Book Commentary 37 E-mailg effect on the rhetoric of community information. Is "Online Community' an O x y m o r o n or a N e w Reality? Heidi Huse Miami University Oxford, OH 45056 Laura J. Gurak's book, Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace, is a rhetorical analysis of two cases of online social action centering on the impact of computer technology on the right to privacy. That is, Gurak looks at the nature of the online interactions that took place in each case: she examines both the structure of the conversations and documents created throughout the duration of the two social actions, and their effectiveness-or lack thereofwithin the communities of those participating in the online interactions. The first case involved the creation by the Lotus Development Corporation of an extensive marketing database, MarketPlace: Households, which provided "the names, addresses, and spending habits of 120 million American consumers" to anyone who purchased the product (1). When the impending marketing of the database was announced, there was an immediate online reaction against the product that included the requests of over 30,000 Americans for Lotus to remove their personal information from the database. The result of the protest was
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