The mid 1990s was a turning point in my life. Within a year I discovered the Internet and rave culture. I started spending as much time as possible in Internet Relay Chat rooms, reading listserv emails, listening to techno and house music, and attending raves on as many Saturday nights as possible. It was in this milieu that I discovered the 313 listserv—a virtual space where people came together to talk about Detroit techno, record collecting, and the art of DJing.
A handful of years later, I made my way to graduate school at the University of Iowa where I enrolled in Thom Swiss’s Digital Rhetoric course. It was in this class that I began to formulate the ideas for this essay, which I subsequently presented at the University of Texas’s technology and communication conference, “Transparencies: Technology, Culture, Communication.” To this day, I am extremely grateful to the welcoming graduate...
University of California Press