Even the online classroom, however, is subject to the eye of power. In The Rhetoric of Technology and the Online Writing Class Hawisher and Selfe warn that “Writing instructors praise on-line communication programs for helping them ‘get to know’ students better, a phrase that survey instructors used in a positive sense but that Foucault includes to describe an architecture of control. Teachers who have easy access to students through a network can also ‘keep tabs’ on student participation, blurring the thin line between ‘evaluating’ contributions students make to electronic conferences and ‘inspecting’ conversations that occur electronically” (63). Most online education programs tie student communications to their school IDs. Online communications are recorded, and may be accessed by the teacher or by the other students at any time even after the course is concluded. A careless remark or uninformed question may be forgotten in the class, but in the digital realm it is preserved forever. This raises the stakes of online communication, especially in classrooms where discussions factor into a grade, and knowing that the instructor is watching, many students will use the forums only as much as they are required, or take their thoughts to a different digital space like Facebook or Twitter where they feel that the stakes of communication are lower. Furthermore, the eye of the instructor forces a certain tone to all in-class discussions, leading to terse, formal, overly-academic writing that, while useful practice for seminar papers, teaches the students less about their own voice than about parroting the teacher’s. Under these circumstances, online discussion can often become a chore, another assignment on the student’s growing to-do list. The digital classroom is still hierarchical, as the student must rely on the teacher for direction and evaluation as they attempt to sift reliable data from a morass of hyperlinks. Ultimately, the student is accountable to the instructor, but not the other way around.