The rise of digital technologies has deeply shaped how people, especially youths, attend to information and tasks. Katherine Hayles makes a profound argument that the extensive use of digital technologies catalyzes a generational shift in cognitive modes and capacities. She explains that deep attention refers to the sustained, rigorous focus on a single object, text,…
A new study reveals the immense water footprint of AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Researchers at the University of Colorado and University of Texas found that training the GPT-3 model at a Microsoft data center in Texas consumed around 700,000 liters of water. This water usage is primarily due to the energy-intensive computing resources required to…
In “Rethinking Repair,” Steven J.Jackson(2014) says: “what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the use of nature?” (p. 221). Our curatorial approach departs from the assumption of a world in flux, defined by uncertainty, fragmentation, and impermanence. Rather than see…
Rewind the tape, cup an ear, settle in: RIDE blog carnival #2 mixes with repair and context collapse, community and corporeality, storying and rhetoric’s reconstitutive capacity, and more: nine distinctive yet generatively syncopated entries. Due to longer lines at the ferris wheel ticket window and kettle corn stand, carnival #1 yielded more time for composing…
I can’t think of the last thing I tried to repair other than myself which is ongoing. Instead, I use Question 5 of this round’s Blog Carnival as an opportunity to expand an argument originally explored in an earlier nineties post on the concept of broken world thinking, repair, and whether or not rhetoric is…
It’s October of 2018. I’m moving to the rural fringes of my college town, and I’m anxious. I brace myself for lawns adorned with confederate flags and Trump memorabilia. I have imaginary dialogues with bible-thumping, gun-toting neighbors who would likely peg me, at first glimpse, as a liberal “snowflake.” I feel as though I’m venturing…
When I think of how often I repair things today as a student of rhetoric, the most recent thing I can think of is replacing a battery in a key fob. Replacing a battery is a relatively simple endeavor, but considering that until the beginning of this very month, I hadn’t owned a key fob…
When we talk about community, there is an inherent tension between those who happen to be around you and those you have actively sought out. How do we understand community in our own lives–something that develops physically around us, or something we have to seek out and insert ourselves into? Jenny Odell, in her work…
Odell’s How to Do Nothing gives a picture of attention economic climate that needs to be curtailed through resistance strategies anti-capitalistic approaches. In chapter four, “Exercise in Attention,” Odell indicates why exercising attention as a rhetorical tool is a necessity such that deep attention as a tool can reclaim and restore a person’s sense of personal sovereignty,…