Ask anybody about the problems they have with the internet, and you will hear a horror story about online "trolls." Many instructors are likely to balk at a completely unregulated forum for fear of antagonistic discourse. However, I would argue that, within the context of a writing class, even controversial speech can be useful. In Rabelais and his World Bakhtin wrote,"Besides the universalism and freedom, the third important trait of laughter was its relation to people’s unofficial truth. The serious aspects of class culture are official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations and always contain an element of fear and intimidation. These elements prevailed in the Middle Ages. Laughter, on the contrary, overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. Its idiom is never used by violence and authority" (90).
The digital space, like the carnival, is a place of release and freedom. This freedom may result in productive discussion that could comfortably fit in the classroom, but an unmonitored individual online is also free to explore darker, more controversial sides of his or her identity. Sherry Turkle stated that “Jung believed that for each of us, it is potentially most liberating to become acquainted with our dark side, as well as the other-gendered self called anima in men and animus in women” (259) and Lester Faigley, in studying why some of his online classes turned agonistic, cited Marshall Kremers who “says that such hostility in electronic discussions comes from the “shock of being granted total freedom of expression, a privilege we can hardly blame them for being unable to handle since we never gave it to them in the regular classroom” (190). Anonymity offers a great deal of freedom for students to explore their dark sides, and indeed, controversy can be highly conducive to discussion as argued in Patricia Bizzell’s “Contact Zone” classroom model. Cooper and Selfe address similar concerns in dealing with controversial discourse online and in the classroom:" In classroom discussions, the dilemma is indeed difficult to resolve: teachers hold so much authority there that, if they argue against students who resist the relativistic tenets of secular humanism, students either fall into implacable opposition or are silenced. One of the great advantages of the alternative forum provided by these conferences is that it offers us a way out of this dilemma. Students can experiment with and confront discourses in a less threatening context, one in which the teacher's authority to privilege or forbid discourses is not so absolute, and what matters is ideas, not personalities" (867).
Rather than simply allowing controversy, however, the anonymous classroom may actively encourage it.Faigley argues that “violations of politeness often occurred when students raised issues of difference in their terms” and that “electronic written discussions create disensus because they give voice to diversity” (19). This is the positive side of controversial discourse, but one that must be carefully and subtly cultivated by an instructor who hopes to use anonymity as a tool for education.