Like Porter and Queen, Banks resists the idea that the digital dislocates the rhetor from their material realities, Banks discusses the digital divide and the discourse surrounding the digital divide: “African Americans occupy a Discursive Divide far broader than the digital one that we’ve all heard about during the last few years” (192). More than just a lack of access, Banks notes a two pronged gap:
- African Americans have a healthy dose of technological skepticism, fostered by a long history of witnessing the ways technologies have been used to create ways to subjugate or exterminate people (see “Docile Bodies“)
- there is a general lack of understanding about what “actually constitutes meaningful access.” More than just computer ownership or an axiological commitment to computer ownership, Banks notes that “science and technology issues shape the power relationships that have historically provided the exigence for African American rhetors, and they have influence — 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” (193).