He asserts that “the Digital Divide itself is a rhetorical problem at least as much as it is a technical one” (190). Built into this is a more complex understanding of access. Access is often “a vaguely articulated right to be in the same space, if one navigates all the other barriers that prevent that presence…But the Digital Divide is about far more than just computer ownership. Science and technology issues shape the power relationships that have historically provided the exigence for African American rhetors, and they have influenced – tangibly and intangibly – the rhetorical situation through the dynamics of control that determine who gets to speak to whom, in what circumstances, and to what degree those messages are mediated” (192-3).
Banks argues that the study of African American rhetoric has primarily focused on the word, written or spoken. While this is important, he believes we should also pay attention to (1) the extra-linguistic like “image, body and design” as well as to the technological, both in how African American have utilize technology that weren’t given access to and in “the relationships that exist between race and emerging technologies” (203). For instance, technology (such as the cotton gin) shapes relationships in how the power structure is written, in how people relate to each other, and in how those not in power can resist (194). Similarly, we can look to how technology is utilized by African Americans. For instance, “one could argue that the single most important rhetorical achievements in both King’s and Malcolm [X]’s careers occurred on television. What transformed a Civil Rights Movement from a set of disturbances led by a “rabble rouser” to a coherent national movement led by one who would become a Nobel Prize winner and national hero depended greatly on King’s grasp of how television worked as a rhetorical tool…For all of King’s eloquence with the written and spoken worked, it was a visual rhetoric of innocent protestors being beaten and hosed, of masses of Black people being willing to sacrifice all they had, of callous politicization that he could count on to put extreme words with those hoses and beatings that made the appeals successful” (198). Put briefly, considering technology in African American rhetoric open up more (and more thorough) research practices.
He asserts that “the Digital Divide itself is a rhetorical problem at least as much as it is a technical one” (190). Built into this is a more complex understanding of access. Access is often “a vaguely articulated right to be in the same space, if one navigates all the other barriers that prevent that presence…But the Digital Divide is about far more than just computer ownership. Science and technology issues shape the power relationships that have historically provided the exigence for African American rhetors, and they have influenced – tangibly and intangibly – the rhetorical situation through the dynamics of control that determine who gets to speak to whom, in what circumstances, and to what degree those messages are mediated” (192-3).
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