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…
In answering the question on the last thing I repaired, I hope also to be able to configure the different kinds of metaphorical repair that play out in the readings of Odell (2019), Jackson (2014), Han (2022), Hayles (2007), and Rivers (2020). To achieve this, I hope to analyze and story repair as a rhetoric…
The concept of smart homes as modern panopticons and surveillance mechanisms is a thought-provoking perspective that raises concerns about the privacy and security implications of connected technologies within our living spaces. Han (2022) says that Google presents the interconnected smart home of the future as an “electric orchestra” with the resident as a “conductor” (5)….
This past weekend, I knelt on the concrete pad outside the back door of my house, contemplating the apotropaic gaping face of the outdoor outlet, burned beyond reconciliation by a combination of faulty cordage and bad decisions from a prior resident of this lore-heavy property. The context of this agamic, unavailing stare-off was the reel…
I’m drawn to Jennifer Clary-Lemon’s new materials environmental rhetoric for many reasons, one of which involves her call for us to “listen better” to the troubled/troubling ways we dwell amidst—and are implicated within—environmental change and destruction. I think of “listening better” as a valuable extension of “deep listening,” as both approaches to sensed/sensing dwelling provoke…
Arola’s argument that “the seemingly landless place of cyberspace is always already part of the land,” as well as an extension of our bodies and relationalities moved me to look back at my MA capstone project, a multimodal, digitally housed text that incorporated images and audio recordings (212). When I set out to archive my…