Entry 9

          I think Wysocki’s Introduction to “Into Between—On Composition in Mediation” is largely encouraging us to think of writing and our expressiveness, thinking, and ideologies produced by writing as a system that includes our bodies and is enacted upon our bodies, and not an intangible, conceptual, abstract process—similar to the arguments that have been made throughout the semester of technology being material, not just a theoretical cyberspace that exists somewhere beyond the hardware and software we use. The heart of her argument seems to be, “…a tension  between the felt experiences of an interior—being a body that composes, writes, and communicates—and a bodily exterior, of being one person among many, subject to study and impress from above or outside, mattering only because of one’s part in composing the many” (10). “That is, in understanding that we are (to use Wegenstein’s formulations) each a subject—a body perceived through itself, through its own mediations—at the same time we are each also objectified through others’ mediations of us…mass media, while potentially setting up structures that could change our relations with a stultifying past, instead have been set up to deny subjects their own perceptions and any abilities to produce their own media and mediations based on those perceptions” (16).

            Wysocki stresses that we are both a body producing ideas within ourselves, as well as a body with ideas projected upon ourselves by others. I think this is important not only in considering new media and technology, but in the misunderstandings and failed good intentions that come out of those media. While the presence of our physical bodies may not be apparent in cyberspace, the ideas of default cultural characteristics that are associated with race are still projected into cyberspace, and thus bring race and racism into non-physical, non-bodied spaces.

            I think this is the key transition to Banks’s piece, “Oakland, The Word, and the Divide: How We All Missed the Moment”. Here, the focus is very much the implications of race in use and access to technology, and how the institutionalization of racism is carried into the institutionalization of technology under a global capitalist market. The idea of embodiment recurs through the piece, and the projection of values (largely racial values) onto Black bodies, as well as the denial or cover-up attempts regarding the presence or absence of Black bodies in proximity to technology, as is clearly stressed in the “Falling Through the Net” reports and the Bush Administration’s denial of the Digital Divide as a social phenomenon. Banks also points out how technology use operates under the assumption of White As Default (p. 34), which immediately instills a racial value in the “cybersphere”, as well as creating an absent Platonic-esque Ideal of the Web user, embodying certain cultural collectives of race/class/gender while denying others (mainly minority/poor/female).

            Overall, this articles attempt to open our eyes both to who we physically are as writers, how our writing is perceived when embodied, and which bodies are participating in which areas. I think these are incredibly important for discussions of technology, which often make the assumption of universal accessibility or neutrality, rather than acknowledging that conversations (through real socioeconomic facts and through embodiment) are actually revolving around certain demographics and access points.