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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Queen “traces how women’s self-representations are transformed through their circulation within global fields of rhetorical action in ways that often ‘fix’ these women within neoliberal frameworks of ‘democracy’ and ‘women’s rights,’ thus erasing the multiple ways in which women across the globe use Internet technology to create and claim identities, agency, and political activism outside of the circulation of one-third world rhetorics of power” (471). This argument is twofold. First, “U.S. neoliberal feminism not only distances itself – both temporally and spatially – from the Other Woman, but also reinforces a global hierarchical system in which one-third world U.S. feminists act as ‘saviors’ of two-thirds world women imprisoned within oppressive, violent, traditional/fundamentalist patriarchal structures of underdeveloped nations” (472). They do this by associating technology with progress and non-technology with old world stagnation; in other words, they associate those with technology as those with agency and those who are progressing, while those without technology access need rescuing from their old ways (which removes their agency and negates any moves they have made without digital technology.).
Second, Queen claims, “Feminist rhetorical studies must extend their analyses to examine how the modes of digital circulation matter in the mediation of relations among groups, communities, and nations” (472). She uses the metaphor of global fields of rhetorical action, which “refers to the cyberspaces through which an element (images, words, texts, websites, etc.) passes as it circulations. She uses “the concept of fields [because it] described the complex rhetorical actions that emerge from encounters among multiple ideologies and practices that are historically, geopolitically, and culturally specific and that are inscribed in global relations among various communities” (474). This is important in electronic texts because , while “oral- and print-based rhetorical analysis stables a speech/text…electronic texts, in contrast, change not only because they are ephemeral – forming and dissolving simultaneously – but also because they are mobile: they circulate and, in the process of circulation, they encounter and are transformed by other forces” (485). In her use of links, she does not necessarily mean hyperlink. Instead, she is interested in how various texts are circulated, where and by whom they are posted, how they are accessed and by whom, and how they are reinscribed by the poster. “As the [text] circulations in cyberspace…its kairotic moment, its intent, its readers, its meaning, its effects, and even…its author all undergo change” (482). Key Term
Finnegan gives us a new way to analyze visuals. First she discusses two understandings of visual rhetoric:
She argues that we should think of visual rhetoric in both ways by analyzing both the history of rhetorical events and the rhetorical study of historical events. She states that “doing rhetorical history of the visual must entail both the third and fourth senses of rhetorical history; neither is sufficient alone. Taken together, they enable the rhetorical historian to pay attention to each of three distinct but equally important moments in the life of photographs—production, reproduction, and circulation. Production must be accounted for if we are to know where images come from (literally) and why they appear in the spaces where we find them. Reproduction acknowledges that images are hybrid entities, that we do not encounter them in isolation, and that their arrangement (at least in the spaces of print culture) is al- ways the result of particular editorial choices and framing of ideas. Circulation must be accounted for as well, for—as Walter Benjamin reminded us long ago—it is the fundamental property of photography” (200) Key Terms
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