The idea of technological access has been a core concern in the field of rhetoric and composition (computers and composition). Traditionally, access has been understood as a literacy issue located in classrooms and framed in political terms such as race, class, gender, technological materiality and activity in networked writing environments. That is to say, access has been a trait to learn or to be possessed. Yet, with the emergence of pervasive socially networked writing environments like Facebook and Twitter, issues of social, cultural, and technological access express themselves much earlier in students' lives and linger throughout professional careers. Such writing technologies collapse moments of access in activities that are enacted across traditional private/public divides. These social writing technologies make access harder to theorize and locate than it was even a five years ago by moving across academic disciplinary divides like cultural rhetoric, professional writing, and computers and composition. In this work, I update the definition of access as enacted to ask two important questions: what does access mean today and can we locate access as it happens?To address these questions, this dissertation builds a methodology at the level of theory and empirical research that enables researchers, theorists, and rhetors to find specific moments of access that span both the cultural and the technological simultaneously. I theorize and trace access not as a trait to be assigned to individuals or in reference to specific technologies but instead as moments of accessing enacted by people, tools, and cultures in professional and personal lifespheres. I build my definition and methodology of access-as-enacted by drawing on a variety of research methods (creative non-fiction, theory building critical analysis, network analysis, and participant interview). These methods trace the professional and personal/cultural lifesphere issues that are coordinated around and through writing technologies not by defining access but rather by locating when and where access occurs.This dissertation demonstrates that attention to social media, careers, and lived cultural experiences when placed alongside traditional concerns of access give us new insights into the interconnectedness of new media writing. Women and nonwhite ethnicities with lower social power have spent more time struggling with the practices of access, which now include social writing technologies. As such, their actions in social writing environments highlight the cultural and career relationships of social writing technologies. Their actions and lived experiences index a more accurate understanding of both cultural and technological rhetorical issues than others who might not have to work as hard to deploy such rhetorically loaded technologies. This dissertation helps us to understand new concerns in the field of Rhetoric and Composition about the relationship between careers, culture, and technologically supported social media writing.
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