We have been on Han for a while now, and I may say I’m a big fan. But a thought suddenly came to my mind while reading “The Information Regime,” and it gained ground. Han speaks of technology as though it has no calculative human connection at all. I do not agree. Yes, technology is…
I was thinking about how the simultaneousness of nearness and distance has been a benefit of the development of phones and other digital tools as I read the passage where Han discusses it (p. 55). When my dad and I talk about how much we miss each other, he often says, “Thank God for phones…
Han positions stillness as a conduit for the divine—the higher order of things that can only be sought through choosing to do nothing and listening. The divine arrives at those who are able to just be without compulsion. But the information regime fosters a “destructive hyperactivity” (81) among those it dispossesses of thingness and bodies:…
I once wrote about our reliance on depictions of greatness in the wake of failure. Because we’re prone to fail–and failure being verboten, nor accounted for all that well in our social systems, if at all–human beings must bounce back from failure. Bouncing back is hard. Heroes, however, make it look easy. The ease with…
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…