "cruiser"--and feeling comfortable with computers in general--allows them to "excel intellectually and socially." One commented that she felt her "mind expand" simply by "clicking a button or two"; another that it "feels intellectual to research on the Net." Other students observed that the Net provides them more "in-depth" coverage of events then the closest comparable conventional media, TV. One student discussed the impact of the Net on her personal sense of being in the world: cruising gives her "a chance to relax and escape [her] daily routines" while also "getting [her] involved" socio-politically by providing the "most recent information on people and events." She also confessed a feeling that Net use gives her "an advantage over others" because she is "getting something that is available only to users." Finally, another student found Net cruising to be psychologically liberating: "one can hide his or her own identity," she muses, referring to the use of aliases and the disembodied nature of communication on the Net. "I am more open and free...."

There is, of course, a dystopian underside to many of the above comments. "Getting something that is available only to users" means that the egalitarianism of the Net is somewhat illusory; "Access Denied" (in red) is cyberworld security fencing. Anonymity on the Net can enhance self-confidence, but also encourage detachment and self-evasion. In "What's all This Hype About Hypertext" (1996), Jonathan Smith discusses the downsides of Net working, including limited access, the frustrations of first time or inexperienced users, the dissimulative aspects of hypertext structure (in which freedom of choice is delimited and constrained by "webmasters'" designs), and the false consciousness of, in Richard Crusin's words, the "technological fallacy"; paraphrasing Crusin, Smith defines this fallacy as "the ascription of agency, especially political agency, to technology itself" (127; Crusin, 470). Valorization of the Net as an information cornucopia (as some of the comments above suggest) can also be self-deceptive: the quality of material on the Net and the breadth and accuracy of "in-depth" coverage vary greatly.

However, the comprehensiveness of the above students' perceptions is not so crucial, relative to feelings of self-empowerment, as the fact of the perception itself. The students' sense of who they are, vis a vis the cultural metanarratives--the social-academic-political structures--encompassing them alters as they interact with the Net: Many commented that they felt "in control" of the flow of information and knowledge (i.e., able to manipulate it), contrasting with a more passive perception of their relationship to knowledge acquired via conventional media and traditional, lecture-oriented instructional environments. Note especially that in the case of one of the female students above, even the practice of leisure becomes empowering, leading to a heightened social/political awareness: relaxation is synonymous with "getting involved" in the global flux of knowledge.

Inhibitions drop away on the electronic cruise (as indicated by the last student quoted above), allowing for a jouissance of exploration. Some users investigate discourse territories and broach subjects in a "chat" that, ironically, otherwise might only be entered into with the most intimate acquaintances--as one black male student put it: "There is no question that can't be asked"--in contexts without immediate accessibility to wide ranging data bases. Though the above student's comment resonates with patriarchal prerogative as his "real" world self engages the virtual flux of voices and identities (as Mark Olsen puts it, summarizing a main concern of feminist criticism over the past 30 years, "unconscious structuring of meaning is the primary means by which gender power relations are linguistically encoded and perpetuated")(312), "contingencies of the real" (to quote poet Wallace Stevens), perceived restrictions or inequalities of race, class, and gender are revisioned on the web: one can encounter "otherness"--a sexual or racial other--without risk or a debilitating sense of inadequacy resulting from a self-consciousness of being "different." Cruising is an (inter)active learning experience of interlinked differentiation and synchronicity, rather than a passively received "order of things," handed-down taxonomies and/or historicizations of knowledge and difference. One can "learn things about different cultures on the Internet," a (white male) student simply put it.

One of the effects of Net cruising, then, most significant to motivating and empowering the student thinker and writer, is the awareness of being involved with a body of information, rather than passively receiving it. Short of being swallowed by "chiasmic hypertext," as Peter Havholm and Larry Stewart dub it ("Computer Modeling and Critical Theory," 1996), in which "a reader, clicking from text to text, becomes lost" (111), students trekking through a wealth of discourse territories, with their "mission" assignment clearly (literally, as the exercise sheet above) before them, are well positioned to establish concrete relationships and conceptual links among sometimes disparate data fields. Winklemann states that "electronic literacy accentuates the complexity of reading and writing" (445); even though, as Smith cautions, building analytical bridges among apparently "unrelated" sites requires "cognitive sophistication" that many learners (trained according to more conventional, product-oriented pedagogies) lack (125), the effort is well worth the larger lesson; critical thinking, in the virtual field, becomes an engaged praxis. The excitement of involvement is evidenced in the form of student/user writings--the quick jottings of the traveler; the essay mode must be temporally left behind, or written through, as the traveler adopts a linguistic form adequate to the rapid shuffling through databases. The interactive cruising session simulates the vital urgency of the mind shuttling through the "brainstorming," "information discovery" stage of the writing process; this "virtual" experience, or "taste," of what prewriting should be can resonate beyond the immediate moment to inform their next (non-virtual) prewriting session. Thomas T. Barker ("Computers and the Instructional Context," 1990) has praised keyboarding programs for "allowing us to peer into composing behavior in a new way, as if we were seeing writing from the inside out" (Holdstein 16). Similarly, a cruiser's "Bookmarks" or "Favorites" and her/his "GO...History," along with his/her Net notes, preserve a trace of the restless, early stages of the Net rider/writer's thought processes and curiosities, a valuable conference record for both student and teacher.

The initial setup of the event--how it is staged and performed--can suspend the mutual, teacher/student evasions (authority/subject of authority masquerades) of a conventional classroom, while telling us a lot about who our students are--as writers and human beings. The nature of the assignment, and the instructor's actions during the session--her/his ideological positioning in relation to the student/other--can sharpen the student cruiser's sense of being "on the inside," involving them in the pedagogical situation in an unselfconscious, self-revealing way.

To be pedagogically productive, the terms of the assignment itself should be fairly liberal--students should be allowed to pursue any subject that interests them and investigate any site that gets their attention; in presenting the assignment, instructors can encourage (re)searchers to explore unusual, or "foreign" territories, and to enter into the discourse of select sites (via e-mail and message boards, for example).

The sites visited during our brainstorm/cruise session provide a window onto some of the concerns of the undergraduate population at SSU--limn, if not a complete outline of a "mind-set," at least a partial profile of what's on (some of) their minds. Some visited informational, utilitarian sites, concerned with their prospective careers--the Electronic Law Library Reference Room and various job search sites; some looked over sorority and fraternity home pages, such as sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha's; others reviewed sites concerned with politics and specifically African-American-related issues--Black Voices; some perused pop culture and entertainment-oriented pages focusing television shows such as "Days of Our Lives" (on the Media Mania page), and on music and sports superstars like Madonna, Erykah Badu, Duke Ellington, Tiger Woods, and Zooyork (a multicultural, New York-based skateboard team); and some delved into "taboo" sexual material--Male Strippers, the Strippers' Network, Hardcore Gay Males. Students often visited more than one type of site--one moved from a home page about rapper Master P to a Kappa Alpha Psi site to performer Jerry Springer's page and finally the Janet Jackson web site; for most, the web exercise staged an encounter, to say the least. A "self-portrait" of a student body begins to emerge with concerns/anxieties about career and social status--how, exactly, they fit into society; with a self-consciousness of race and identity politics and the globalization of racial issues, with an interest in public figures who speak (or perform) in their (ideological) place, and, with a curiosity about repressed psycho-sexual material (many of the students at SSU live and/or have been raised in seriously--sometimes restrictively--religious households; it is still risky to use four-letter words in class discussions and some students, when quoting a passage out loud that contains profanity, will simply censor or paraphrase the unallowable diction); the net provides a non-threatening, controllable space in which to play upon/with otherwise unreadable desires. One student quite matter-of-factly (if not clinically) phrased her findings on the Male Pornography site "1. Seeing actual penises and 2. Seeing a female with a penis. I had no idea the Internet had those kinds of topics on it."

This specular function of web browsing dialogizes the self; displacing or dispersing crucial aspects of their identity through the (electronic) other allows students to confront and test, to play through some of their assumptions, their way of seeing the world and of knowing who they are within it, in a "public" yet risk-free arena. Such "playing through" helps cruisers become active evaluators, aligning themselves critically to "text" and its production. While several students agreed that there were a number of sites that appealed to African-American interests, for example, they also noted how the design and layout of some pages, which often included ads, appropriated content as a vehicle for commodity hustling--the Net's becoming "another potential money trap," as one student put it. Some students also noted the emphasis on virtual sensationalism--startling animated GIFs and bold color contrasts--in some sites (hip-hoper AKA Machiaveli's home page, for example), and how this tends to bolster a stereotyped figuration of black desire. A few of the female students commented that more sites were oriented toward African-American men than women--again, the (broad ranging) accuracy of the observation is not so crucial as the fact that it underlines a stereotype of patriarchal dominance in black culture and the students' concern about their own position as black women in relation to it. Another student criticized that "pertinent topics" such as education are not given "serious attention" on a site where they probably should be, like Black Voices, giving a garbled impression of how that "voice" actually sounds.

Alerted by the above student's observations to a possible false consciousness in the site's design, I was compelled to take a closer look at it: what was the site telling her about herself that she didn't like (i.e., where did its concept about who she was as a cultural entity veer from her self-concept)? What image of African-Americanness does the site present? Black Voices home page deploys a dark palette. Letters of the title, in different sizes and two tones of deep blue, are crowded together in pseudo jazz rhythm on a black background, suggesting a potent, slightly dangerous force. The content of links, however, focus on entertainment, health, potential dilemmas associated with appearance ("Are Your Dreads Acceptable at Work?"). On the particular issue of the page I cruised, the visually dominate links were related to (in the following order) entertainment (Terry McMillan's new film How Stella Got Her Groove Back highlighted in large open script beneath the site's handle), health ("The Health Gap"), and self-presentation (a photo of the "Member of the day" linking to a "personal" ad for SmooveBLK@AOL.com, the imaged member). Scrolling down the page, there are four more links to entertainment information (including a large-font ad for Music Boulevard, an online music store, just under the "Member" photo), another to "health"--actually appearance ("Get Your Free Health Hair Care Booklet"), two links to job and financial sites, one to travel material, and (true to the student's observation, above) only two links to articles focused on education (pertaining primarily to young parents with school-age children). The bottom of the page features a screen-wide, boldly-colored ad for the action film Blade (balancing yet undercutting the full-width, blandly-colored ad at the top of the page for a career chat).

Following the Pagemaster's compositional path, however, before coming to the personal photo, "Blackwall" strikes the eye, individual letters in dark blue, blood red, and green, with the clamoring effect of Black Voices. The sign links to a message board nesting further links to sites concerned with sex, money, appearance, teen issues ("Teen Talk": "fashion," "music," "hobbies, school"), family history ("Roots"--a genealogy-oriented site), current events, job and life world problems ("Rant": to "release the stress"), and gay and lesbian issues. Though the links embedded in this message board ad some resonance to Black voices, it takes some digging to get there: one has to go four levels down, for example, to log onto the "Black Women Chat," the announcement for a new "lesbian magazine," or a bulletin board for "Black and Gay" issues. A quick impression of the surface features of the Black Voices home page (which is what many uncritically-attuned "cruisers"--"surfers"--will come away with), with its visual emphasis on entertainment, health, and looking good, tends to mask more substantial, personal and social issues. At a cursory glance, then, "Blackness," from the point of view of Black Voices," equals coolness, slick self-presentation (self-commodification), and poses a vague threat to the status quo, though the content of the site is not confrontational--at least at the surface levels (it may be going too far to claim that the frame division of the page into "separate but equal" halves with, respectively (right to left), black and white backgrounds, tropes and is thereby complicitous with a racist political ideology).

As the student comments above suggest, the cruisers in our session soon discovered that the web journey is not so much about "finding oneself," as about taking a critical stance (as the initial assignment encourages) toward the semiotic itinerary, observing the way various site clusters image one's physicality, interests, and desires, perhaps returning, as in a fun house mirror, a distorted, (avant)popped version of the self.

Barker claims that conventional, authoritative pedagogical models emphasize product over process, view the audience/teacher as evaluator rather than someone seeking information, and cast the teacher as authority figure, delimiting the potential "range of relationships" between student and teacher (14). Interactive methodologies utilizing Internet technology create a more vital, enabling (rather than disabling) learning environment and mobilize participant relationships (contributing to the larger condition of "social connectedness" that, according to Kenneth Gergen, high technology fosters) (Hawisher 21). As students begin to make discoveries in the electronic world, the computerized classroom heats up, energized by their excitement: the need to talk, to share their findings with others in the immediate social/educational context (other classmates and the instructor as she/he circulates among the work stations). Roles reverse, or become fluid, as the teaching-learning system is decentralized; conventional taxonomies (i.e., "teacher" and "student") collapse as each member of the cruise group becomes a participant/node in an ongoing process--at certain points in the continuum a consumer of knowledge, and at other points a conveyor of knowledge and information, not rolling it back to its immediate source of dispensation (as on a conventional test), but presenting, or passing on, "new" information to other participants. Observing her students' efforts to employ Internet technology to generate a collaborative text, Winklemann remarks that "they acted out their literacy" (440); our virtual tour bus/Net-driven research community was the scene of a similar dynamic.

Visiting individual work stations where students had located interesting or unusual sites, my immediate response was often "how did you get there?"--I became the learner as my guides showed me the ropes. I learned about hot black models like Tyson Beckford, got inside info on the latest rap and hip hop stars--my student/teachers would often supplement information found on the web page with what they already knew. One woman, online with the Africa Forum chat, read me portions of a correspondence she was conducting in Swahili; we (myself and the students immediately around her) were impressed with her fluidity and the lilting, musical quality of the language. Another read me a poem she had found on her sorority home page and just written down on the back of the cruise assignment sheet--I hadn't known about her interest in poetry before this class meeting--which led to a brief discussion about the role chance plays in creativity. One group of cruisers had waded into the home pages of some area colleges, leading us to a discussion and comparison of various institutions of higher education in the state; we all were amazed, for example, at the estimated cost of a one year's study at Macon College: $28,000--$17, 000 for tuition (not untypical of smaller, private colleges) and the balance for cost of living; but this is "Macon," we chimed, not Cambridge or even Atlanta. Someone else in the class, overhearing the name of her hometown, shouted in mock indignation across the room "What about Macon?" I shared a few quieter, more reflective moments with another student, discussing a movie about Internet hackers that my assignment had called to mind; he explained that the plot centered around internet terrorists who defy social/racial boundaries--I got out my note pad. I felt lifted, transported by the atmosphere of collaboration our Net work had initiated; our "class" had, almost imperceptibly, slipped over/through-- "transcended"--pedagogical boundaries, enacting Fish's dialogic "discourse community." A heady moment for any "instructor."