In response to J.E. Clark's article, the private/public dichotomy is being changed significantly by the emergence of digital media.

Censorship is power

Literary scholars have repeatedly reached into the past to find the more marginalized voices of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Though perhaps never really found, these voices were never acknowledged during the enlightenment, which privileged "objective" truth without realizing that much of the truth was in actuality male-white-truth.

It was not until postmodern deconstruction, feminism, cultural studies and queer theory, that we began to recognize how narrow we had been. The inclusion of marginalized voices facilitates a more holistic understanding of the human experience by recognizing the contentions among perspectives. This enabled us to apply multiple angles of vision to the world that is, to really challenge ideas by using the lived experiences of different groups as a grade card--a heuristic. Previously, to perpetuate a system that favors the dominant class, all you had to do was use wealth to silence the dissonant. With the increasing visibility of marginalized voices, this farce is no longer possible.

However, it was the socially aware privileged who first began the conversation, and it is the burden of the margnialized voices themselves to continue to share their experience and thereby challenge the dominant culture. In this way, inclusion was only afforded by the ruling class, so does technology have the ability to change this?

Technology can break the silence

In the digital world, there is potential for students to assume an identity and tailor their engagement with their audience in mind. They are free to share their views on the internet where literally anyone can potentially find them (as long as the internet remains free). This is a reality brought about by technology. Before now, the marginalized could rarely afford an education, rarely afford a printing press, and almost never have the opportunity to express their ideas without the permission of the ruling classes. The internet has the potential to bridge this if the marginalize have access an interface and the literacy to use it.

Agency is power

The marginalize then are no longer silenced. They can share their lived experiences to truly test social structures, and all ideas and perspectives can be shared on the digital frontier.

But perhaps more so, people are able to challenge the the capitalist "tradesmithing" that has become our compartmentalized education system. Take for instance Clark's success with his ePortfolio and his student, "Ally". According to Clark, Ally felt constrained by academic writing. It's structures inhibited her agency by have a strict structured "product approach" where her ideas were tailored to a format--often to the detriment of her ideas. But the ePortfolio exposed Ally to a digital world of possibility. She could write informally in her blog about the Iraq war (the ghost of Elbow?) which she was able to link to a paper she wrote about personal interviews with Vietnam veterans. Multi-modality allowed her to tie these two different works together. The public domain of the blog provided the heuristic where she could test her writing on a broad audience, thereby learning the importance of audience and context. Through this work, she was able to establish a networked voice and identity using a networked body of works, including a research paper on Vietnam and its similarity to the Iraq war.

Her voice as an advocate for political awareness was born. Technology and writing, working in tandem and with the network of peers provided by increased accessibility to the public domain, provided her with agency to pursue passionate interests. Ally's final grade, her testement to her newfound identity and agency, was being able to prevent her work to the entire college, sharing her ideas they may have otherwise not been actualized let alone articulated.

But the reality rarely matches the ideal

Does everyone have a voice? Can they? Are we right to challenge ideas and identities in this way? There must be repercussions? Does the potential to be anonymous facilitate vitriol? How successful is the heuristic approach without being coupled with actual civic engagement? Could third-space disembody the individual and work against the heuristic? Can we call this kind of engagement, under constant scrutiny, as agency? Who benefits from the ePortfolio, ie...is it trademarked?