In a post-globalization world, when the horizon of cultural mixing is rapidly expanding and we are renegotiating our understanding of values, perceptions, and habits—Byung-chul Han sees this cultural shifting through a lens of optimism and names it Hyperculture. The definition of culture is varied and anthropologists, sociologists, or literary critics explain the term from different…
This entry ponders the significance of database as an act of theory-making in two phases: database as fate and database as canon-making. The intention of this work is to extend the consideration of formation of knowledge in digital spaces as an active process influenced by the metaphysical, an interwoven academic lifemaking that penetrates into the…
Han reflects on communal disruption in the wake of and addiction to digitalization from different perspectives, one of which is the role of corporeality in the conceptualization of community. The term “digital community” has redefined the directionality of human relationships. It reinforces the paradigm shift in human values, including freedom (p. 10), possession vis-à-vis access…
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). I…
When I think about the resistance of material things—those tactile objects giving shape and texture to physical reality—I think about how I bought a home in the forest on a small plot of land, where I put things into the earth so that it yields things in return. I think of how the invasive creep…
Han’s discussion of fluidity of information by infomatons in ‘Non-things’ shows how hyper-cultured our society has become. The apt attention we pay to information, which is referred to by Han (2022) as “non-things,” shows that the internet world has changed our lives and reality. The digital terministic screen indeed prevents us from having access to…
Hermeneutics refers to the study of interpretation. The word’s journey started with an Anatolian origin as a technical expression through Greek hermēneuō (to interpret) to hermeneutes (interpreter) to hermeneutikos (of or for interpreting). Another etymology of the term was established by Martin Heidegger that traces its origin to Greek hermeneuein (v.), which is related to…
Would you characterize Byung-Chul Han’s Non-things as a critical theory, a productive theory, or something else? Why? This week while reading “A Portrait of a Scholar…In Progress” in Composition Forum, the distinction Louise Phelps draws between critical and productive theories queued these questions. If we grant “theory” its etymology, the trace gives us theorein, or…
– In Computer and Composition, technofeminism has emerged to critique the historical domination of male figures in the domain of digital spaces, technology and culture, which were inherently biased against women. The hegemonic designs and definitions of technology often limit women as eternal outsiders in that very realm and perpetuate harmful stereotypes as technologically challenged/inferior…
Banks’s (2011) work on Digital Griots seeks to project afrofuturistic movements to nudging for non-western and diasporic rhetoric to inclusively have a space in Digital Rhetoric. What the field of Writing and Tech Com needs to know is that there is communal and indigenous knowledge from different national cultures that needs to be embraced to…