Following the example of Jody Caravaglia, our class realized that publishing the language of our experience was important. Moreover, we realized that publishing obscenity and slang--which appeared in many of the postmodern poems we had read--allowed us to explore important social issues, particularly issues of gender and race. However, while it was easy for us to say that "it was important to publish" our projects that critically explored "tough" issues for other students in the class, it was another thing to publish them on the Internet for all: parents, university officials, faculty members, strangers.
As a class, our first concern was to see if what we might publish on the Internet would violate university rules. The Michigan State University statement on the "Acceptable Use of Computing Systems" was sufficiently vague to make publishing anything by students seem inappropriate if MSU decided it was inappropriate. We concluded after some discussion that we would not worry about language but would "censor" any image considered by students in the class to be explicit. The images would appear on disk versions of the student hypertexts but not on Internet versions. As it turned out, this did not become much of an issue since only Project #17