Jessica Badia Professor Anne Kretsinger-Harries CAS 138T 1 March 2013 Online Deliberation Reflection For my online deliberation

I chose to use NPR to find an article focused on the current political topic of gun laws. I chose this site because the professor recommended it and it has a great politics section that includes very up to date articles, as well as an intellectual audience. New posts are constantly being added about current events, and these articles get a large amount of responses, which seem to be very educated and fairly civil in comparison to other sites that I have seen. My goal was to not only learn about others opinions on the current debate on gun laws, but also to try to add to the deliberations and maybe even persuade others to think the way that I do by using my own knowledge and opinions on the topic. In order to deliberate effectively, I decided to focus on Gastils points on enlightened understanding (7), drawing on media and personal experience (22), investigative journalism (53), and disagreement and persuasion (26-27). I first chose to comment on the article Obama Administration Takes Gun Control Fight Outside Washington, but by the time I went to start posting comments on it, it had already been a month since the last post was made. I thought that amount of time was much too large for me to restart the conversation, and after looking through some of the past comments and seeing that conclusions were pretty much made, I decided to look for another article about gun violence. I then commented on Gun Control an Emotional Issue for Citizens, Lawmakers in Colorado, because the Colorado shooting was what made me really interested in the topic. I first decided to comment on a post already made on the article:

I actually formed some of these ideas in this comment after reading Gwens civic issues blog on party politics, and was happy that I could bring that into this conversation because I also see that as an important issue. The reason I commented on his post was because I found the comment to be ill focused. I wanted to try to make this person understand that party politics had no part in gun laws, so I used Gastils take on disagreement and persuasion as well as personal experience (22, 26-27). I tried to explain my opinion while acknowledging his. He then replied:

I appreciated how respectful he was to me, but I felt that he misunderstood me a bit and that he got a little off topic at this point, so I responded:

His response:

I honestly told him that I didnt know much on this situation and therefore didnt feel comfortable giving my opinion on it until I did more research. As I stated before, I wanted to take an enlightened understanding approach to the deliberation, and I felt like I would not be able to do so on a subject that I didnt know much about. Aside from that, I was very happy with the way this conversation went because he brought in many outside sources and was very welcoming to my ideas. He clearly used investigative journalism much better than I did, but I learned a lot from him and appreciated this discussion. I do feel that we had different opinions and therefore did not come to a conclusion, but we did agree on some aspects and it ended up being a very interesting deliberation. I also had made my own comment on this same article:

I had not received any comments on it for a very long time, and therefore gave up on it and realized that sometimes starting your own reel of comments will not work because most people want to do that. When I recently checked back I did realize that I had gotten a response. I read the response and wrote back the following:

There was then a bit of a misunderstanding with my wording, which was completely my own fault. I realized that when talking to people I did not know, I needed to be very clear with my wording, so his response was not what I expected:

I then went back and corrected myself while posing some rhetorical questions to him:

This conversation seemed to be less productive in my opinion, because we were debating more than deliberating. I believe that we were both a bit one-sided in this and I should have tried harder at understanding his side. This understandably will happen in discussions about heated topics, so I still think I learned from it. Overall, I thought that I was informative and presented my ideas well. I tried not to be pushy and instead aimed at trying to persuade others while still considering their thoughts and reacting to them respectfully. I sadly had not originally received any responses to those comments, so I had decided to also comment on Biden: For Protection; Buy a Shotgun, Buy a Shotgun, because I thought that it explained the other side of the situation well. I decided to post a response to a comment that I thought was very in depth and informative:

(It was too long to post as one picture) This comment weighed both sides of the situation, and I agreed with many of the points made but also offered some of my own opinions:

Again, I used my own personal experience in this post, but the post was made more for the purpose of being able to understand the issue more. This stream has over 700 comments, which I think makes it easy for things to get lost in the shuffle, which I believe is why I did not receive a response to my comment, but it was still very interesting. The reason I chose to comment on both of these articles is because I wanted to see if the size of the conversation had an effect on the deliberation. I believe that it does. The smaller conversation was not as repetitive as the larger one, and it was also more in depth and had more deliberation than debate while the larger conversation had more debate than deliberation. The problem with the larger deliberation is that many of the monologues were disconnected at points because of how many different people were commenting on them. As for the smaller deliberation, people responded well to each other to begin with but at points began to get off topic and misunderstand each other.

I believe that the discussions are productive, because not only was I able to start to understand the other sides point of view, but I also was given some new ideas about gun laws/gun violence. Though some conversations within the thread were pointless and a bit annoying, once filtered out the conversations were really in depth and helpful. These deliberations consisted of outside sources, factual information, personal stakes, opinions, and back and forth conversations leading to conclusions, which was very interesting to see and a great thing to be a part of. The challenges posed by online deliberation come from the fact that you are deliberating with people around the country/world who may not be open-minded. Some people may annoy you with their childish comments and off-topic posts, but that just needs to be ignored in order to get something good out of the experience of talking to others on important issues. Another challenge is the size of the Internet and popularity of the topic/article. Writing about an article that talks about a hot topic and getting good responses from that writing is difficult because there may be a lot of people commenting and therefore you may get lost in the confusion. A small conversation may be one-sided on the other hand. It is harder to get a good deliberation going in that kind of situation. I think that a great size would be anywhere from 50 to 100 people commenting. In our Civic Issues Forums, it is much easier to be open with each other because we know each other and dont have to be afraid of someone responding forcefully because of something we said. On the other hand, being able to hide behind a sort of anonymity might help some people break out and say whatever comes to mind. Another challenge comes from the fact that people online dont know you personally, so claiming your personal stake may be more difficult to explain. I personally prefer online deliberation than commenting on Civic Issues Blogs because I have an interest in what I am deliberating about and am talking to others who

also have an interest in it. These people are also a lot more straightforward, so they say what they think without beating around the bush in order to not hurt my feelings. In the future I would definitely like to participate in more conversations like these, but I would prefer to start commenting as soon as the article/post is made so that more people would see my post and so that I could also take part throughout the deliberation. I also think that posting more facts would be useful, because even though I have investigated the topic and know quite a bit about it, I could not pull anything relevant from my sources. These facts do need to be triple checked, if not more, because I did realize that any wrong facts were pointed out immediately. This means that I clearly need to do more in depth investigations of things that would not be constantly repeated throughout the conversation and would actually add to it. In my opinion, I used personal experience well and tried to persuade others, though I could have been a little more aggressive with my persuasion. Overall, I enjoyed this experience and think that I did a pretty good job adding to the conversations and even gained some knowledge through it.

Works Cited Gastil, John. Political Communication and Deliberation. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2008. Keith, Tamara. "Obama Administration Takes Gun Control Fight Outside Washington." NPR. NPR, 26 Jan. 2013. 01 Mar. 2013. Memmott, Mark. "Biden: For Protection; 'Buy A Shotgun, Buy A Shotgun'" NPR. NPR. 01 Mar. 2013. Verlee, Megan. "Gun Control An Emotional Issue For Citizens, Lawmakers In Colorado." NPR. NPR, 19 Feb. 2013. 01 Mar. 2013.