like Ronald Sudol and the Delaware study, they don't like the apparent chaos or open flow of what happens in Interchange, what Shoshanna Zuboff calls the "post-hierarachical relationships" implicit in networked communications. To them, hierarchy means controlled, incremental progress. Interchange seems to suggest that the students are always just about to break out of the hold and take over the ship. Consider some of the comments:

* I have a bunch of smart-ass sophomores in my class, and they love to screw around.

* Because the discussion moves so quickly, students are forced to write in one to two sentence comments that allow them only to make fragmented contributions to the overall discussions. These comments do not allow them to make supported arguments; rather, they just make generalized claim after claim.

* Of course, other students respond, and we soon have a meaningless name-calling exercise with insightful comments like "liberals suck" or "Do you consider yourself a FemiNazi?" or "You're just a bigoted male pig." I've even seem some veiled comments bordering on racial slurs pitched in. Some teachers might rationalize this activity as a great learning experience about "bigotry" or ineffective rhetoric. At a minimum, I think it's a waste of time. In a larger sense, it could be seen as threatening to some people, because they cannot confront or even just identify the people who hold ill will toward them.