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,…
When the market economy is always advertising its newest advanced technologies as something essential for your living, even if you had a fully functional device that you were satisfied with the day before the ad came up, what you feel for the new one is not a desire but a need. Consumerism takes away one’s…
Han’s texts have made me rethink the relevance of human values rooted in cultural identities. Although I spend almost all my day in digital environments, as a millennial, born and raised in a Third-world country, I am not a digital native. I have experience and memories of rhetorical practices outside the digital jungle. The all-encompassing…