Burroughs felt that individual empowerment in the electronic age would come
through juxtaposition and cut and paste techniques, not, as Berlin stated, through the
observation of discursive contradictions. However, since Burroughs'
observations, we have taken these
techniques
for granted in word processing (the simple commands found under "edit" in word processing programs)
or disparaged them in academic
writing (borrowing other sources is labeled "plagiarism").
The editors
of Race in Cyberspace have compiled a collection of essays
seeking to understand personal empowerment as
the "cyberself as embodied in language, and of the cyberself situated in gender" (Kolko,
Nakamura, Rodman 6) without considering how early technology and culture theorists
like Burroughs understood such empowerment as the juxtaposition between the individual and the machine,
the cut and paste of not only words, but cultural phenomena and technology.
What follows is a sampling of Race in Cyberspace, a brief look
at how cultural studies tackles the digital, and a few suggestions as to
how it might proceed in new directions.
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