About this Issue

As we enter theholiday season, the November issue of The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet (Interface) is appropriately about change.  John Schaefer, and Jesse Snyder, both teachers, discuss some of the impacts that electronic media are having on their students.  John, the founder-director of the Children's Media Workshop, in his article "Digital Divide or Media Divide?" <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/08/schaefer/schaefer.php> argues that we should see computer-mediated communication as a specific form of the general phenomenon of media, and believes that just as we have a Digital Divide, so do we have a Media Divide.  Some students have more access and understand media better than others, and almost all students understand it better than do their teacher. He sees this Divide as having as many implications for the future of democracy as does the Digital Divide itself.

Jesse Snyder, in his first year of teaching high school, has begun to see how popular computer games are affecting language use as well as social attitudes.  His piece, "Counter Strike Culture" found at <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/08/snyder.php> introduces us to a world and a language as baffling and as important as the mysterious gang glyphs that are now ubiquitous in American urban areas.

The scholars Byungho Park and Thom Gillespie of Indiana University discuss the broad changes wrought by the Internet upon another culture, Korea.  Korea is arguably the most "wired" of all nations, and Park and Gillespie introduce us to the Korean equivalent of the Internet Café, the "PC Bang". <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/08/park.php >

Kevin Kawamoto introduces us to a very powerful element for change, the ability to use the Internet to choose hospitals. <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/08/kawamoto.php> For most of us, the hospital is something that happens to us, and the notion of choosing one, or learning how to do it properly is as alien as Jesse Snyder's Counter Strike Culture.

In my editorial, "Spam and States' Rights" <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/08/edit.php > I discuss current legislation to control spam and try to put it into a historical perspective, including our own misguided experiences as spammers at Interface.

In this issue we review two books, Mark Buchanan's Nexus Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks, <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/08/buchanan.php>, which permits us to see regularities in otherwise chaotic systems, including elements of the Internet.  Our second book is Laura J. Gurak's Cyberliteracy. <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/08/gurak.php> Gurak agrees with John Schafer that the Digital Divide is far more complicated than we might assume and introduces us to element of the most important of contemporary modes of literacy, Cyberliteracy.

As this issue goes to post, I leave for six weeks of travel and teaching in China.  We will produce our next issue in a truly distributed fashion, with me working from Wenzhou, China, and our faithful student crew pounding their keyboards in the Berglund Center at Pacific University. I expect to have a great deal to report from China, following my return in mid-January.

We hope that this issue of Interface is useful and interesting to you as we begin the holiday season.

Jeffrey Barlow
Editor, Interface.