Main ARS, Rhetoric, and Technology Andrea Lunsford: Readers of Kairos, that is scholars and teachers who are especially interested in the relationship of new technologies to rhetoric and writing, will be interested in re-thinking the history of rhetoric and writing—since, after all, these are very old technologies on which the newer ones are building today. Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “remediation” pushes us well beyond the old orality/literacy binary to think about how newer technologies are always mediated by older ones, and vice versa. One theme that ran consistently through the ARS meeting was performance and performativity. Every plenary speaker, for example, touched on performance as an instrumental element of rhetoric, though without taking time for the hard work of definition and illustration. Performance, in turn, is of necessity embodied and mediated—performances entail performers and their media of expression. To this conversation, Kairos readers have an enormous amount to offer, not least because they are already interested in thinking about performance in relation to new media. Working together, scholar/teachers of both old and new media could articulate a theory of rhetoric and of writing capable of accounting for these current practices and situations. ACW [The Alliance for Computers and Writing] currently is not a part of ARS, but as my comments suggest, I believe scholars in these organizations have much to say to one another. Top Main