Movie cameras give us the “optical unconscious” (Benjamin). In a way, they’re like Kenneth Burke’s terministic screens. Because people perceive the world differently through language and symbols that lend themselves to abiding certain beliefs, we could think of Burke’s screens as revealing the “rhetorical unconscious”; or capturing interpretations that we otherwise take for granted. The…
Han (2022) says that analogue photographs are things because we take great care in keeping them safe. Sure, analogue, printed photos of a Kodak camera are probably kept in an album. As did my mom. She used to have a polaroid camera and it produced a couple of hundreds of “still” photos. I can see…
It’s awfully presumptive of Dataists to say humans would prefer a robot to the same democracy that gave them the robot. The Marvel character Ultron once observed that humans always create things that supplant them: “Men of peace create engines of war and people create children” (Avengers: Age of Ultron). He then turned around and…
Many of the blog carnivals of the 2000s responded to moments and events; I remember them as informal, self-selective with regard to participation, and staggered in time so as to foster dialogue and cross-hatched linking to one another’s entries. Simply, conversations played out. The carnivals that have endured through University of Michigan’s Digital Rhetoric Collaborative…
It’s funny because I’d been working on my duck face all summer only to encounter Han and get told that my engagement with an informaton turns my countenance in a non-thing that is information, or a digital illusion. But so what? If we must abide a terrestrial order, why can’t our lives be optimized to…
he critical to post-human approach is based on the concept that memory is not additive, rather narrative: memories shape a changing story, while digital mediums operate only by storing data. Accumulation and addition, characteristic of digital data, displace the narrative essence of memory. Only narratives can imbue meaning and endure. The digital realm, governed by…
In a scene from The Deerhunter (1978), a disillusioned “Nick,” played by Christopher Walken, steps onto the veranda of the hospital where he was convalescing alongside other Vietnam War soldiers. He absorbs a scene of uniformity-in-death: countless metal coffins are being stacked so that the bodies of the dead could be returned home. Nick then…
Over the last four decades, Hip Hop has expanded its influence across various demographics, employing principles akin to those found in technical and professional communication, which can be likened to user-localization of digital and communicative technologies. In “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America”, Tricia Rose(1994), primarily asserts the enriching an intriguing…
. Sankofa symbol It’s critical to note that the field of digital rhetorics is dynamic, and discussions and viewpoints about redefining the field must continue to evolve based on ongoing research and how the field can explore innovative pedagogical approaches that can utilize digital and surfing technologies to enhance teaching writing and composition. Not only…
In Adam Bank’s book, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, he uses ideas of multimodal rhetoric and rhetors as community leaders to help us understand how DJs occupy a space outlined in West African culture for the “griot,” a role Banks defines as a “master of both words and music who is…