My undergrad experience in college really shaped my approach to the internet. I was an English Education major at the time, in the early 00s, when the internet was around but mostly the wheelhouse of scholars and nerds. I was a nerd, learning code as a vehicle for writing, primarily to amuse myself and my friends.

The English department was an embattled unit within a school within a college of a STEM-centric university whose administration was perennially annoyed by the Humanities and their writing requirements. One of the English department’s survival tactics was to grow their approach to technical writing, getting deep into the question of how technology changes, shapes and shifts reading, writing and literacy. Thus they organized loosely around an emerging field called “digital rhetoric.”

For a time this was the top rhetoric and composition program in the field, populated by scholars from scrappy programs. My closest mentor, an English PhD from Wayne State in Detroit, studied race and gender representation in video games and how programmers (particularly Black and trans programmers) write themselves into existence through code, design and other aesthetic and storytelling choices. Outsiders had a really hard time understanding how this work belonged in an English department, but ultimately, she was focused on the question of authorship and how the author is projected throughout her work, a classic literary debate. She treated video games as texts and gamers as an audience, an approach that foretold many things about our current political era.

In this space, “digital” doesn’t just mean content on a screen. The concept is more complex, including social, cultural and rhetorical dimensions, in addition to shifts through time. Digital “texts” and practices exist on a continuum with print and other media, rather than in isolation, transforming how persuasion and communication work, both separately and together.

I took all these lessons and ran with them. This is where my approach to the internet is situated, and there are a few truisms that I learned from that time and era that further position my writing and approach.

Writing is code, code is writing

Writing and code are fundamentally the same thing in digital contexts. Both are systems of symbols that create meaning and action through semantic rules. The line between “content” and “container” blurs in digital spaces. A blog post is the copy on the page – and it’s also the metadata, the responsive design that adapts to different screens, the accessibility markup that makes it readable by screen readers. Each of these elements is written (coded) and each carries rhetorical weight and communicates something to the audience, intended or not. If you understand these relationships, you understand how the internet works as a social and information system.

This convergence of digital and material amplifies the concept of intertextuality, the idea that all texts reference, respond to and build upon other texts. In the classroom, intertextuality often focuses on plays and novels, and explores how authors speak and refer to one another’s work over time. In music, this is the study of sampling and referencing and why.

In digital environments, intertextuality becomes literal and functional. Code libraries reference other code libraries. Websites link to and embed other websites. APIs allow different platforms to communicate and share data. A single digital text might pull content from multiple sources simultaneously – a Twitter embed, a YouTube video, a Google Map – creating a networked document that exists across multiple platforms and authors. Virality builds rhetorical velocity through layers of meaning being added by individual users in real time, creating new texts and contexts through iteration and sharing.

Writing makes reality

A lot of students of this era took up knitting. It was trendy, yes, but the professors also taught knitting as an applied example of technical writing, and how writing produces a material reality.

Knitting patterns are technical writing in its purest form. A pattern is a set of instructions that must be precise, unambiguous, and reproducible, the same goals as any technical document. Pattern writers use specialized notation (K2tog, SSK, yo) that functions like code, compressing complex physical actions into standardized symbols that individuals interpret using sticks and string. The pattern must account for different skill levels, anticipate common errors, and provide enough context for the knitter to understand not just what to do, but why.

Good instructions and an able translator may result in a wearable delight: a sweater, a scarf, a cozy and colorful pair of socks. When a pattern fails the result is the same as failed technical documentation: confusion, wasted time and an unusable product. Piles of string. Dumb, useless sticks. It is an incredibly strong reminder that technical writing isn’t confined to manuals and protocols. It exists anywhere complex processes need to be communicated clearly and consistently so others can replicate results – including in your granny’s yarn basket.

So that’s how I learned to knit. Digital rhetors link physical practices to digital ones to illustrate highly conceptual ideas about writing and social networks. And one reason why digital spaces like Ravelry deserve recognition as thoughtful, functional social platforms is that this link between conceptual and material is made explicit in the digital knitting community. Designed for information sharing among a particular audience, decisions about information architecture and community management reasonably cascade from the mission, so Ravelry has remained a reasonably healthy community experience for most users despite its massive size and sprawling discussion. It remains an example of positive social dynamics online, unlike its behemoth competitors.

Always returning to Haraway

Many thinkers and texts built out this field of thought, but Cyborg Manifesto sits at the forefront for me. Writing during the Reagan era, with the populace freaking out about the rise of biotechnology and personal computing all around her, Haraway entered debates about whether women should enter male-dominated, militaristic fields like engineering and computer science, bringing an overtly feminist lens to questions of technology and power.

One major takeaway from Haraway’s work is the importance of rejecting binary thinking around technology and science. This approach aligns with other humanist and feminist perspectives that foundationally believe technology is by, about, and for the human experience, thus providing new and novel sites for political struggle. This gave people frustrated by tech a permission structure for interacting with technology rather than avoiding or abstaining from it entirely.

If these questions of knowledge and power remain central to technology, we want the people making those decisions to share our values and interests, and to be in the room when decisions are made. This argument is ripe for various challenges, which is why it was such a provocative starting point for cyberpunks and cyberfeminists alike.

Sharing is caring

This was an open source culture that meant sharing not just finished products, but the breadcrumbs and other attempts at learning along the way. It requires the safety that supports a yes/and culture, where people can collaborate with transparency, in spite of, or in consideration of, the ugly stuff and the many unknowns.

We let public and private live alongside each other without rigid boundaries about professionalism and polish. Your serious professional work could sit next to a meme, which could sit next to a picture of your cat, and none of it diminished the other.

This was an intentional acknowledgment that people are multifaceted, and that the digital spaces we inhabit should reflect that complexity. Putting the personal and the real alongside the artificiality of digital communications builds a relationship between the viewer and creator in ways that carefully curated, brand-managed presences just can’t (also: yawn).

Vulnerability, humor, expertise, horror, scholarship, and joy coexist, as in real life.