Come one, come all, to the mashup mirror—and get lost in the discursive journey of your reflection. As a response to Brown, Jr.’s call for a “mashup” approach to composing as a “matter of tuning the dial appropriately” and finding synergy between scholê and dromos (89); and Ridolfo and DeVoss’ call to consider how “rhetorical velocity” shapes our writing decisions in the presence of future places, spaces, and circulations; I present to you a mashup of our collective dialogue around the class lodestar, “attention.” By placing my peers in dialogue with one another (and myself), I write alongside the “accident” of our compositional collisions in order to make intentional, strategic space for future remixing, reinvention and reappropriation.
Below is a collection of our contrapuntal voices across 13 tracks—and, as such, a series of conversations that are as (un)likely as they are serendipitous. I invite you, dear reader, to follow the thread of your own writing as it collides, intersects, and constellates with others’ ideas, perhaps opening up new pathways for discovery. Make note of the remixed title for each mashup, and how the bolded words are gleaned from your dual posts to refashion a dialogic landscape rooted firmly in your own voices. Finally, feel free to get lost in the uncanny surreality of the image mashups, which are generated as prompted by each remix title (using DeepAI and Open AI), ultimately visualizing a semester’s worth of inter-wor(l)ding collisions.
[Track 1] The DJ’s Voice as Rhetorical Captain: Sailing versus Sinking in a Sea of Digital Information (Ojedele’s “Syncing Syncopated Rhetorical Rhythms Towards Cultural Codification” x Nath’s “(in)significant existence”)
[Track 2] Rolling in the Digital Deep: Play as a Pathway Towards Resistance (Jones’ “Be a Menace by Taking Selfies at the Circus While Playing Games and Eating Bread; or Is There Room for Joy in Non-Things?” x Zan’s “Narrative Ecologies: A Living Landscape Between Hyper and Deep Attention?”)
[Track 3] The Exhaustion of a World On-Demand: How Hyper-attention Fuses Distraction and Entitlement (Temi2: “Alpha Meets Millenial: Do People Still Eat at the Dinner Table?” x “Now That We Have Your Attention…”)
[Track 4] Back to the Grass: Is a Yorkie’s Joy Key to Active Stillness and Anchoring Disconnect from Hyperculture’s Uncomfortable Wail? (Ojadele’s “MJ, People Don’t Want to ‘Leave Me Alone!’” x “Critically unmoored (or learning from a Yorkie“)
[Track 5] ’Refusing to Produce’: Is Doing Nothing a Privileged Demand? (Nath’s “Is ‘doing nothing’ realistic?” x Jones’ “The Precarity of Doing Nothing”)
[Track 6] Communities as Masks or Matter? Outlining the Differences Between Living Spaces and Play–Work Voids (Unger’s “Rhizomatic and Repetitive – Odell and Communities” x Zan’s “Luxury Living in a Placeless Space: A Troubling Snapshot of Hudson Yards“)
[Track 7] To Dwell in the World You Must Listen Beyond Nothingness: How to Navigate the Troubled Space of Hyperculture Through Attentive Leaving and Reckoning Returns (Zan’s “Listening as Intervention” x Ojadele’s “Doing Bad All By Yourself: How to Live in Nothingness and Uselessness”)
[Track 8] (Re)Branding for Repair: Rejecting the Reductive Stories we Tell About Self and Other (Nath’s “Who am I? Mark Zuckerberg and Identity Monolith” x Ojadele’s “Storying Repair: Rejecting Stereotypes”)
[Track 9] Nothing Changes but the Growing Constellation of Crap: Exploring the Links Between Self–Care, Repair, and Outlets of Light Amidst Disciplinary and Personal Darkness (Jones’ “How to Actually Do Something” x Ryan’s “One-Days: A Meditation on Rot and Reparative Care”)
[Track 10] Distorted Communities, Thin Relationships: How Our (Dis)likes Alienate Self and Others (Ojadele’s “Familiarity and Affection as Digital Commodities” x Zan’s “Crowded Zoo, Empty World”)
[Track 11] Regaining the “I” in Rhetoric and Repair: (Re)Centering Humans in Derealizing Contexts (Green’s “A Rhetorician’s Reflection on Repair” x Ojadele’s “The Derealization of the World and Rising Human Passivity”)
[Track 12] We Are a Part of the Fire: Looking Inward to Repair in the Face of Context Collapse (Ryan’s “Nine of Swords; Lord of Cruelty” x Zan’s “Beyond the Looking Glass of ‘Likes’: What a Move to the Country Taught Me About Context Collapse and Relational Repair”)
[Track 13] Broken Bodies and Compromised Communities: How Belonging to Breakdowns Helps Us Repair Towards Futures Otherwise (Nath’s “Kintsugi Repair: Imperfections are Beautiful” x Jones’ “Recovering Rhetoric’s Resilience”)
