After reading Banks’ pieces from Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age I was interested in exploring Banks’ analysis of the DJ as a community figure. In terms of examples of this figure, it is funny to me to hear the DJ referred to as someone who “helps” the MC, amongst others (Scratch,…
I don’t think I have ever thought of the DJ as a rhetor, and here is Banks simply blasting it all over my face; it is indeed amazing, and I am grateful for this reading and would like to own this text. One “mundane fact” I shared in my practicum class is that I used…
I’ve been thinking about how the deeply sited nature of diaspora translates into digital spaces that collapse time, space, and embodiment—elements whose intersection manifest as “site,” a concept Han suggests is the antithesis of hyperculture. But I’ve also been thinking about who might guide us through “de-distanced” landscapes, enacting Walter Mignolo’s decolonial concept of “pluriversality,”…
Face surveillance is the probably most dangerous of the many new technologies that are available to police. It goes without saying how terrifying it can be towards communities of color, especially Black Community. Algorithms can be racist. Apple’s Iphone is a prime example of that. Some facial recognition algorithms misclassified the facial features of at…
The rapid growth of information and communication technology can certainly bring challenges to archives and any theory/practice that is related to it. Internet-based services are capable of replicating all the functions of the archival institutions, as studied by Ivan Szekely. Most of the documents are available online in today’s world which makes them more user-friendly…
I find the way Angela Haas explains organization interesting, especially in relation to the relationships between database and narrative that Folsom and Hayles discuss. Haas clarifies her usage of subheadings, stating “Despite the use of subheading to facilitate spatially organized logics, it is important to read productive intellectual and practical overlaps across and between the…
Cued up from Hayles (2007) and Folsom (2007) I find the ponderance of databases as carefully plotted but also as wildly human, as collateral to whims and unbidden fantasy, and somehow distillable down to a character, an avatar made of code and thought and poorly translatable emotion. Can databases be alive, not because of their…
Haas (2018) calls for making digital cultural rhetoric an inclusive space for all bodies and identities. In Case Studies of Communities in Digital Practice, I noticed that Digital Cultural Rhetoric need not be situated in specific cultures if we want to achieve social change. Instead, the field needs to expand to value communities of practice…
Folsom reminds us of the inherent excess haunting both database and narrative: each requires a perpetual eclipsing of an out-thereness; a map of infinite possibilities that can only be illuminated one at a time, emerging from thresholds like phantoms. If databases provide bits and pieces rendered visible by a series of choices; narratives are the…
Han’s example of a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt is not necessarily eager to experience a foreign culture, rather suggests that they have no existing cultural roots to identify another culture as a foreign one. If we just look at this class, it consists of people representing such vast cultural diversity. However, visually we all…