The following discussion threads, some of which lasted several weeks, are presented as exemplary excerpts of what I've called critical dialogue (30% of the total messages; see 03, 04, 05). I have added a summary narrative and/or brief analysis for all of the threads except Neo-Nazis and Free Speech. I discuss the Rape and Gender and Death and Birth threads at somewhat greater length because I think these are the two most revealing discussions of the year with regard to electronic community-building in a residential community.
The keys to the amount and success of critical dialogue on the e-mail list, in my view, were the thoughtfulness of residents' messages and the reasonableness with which they engaged one another. At their best, the residents of Rinconada modeled an intellectual community in a new, fuller sense, because their intellectual interchange on the e-mail list was enhanced by their feelings for each other as individuals and as a group of fellow residents, and their friendships and group feeling was enhanced by their written exchanges. On the e-mail list, they almost never let their frequent political or intellectual disagreements become personal -- a difficult task in this text-only medium and strongly suggestive of how computer-mediated communication (CMC) may have different advantages for people who live together in a face-to-face community than for communities-at-a-distance.
The prototypical exchange would be started by Hillary and Ronald (see Neo-Nazis and Free Speech for an actual exchange involving these two; the prototype that follows is a synthesis and generalization based on several threads). Hillary was the most prolific participant on the e-mail list (see 11) and a large proportion of her postings were forwarded messages with political content, reflecting her liberal activist interests. Ronald's politics were conservative and he had frequent reactions to Hillary's political forwards about, for example, the plight of Asian-Pacific lesbians or the alleged exploitation of Burmese people by PepsiCo. But neither Hillary nor Ronald was an idealogue, and both responded with maturity and restraint to reasonable criticism of their messages and views.
Like most of their fellow residents, both also clearly cared about their social relations in the dorm, which no doubt tempered their responses. When the socially-active, popular, sincere Hillary would frame a forwarded message calling for a political boycott, in her inimitable fashion, with a warm "Hi everyone, sorry for another one of these, but please think about this issue! Rinc is great -- I love you guys!" -- how could Ronald or anyone else respond with venom? For her part, when Ronald -- who had often thought more deeply in the intellectual sense about the issues that Hillary raised -- posted a series of objections, Hillary sometimes backed off or admitted that the issue deserved fuller consideration. In some ways Hillary and Ronald represented our right-brain/left-brain stereotypes about female and male politics -- Hillary led with her feelings and her liberal passions, and Ronald played devil's advocate with objections based on reason and traditional forms of argumentation.
Continuing the prototypical exchange (and fuzzing the gender
stereotypes just described), liberal men such as Gregory and Buff
would often respond to Ronald's objections, and the discussion would
really take off, with other participants of various political
persuasions weighing in. (Hillary often dropped out at this point, so
despite the abundance of her postings, she was more a
discussion-starter than a core participant.) At its best, the
discussion would reveal an issue's full complexity and a range of
reasonable views about that complexity -- the goal of much
intellectual discussion in academia. Along the way, the most
electronically-active residents got to test their views, and their
writing and persuasive skills, in the context of a diverse audience
of intellectual peers who really cared about what they had to say
(not just on the e-mail list but also over dinner, in the lounge, and
in the hallways late at night). The less electronically-active
residents could be edified or entertained while learning more about
their dormmates -- in a thoughtful discussion they would not
otherwise have "heard" -- and the community as a whole was
enriched.