BIOGRAPHY:
Christopher
Carter specializes in Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy studies.
His research interests include critical pedagogy, composition in
the corporate university, activist rhetoric, and new media theory.
In the classroom, he invites students to write hypertexts that
analyze relationships among literacy and ideology, technology and
social power. He has published articles in *Works and Days* and
*Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers*, and has an upcoming essay
in *House of Mirrors: Revising Our Understanding of Reflective
Writing*. He serves as co-editor of *Workplace: A Journal for Academic
Labor*, and is currently writing a book about college unions, their
language practices, and their implications for literacy instruction.
ABSTRACT:
IIn Computers and Composition Studies, there exists growing
concern about relationships between web-based communication and
physical bodies. In response to work in the early nineties suggesting
that virtual interaction allows temporary respite from racial,
gender, and socioeconomic coding, more recent scholarship suggests
that historical forms of exclusion and domination thrive in cyberspace.
As researchers of activist discourse document such exclusivity
within web-supplemented protest movements, they also worry about
the potential replacement of face-to-face political actions with
disembodied forums that produce extensive debate but little strategy.
Yet those who equate online interaction with disembodiment fail
to account for the trace of flesh-and-blood materiality within
virtual conversation space. Body politics and bodily assumptions
tend to linger in discourse whatever its degree of mediation. The
lingering body, or what hackers sometimes call “wetware,” lends
electronic activism its energy while producing some of its internal
dissonance. Based on the subversion of the World Trade Organization
website by the hacktivist collective ®tmark, I argue that the
potential for activism to influence social change depends less
on whether it is embodied performance—which I take as given—and
more on its materialist appeal to the classical concept of *kairos*.
This appeal simultaneously emphasizes opportune timing and a correspondence
between medium and message. |
