Johndam Johnson-Eilola:

Writing and texts are increasingly being thought of as chunks rather than long, composed works. The ways in which authors connect these chunks are not only becoming more complex, but are also texts themselves. Search engines and hyperlinks are rhetorical compositions in and of themselves because, like traditional texts that incorporate the voices of other authors and texts, they create an amalgam of ideas and thoughts that are presented to the reader in a specific way.

Sorapure, Inglesby, & Yatchisin:

Revolving around the question, "should web sites be used in research papers?", Sorapure et. al. attempt to answer a pressing problem for composition instructors at the dawn of the internet age. While many of the examples Sorapure et. al. present have either disappeared or grown in complexity and sophistication ("Joe's 20 Coolest Sites of the Day" has now become the Huffington Post or the Drudge Report--or Google), the importance of judging a webpage's ethos in academic and any other contexts remains an important lesson for the composition classroom. Sorapure et. al. conclude that, following proper evaluation, web sites can be critical resources for academic research.

Sidler:

In order to teach students how to access the web, they must first recognize the web as a collection of spaces, and picture how to navigate those spaces. Sidler's focus on websites as spaces is especially important due to the disembodied (digital) nature of these spaces; without paper and ink to hold a document together, how can it be recognized as a real thing? Sidler suggests that students should think of the internet as a city, where certain types of sites represent different buildings or neighborhoods; personal web sites represent residential neighborhoods, whereas pornography-related websites might represent the seedier establishments within a city. The need for this kind of metaphor to describe digital places is the same as Sorapure et. al. confronts: the need to establish the ethos of a particular site.

The Big Picture

The obvious connection between these three readings is the need that these scholars feel to situate the Web within more traditional concepts--authors, texts, spaces. Furthermore, the need to establish, identify, analyze, qualify, and pick to death the ethos of any work is common to these readings; in order to accept the Web, at least in the academy, a hierarchy must be established--one that recognizes "Joe's 20 Coolest Sites on the Net" as being on the same publishing tier as The National Enquirer, and ProQuest or Lexis-Nexis as residing in the same gated community as the Princeton University Press. In this case, Weinberger might easily make a snarky comment about the new, digital Dewey Decimal Internet.

But ethos is important (so put your pitchforks and torches down!). The problem is not so much one of sifting through the major sites (to go through all the minor ones would be an endeavor best left to the immortal), letting some within the gates of the academy while shutting others out ("Hey you! Yeah you, Wikipedia! Beat it!"), and thereby forming a taxonomy of the acceptable. The problem is that, as Weinberger points out, there's simply too much information to filter in the third order of order (which, until digital spaces came along, we didn't have to think about or cope with) for any system other than dynamic filtering (tagging). How long can we, as educators, read our students' "Works Cited" pages and simply accept or reject sources based on the ethos of their sites? Surely, if we simply hide behind the "academic sources" gate, we'll be robbing our students of opportunities to use valid sources (primary and secondary) as they pursue their research (Sorapure et. al. 333).

My inclination is to, tenuously, evaluate the research presented by these new sources--as well as how students are using that research. In other words, I want to pursue Johndam Johnson-Eilola's model of approaching texts as chunks, rather than entire works; obviously, this is an old solution to a new problem, as scholars have long since used chunks of ideas and texts in order to form new ideas and texts. I don't think we need a taxonomy or hierarchy of the "reliable websites" in order to evaluate our students' research sources; a definition lifted from Dictionary.com is usually going to be a waste of print (let the student define the word, damn it!), but perhaps a definition of "santorum" from Urban Dictionary might be needed in a paper on how politics and internet culture affect each other (since the definition of "santorum" is quite specific, and is likely not to be found in the OED). IMHO, context is the answer to ethos.