Many Types of Access; Access is More than Material; Access is not Simple

This blog post is largely to note several important references for my research and work in regards to access. In much of what I read, access seems to be presented most frequently as a simple on/off switch, which is sensible given that much of what I read is covering stark differences with closed subscriptions versus open access online, where the difference is so enormous. In addition to cases where access is a question of enormous difference with an identifiable limitation like subscription-only publishing systems, many questions on access are complex.
In Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, Adam J. Banks offers a brilliant argument on many levels, which includes building from a more complexly articulated concept of access. Banks explains:

(starting on Page 41) Beyond the tools themselves, meaningful access requires users, individually and collectively, to be able to use, critique, resist, design, and change technologies in ways that are relevant to their lives and needs, rather than those of the corporations that hope to sell them. Let me sketch what I believe is a more effective matrix for understanding technology access and then conclude with some reflections on what this changed understanding might mean for writing instruction—the work of composition, computers and writing, technical communication, and African American rhetoric. Of course one has to own, or be near places that will allow him or her to use computers, software, Internet connections, and other communication technologies when needed. The “Falling Through the Net” reports, along with many other studies brought this need to our attention. I call this material access, and meaningful access begins with equality in the material conditions that drive technology use or nonuse. To really play out the implications of this statement would mean that there can be no real digital equality without fundamental transformations of the economic relations in our nation. But even that “revolution” alone would not be enough. For material access to have any effect on people’s lives or on their participation in the society, they must also have the knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools effectively, or what I’ll label as functional access. I use this term because, just like functional literacy, it is insufficient for economic or political power or for many kinds of participation in the nation’s social or cultural structures. [end page 41; start page 42]
Porter also notes that people must actually embrace the technologies involved, that there must be a level of community awareness and acceptance in order for those technologies to mean anything. Beyond the tools themselves and the knowledge and skills necessary for their effective use, people must actually use them; they must have experiential access, or an access that makes the tools a relevant part of their lives. In addition to discerning relevance in the technologies, people must have some involvement in the spaces where technologies are created, designed, planned and where policies and regulations are written. They must be present in the processes by which technologies come to mean what they mean for us. This notion of experiential access is a kind of fusion of Porter’s understanding of access and Taborn’s insistence that access also includes power in the creation and shaping of our technologies.
Richard and Cynthia Selfe’s work, along with that of Charles Moran show us that not even these layers of access, alone, are enough. Members of a particular community must also develop understandings of the benefits and problems of any technology well enough to be able to critique, resist, and avoid them when necessary as well as using them when necessary. School districts must know when the wonderful sales pitches of computer companies—and maybe even their donations— won’t work for their budgets, curricula, and strategic plans. I term this ability critical access. Let me offer what might seem to be a simplistic non-technological example here. Just as we make decisions about what foods are healthy for us or not healthy for us, or which ones fit our bodies’ needs at a particular time when at a supermarket or restaurant, any group of people must know how to be intelligent users and producers of technology if access is to mean more than mere ownership of or proximity to random bits of plastic and metal. [end page 42, skipping to page 45]
By transformative access, I mean that African Americans have always argued for a genuine inclusion in technologies and the networks of power that help determine what they become, but never merely for the sake of inclusion.

The entirety of Banks’ book (Banks, A. J. (2006). Race, rhetoric, and technology: searching for higher ground. NCTE-LEA research series in literacy and composition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 162 pp.  ISBN 0-8058-5312-X) is important reading for concerns on access and much more. His articulation of technologies and access are incredibly informative for many fields.   For instance Clara Fernández-Vara and Nick Montfort, in TROPE-13-02 – Videogame Editions for Play and Study, address:

Four types of access to videogames that are analogous to the use of different sorts of editions in literary scholarship: (1) the use of hardware to play games on platforms compatible with the original ones, (2) emulation as a means of playing games on contemporary computers, (3) ports, which translate games across platforms, and (4) documentation, which can describe some aspects of games when they cannot be accessed and can supplement play. These different editions provide different information and perspectives and can be used in teaching and research in several ways.

The TROPE-13-2 publication importantly addresses different types of material access to videogames, in terms of how it relates to scholarship, teaching, and research. This is certainly useful to  inform practices by others, like libraries, for how to handle and support collection and access to physical materials. Banks’ work informs in conceptualizing questions of access, helping to build from and with specific cases.


ADDITION ON MAY 5, 2017. Added all types notes for ease of reference.
Banks, A. J. (2006). Race, rhetoric, and technology: searching for higher ground. NCTE-LEA research series in literacy and composition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 162 pp.  ISBN 0-8058-5312-X
Not checked formatting below, so potentially words mixed, italics missing, copied from PDF, so many possible errors.
Page 1:
We don’t need a “whole new set of metaphors for thinking about the unconscious.” We need, as a culture, to pay attention to the theory and literature of those among us who have long been wrestling with multiplicity. There are many things about e-space which are not new. Yes, the Internet gives us more people writing, but I’m afraid that at the moment it gives us more of the same people writing. Let’s see some real difference.
—Kali Tal, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: African American Critical Theory and Cyberculture.” Wired Magazine, October 1996.
Page 2:
“rather than answer either/or questions about whether technological advancement and dependence leads to utopia or dystopia, whether technologies over determine or have minimal effects on a society’s development, or whether people (especially those who have been systematically excluded from both the society and its technologies) should embrace or avoid those technologies, African American history as reflected through its rhetorical production shows a group of people who consistently refused to settle for the limiting parameters set by either/or binaries. Instead African Americans have always sought “third way” answers to systematically racist exclusions, demanding full access to and participation in American society and its technologies on their own terms, and working to transform both the society and its technologies, to ensure that not only Black people but all Americans can participate as full partners. The story of African Americans’ pursuit of a transformative access can contribute much to rhetoric and technology theory by engaging both in a space beyond the narrow polemics of whether Technology is ultimately evil or wonderful, but rather develop and articulate models of the specific kinds of practices that can provide excluded members of society access to systems of power and grounds on which those systems can be challenged and ultimately changed in meaningful ways.”
Page 3:
Martin Heidegger’s definition of technology as a combination of instruments and processes, artifacts, and activities:

[e]veryone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, and the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. (p. 5)

Page 3:
Rather than look to the cyborg and perpetually fragmented selves and unyielding rupture and be resigned to either celebrate, lament, or endure them as simply the state of being we’ve all been reduced to in this moment, I choose to look for the ways Black people, through their rhetorical traditions, have worked to find their collective way home and heal what ranks among the greatest physical, material, and social ruptures experienced by any group in human history.
Page 7:
Finally, I present in this chapter a taxonomy of access that shows a meaningful access, a transformative access occurs simultaneously along the connected axes of critique, use, and design. One reason I argue for the necessity of such a multidimensional view of rhetoric and technology access is my belief that one cannot afford to be forced to choose between Rhetoric and Composition, between skills and critical thinking, between technological literacy and essayistic literacy, between being a technophile or a Luddite. These are all false choices. An
extension of this argument guides the rest of this project: rhetorical and technological education must take up all three of these axes in theory, pedagogy, and practice with the focus on helping students employ each and all toward access and/or transformation of the spaces they occupy as they see fit.
Page 10:
more than mere artifacts, technologies are the spaces and processes that determine whether any group of people is able to tell its own stories on its own terms, whether people are able to agitate and advocate for policies that advance its interests, and whether that group of people has any hope of enjoying equal social, political, and economic relations.
Page 17:
Meaningful access to any technology involves political power and literacies: “in a formulation that literacy educators will feel most keenly, the project to expand technological literacy implicates literacy and illiteracy—in their officially defined forms—in the continued reproduction of poverty and racism. And it implicates teachers as well” (p. 7)
Page 17:
While race, and especially the connections between race and technology access serve as what Catherine Prendergrast would call the “absent presence in composition,” conveniently contained within easy labels that prevent action on an anti-racist agenda (like tolerance, multiculturalism, and diversity, to take those in common parlance these days) (p. 36), the silence is not all-engulfing, as small numbers have begun to pay attention.
Page 20:
Given these problems, Selfe and Moran articulate an agenda based on activism for equitable access across racial and economic lines, but for an access that is critically informed
Page 21:
The burden of access is not only the responsibility of those seeking it, but is a systemic burden as well.
Page 25 (my note: based on description, this is a perfect DH project):
One of the most studied forms in African American rhetoric, the sermon becomes much easier to study thoroughly, because many of the five challenges to offering rhetorical criticism of sermons that Lyndrey Niles identifies can be greatly minimized:

  • Most African American sermons were not and are not prepared in manuscript form.
  • Most African American sermons through the centuries were not and are not tape recorded during delivery.
  • Some preachers are reluctant to release copies for criticism.
  • Because most African American sermons are in dialogue form, manuscripts may not satisfactorily represent what actually took place in the church.
  • Sermons in the African American tradition were not written to be read. Much of the real impact, therefore, is lost unless the critic knows how the words would have sounded, and can picture the delivery in his or her mind as he or she reads the manuscript.

Page 26:
Many people already know the story of Enlightenment justifications of racism, but the assumptions that Black people had “no ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences” (p. xxx) was accompanied by a draconian body of public laws, making two forms of literacy punishable by law: the mastery of letters and the mastery of the drum“ (p. xxix).
Page 26-27:
“It is the Black Arts Movement that “is the aesthetic and spiritual [page 27] sister of the Black Power concept” (p. 122). While the Black ArtsMovement articulated goals for literary production that were very different from those of Phillis Wheatley or writers in the Harlem Renaissance, the larger purpose remained the same—to undermine Western racism based in pseudo science by using literature to talk back by talking Black,”
Page 27:
But just as dangerous as assumptions that Black people are not technologically inclined, is the assumption that race is, and should be, irrelevant online.
Page 34:
The Pew study, however, interpreted all of its results solely by comparison with the uses to which White Americans put computers and the Internet, repeating the erasure Beth Kolko argued is a fundamental characteristic of technology decision makers, making Whites’ uses of these tools a technological default, rather than viewing the results through a lens focused on African Americans’ needs, experiences, and histories with the technologies. The major result of the Pew study was that the Divide, in their view, was narrowing, and this conclusion has generated much conversation about whether or not people need to continue to view the Digital Divide as an “African American” problem.
Page 39:
We must complicate access, and use our understanding of it to look forward, imagining Black futures, then back through African American rhetorical traditions and legacies of struggle, understanding histories to be created in the service of the futures we want.
Page 41:
Beyond the tools themselves, meaningful access requires users, individually and collectively, to be able to use, critique, resist, design, and change technologies in ways that are relevant to their lives and needs, rather than those of the corporations that hope to sell them. Let me sketch what I believe is a more effective matrix for understanding technology access and then conclude with some reflections on what this changed understanding might mean for writing instruction—the work of composition, computers and writing, technical communication, and African American rhetoric. Of course one has to own, or be near places that will allow him or her to use computers, software, Internet connections, and other communication technologies when needed. The “Falling Through the Net” reports, along with many other studies brought this need to our attention. I call this material access, and meaningful access begins with equality in the material conditions that drive technology use or nonuse. To really play out the implications of this statement would mean that there can be no real digital equality without fundamental transformations of the economic relations in our nation. But even that “revolution” alone would not be enough. For material access to have any effect on people’s lives or on their participation in the society, they must also have the knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools effectively, or what I’ll label as functional access. I use this term because, just like functional literacy, it is insufficient for economic or political power or for many kinds of participation in the nation’s social or cultural structures.
Page 42:
Porter also notes that people must actually embrace the technologies involved, that there must be a level of community awareness and acceptance in order for those technologies to mean anything. Beyond the tools themselves and the knowledge and skills necessary for their effective use, people must actually use them; they must have experiential access, or an access that makes the tools a relevant part of their lives. In addition to discerning relevance in the technologies, people must have some involvement in the spaces where technologies are created, designed,
planned and where policies and regulations are written. They must be present in the processes by which technologies come to mean what they mean for us. This notion of experiential access is a kind of fusion of Porter’s understanding of access and Taborn’s insistence that access also includes power in the creation and shaping of our technologies.
Richard and Cynthia Selfe’s work, along with that of Charles Moran show us that not even these layers of access, alone, are enough. Members of a particular community must also develop understandings of the benefits and problems of any technology well enough to be able to critique, resist, and avoid them when necessary as well as using them when necessary. School districts must know when the wonderful sales pitches of computer companies—and maybe even their donations— won’t work for their budgets, curricula, and strategic plans. I term this ability critical access. Let me offer what might seem to be a simplistic non-technological example here. Just as we make decisions about what foods are healthy for us or not healthy for us, or which ones fit our bodies’ needs at a particular time when at a supermarket or restaurant, any group of people must know how to be intelligent users and producers of technology if access is to mean more than mere ownership of or proximity to random bits of plastic and metal.
Page 45:
African American rhetoric has been about all of this and more; Black people have continually worked for a transformative access to all of the technologies that make up American life. By transformative access, I mean that African Americans have always argued for a genuine inclusion in technologies and the networks of power that help determine what they become, but never merely for the sake of inclusion. African American rhetorical practices call attention to the ways that the interfaces of American life, be they public facilities, education, employment,
transportation, the legal system, or computer technologies, have always been bound up in contests over language, and have always been rhetorical—about the use of persuasion, in these cases, toward demonstrably tangible ends.
Page 61:
Where Malcolm X’s speech shows a thorough functional knowledge and critical awareness of the particular technology of the ballot and the larger political system of which that ballot is a part, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” addresses larger questions concerning the roles of technologies in human life. In the speech,King insists that the test of technological advancement is not increased efficiency or profit, but the degree to which those technologies help to end human suffering and injustice. Religion scholar James Cone documents the ways African American preachers transformed interpretations of the Bible and Christianity more broadly with a “liberation theology” that placed Christ squarely on the side of the oppressed. The purpose of the Black church, then, became about actively seeking the liberation of African Americans, from the individual spirit to the congregation to the nation to Black people worldwide. The radical achievement of liberation theology is in its ability to take what was a tool of enslavement and racism and use it aggressively to disrupt the status quo.
This is the kind of reinterpretation King offers of the role of technologies.
Page 62:
establishes his own activism and African American struggle as examples of technology theorist AndrewFeenberg’s “thirdway,” arguing that neither time nor technology are positive or negative forces in and of themselves. Instead, they reflect the ideological commitments societies and individuals impose on them. What this means is that one must call attention to the systemic problems in theways technologies have been used to further oppression—but also that there are always ways to resist, that there is always agency in the individual and in the society.
Page 83:
her study of nearly 3,000 student essays in the National Assessment of Educational Progress over a 20-year period showing that “the Blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice”—that the “the more discernibly African American the discourse, the higher the primary trait and holistic scores; the less discernibly African American the discourse, the lower the primary trait and holistic scores” (p. 184). Not just the sermonic tone, but African American discourse in general shows what can happen when students and other writers genuinely do have the right to their own language: they claim the right to speak, take the space to do it, and become invested in doing it thoroughly and effectively, and develop rhetorical savvy.
Page 90:
One notable move toward clarifying this muddle comes from Langdon Winner, in his 1986 book The Whale and the Reactor. Winner argues that technologies are not simply the instruments, the tools that we touch, use, save, or throw away. He discussions technologies as both “objects and processes” and argues that “the crucial weakness of the conventional idea is that it disregards the manyways in which technologies provide structure for human activity.” Winner adds that “technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape
that activity and its meaning” (p. 6). I take Winner to mean that the computer—and what we do with it, what it comes to mean in the society—is both aid and powerful force, but that structuring forces that, while instrumental, do not make their way into boxes and wires are also tools.
If technologies can be processes as well as artifacts, and if they can be more than mere tools because they have important effects on the structures of the societies that use them, then it is not such a stretch to consider a genre and its discursive conventions to have technological functions—especially one that is so clearly both process and artifact, tool and shaper of society, as legal discourse is.
Page 106:
Amiri Baraka (1972) implored people to see these same connections, more than 30 years ago, explicitly grounding technology design in both Black culture and rhetoric in a short essay called
“Technology and Ethos.” The essay deserves to be quoted in its entirety, but the opening sentences issue the call even more dramatically than Jafa and Tate: MACHINES (as Norbert Wiener said) are an extension of their inventorcreators. That is not simple once you think. Machines, the entire technology of the West, is just that, the technology of the West. Nothing has to look or function the way it does. The Western man’s freedom, unscientifically got at the expense of the rest of the world’s people, has allowed him to expand his mind—spread his sensibility wherever it cd go, & so shaped the world, & its powerful artifact-engines. Political power is also the power to create—not only what you will, but o be freed to go where ever you can go (mentally physically as well). Black creation—creation powered by the Black ethos brings very special results. (p. 319)
Page 118:
Baraka reminds us why all of this is so important to African American rhetoric, as well as to rhetoric, composition, technical communication, and Black studies: critique alone will not interrupt these practices. Those of us who care about ending systematic oppressions must design new spaces, even as we point out problems in our current ones. While there is probably a need for people like the virtual architects Mitchell evokes to design spaces and communities on the Internet, there is an even greater need for people to make sure that the development of cyberspace doesn’t simply replicate the kinds of systematic exclusions that make up the unseen,
rarely interrogated infrastructure of our uses of physical space. The problem is access, and any vision of what cyberspace can, will, or should become that does not seriously engage this problem cannot make good on any other claims it might make, no matter how attractive. Scholars in composition and technical communication have begun to see access as an important intellectual problem, and some have even begun to see it as a rhetorical problem in addition to a material one.
Some of those scholars have also begun to pay serious attention to design in their teaching and theorizing, as the Internet has made the visual far more important than it ever had been to whatever we now call “writing.” Our ability to ensure that problems of access and design come together to help people move from no access, to the kinds of passive, consumer and corporate driven access that Mitchell and others understand Internet users as needing, to a more meaningful power that holds the potential to transform experiences, lives, spaces, and technologies depends on far more than the ability to write for, speak for, advocate for, those who have been locked out of opportunity and planned out of community. It depends on the ability to get people involved in answering design and policy questions for themselves and understanding the networks of power that prevent designers, policy makers, politicians, educators, and others from making more equitable design and policy decisions.
Page 131:
The broader challenge is exactly as he identified it in 1968—the challenge of transforming our technologies as we gain access to them, and that we use those technologies toward the larger project of transforming the nation, of justice and equal participation for Black people and all people.
Page 138:
I attempted in the first chapter to provide an outline of what might constitute a more meaningful access to digital technologies. Of course one has to own, or be near places that allows her or him to use computers, software, Internet connections, and other tools in order to have access to those technologies. I called this material access. But for one part of access to have any effect on people’s lives or on their participation in the society, people must also have the knowledge and skills necessary to use these tools effectively (functional access). They must be
connected enough with those technologies that they use them (experiential access). They must also understand the benefits and problems of those technologies well enough to be able to critique them when necessary and use them when necessary (critical access). We must know how to be intelligent users, producers, and even transformers of technologies if access is to mean anything to our individual lives, the lives of our students, or those of the communities we live, work, and play in. That template for what meaningful access requires doesn’t go far enough, however. What is meaningful access to technology if it’s not just about its availability or proximity to us? It’s not just a neat list of material access, functional access, experiential access, and critical access. Access to any particular technology occurs only when individuals or members of a group are able to use that technology to be able to tell their own stories in their own terms and able to meet the real material, social, cultural, and political needs in their lives and in their communities. Access to a technology means that members of a particular group know how to use it for both participation and resistance. Real access goes far deeper than the passive consumerism that drives almost all computer advertising and much technology policy—it is about the ability to use computers and the Internet as a means of production too.
Page 143:
African American rhetoric as a field of study should make the Internet and multimedia publishing spaces for reclaiming the work of as many speeches, sermons, flyers, posters, radio broadcasts, websites, television shows, films, and other media as possible in hypertexts and other instructional media that are collaborative, connected to each other, and in DuBois’s standard for Black Theater that was reduced to a sample and turned into a clothing industry, FUBU—for us, by us. Using cyberspace and multimedia products like CDS for serious archival work can prevent those who teach African American rhetoric from having to worry as much about what publishers are willing or unwilling to publish, or include in anthologies. It can also, to some degree, help to minimize the problems of copyright that can emerge in our attempts to make materials available to students and colleagues. My point here is that if as much material as possible that is currently in the public domain and/or can be obtained through permissions is archived in repositories that make free and open access to them their policy, the struggles that individual faculty and students face in trying to obtain those permissions from the exclusive archives Alkalimat mentions, or from dead publishing companies who still hold the rights to so many documents, can be mitigated.