Historicity and Internet Research

At AoIR 2003, in a roundtable on qualitative internet research, Annette Markham said (my paraphrase):

We need to place our research in history; ahistoricity is a problem. Go to other researchers' work even if you're working with a new technology--other researchers have already thought through epistemological and theoretical problems.

A sensible statement, one to which I don't think many people would object, but still, I came across a nice illustration of this claim and would like to share it. Rhetoric, Community, and Cyberspace, an article about MOOs, was written by James P. Zappen, Laura J. Gurak, and Stephen Doheny-Farina, published in 1997, but based on research they did in Fall 1994 during a ten-week colloquium in the Diversity University MOO. It struck me that one could pretty easily substitute the word "weblog" for "MOO" in this passage, that the issues and questions raised continue to be quite relevant (last paragraph of the article):

Traditional rhetoric focuses its attention upon a single rhetor (or perhaps single rhetors each in turn) seeking purposefully and intentionally to persuade an audience within a single community upon the basis of shared beliefs and values. We found in our colloquium in the MOO a kind of rhetoric and a kind of community that seem to us to be quite unlike anything that we see in the mainstream of the tradition--a rhetoric and a community characterized by a multiplicity of languages and perspectives and a consequent challenge to the rhetor to find the opportune moment to enter into and influence the course of a discussion. Though we recognize the current limits to the access and use of this technology, we nonetheless believe that the MOO has potential to become a contemporary rhetorical community--a public space or forum--within which local communities and individuals can express themselves and develop mutual respect and understanding via dialogue and discussion, and we believe that the graduate students who participated with us in our colloquium demonstrated this possibility through their own positive action in making this space their own. Given the potentially global reach of the MOO, we also believe that it has potential not only to transmit information across time, space, and cultural differences but more especially to provide a forum for dialogue and discussion among people of vastly different cultural backgrounds and beliefs, to become, if we choose to make it such, a contemporary rhetorical community in cyberspace.