The Theory Lobby formed in 1994, at the University of Florida, in response to an invitation to the Surprise Party, a celebration held in honor of all researchers investigating the possibilities of electronic media for creative, critical, and pedagogical practice. Working from the premise that the cultural apparatus of literacy must begin to revise its institutional and methodological procedures for storing, transmitting and producing knowledge, the Theory Lobby set itself the goal of inventing writing and reading strategies which directly engaged the significant questions posed by current advances in the fields of computer technology, artificial intelligence and information transfer to the human capacity for reason and creative thought. But an equivalent modification in discursive and cognitive structures, in interpretative and textual practices, accompanies the paradigm shift from the literary to the electronic.
Theory provides the operative mode for proceeding under such circumstances.
Theory is merely the name for a rule-based activity which employs the conceptual as well as material resources of language for the solving of problems or the problematizing of solutions. It facilitates the movement from the Lab to the Lobby , the other scene of electronic invention. The object of this report is to describe the action and experience of writing theoretically and to show the writing of theory to consist in a particular relation with its object, in this case writing electronically, that is with, through or like a machine. . . .