As promised yon, RIDE Blog Carnival #3 is an open event. Here is what we agreed to some months ago: Carnival #3 will work a bit differently in that it will invite a wider set of possibilities. Whereas Carnival #1 and Carnival #2 will be guided by a set of questions, or a theme, Carnival…
I read Mark Zuckerberg’s definition of identity (Odell, p. 163) as one and absolute as a consumerist trope, which wants to turn human consumers into a product—a product that is manifested as a brand with a distinctly monolithic self. This, I guess, helps the manufacturers of this product—the social media companies in this context—to orient…
I figured I would respond to question one, which is also connected to question three on the “blog carnival” prompt, as I intend to revisit some of the responses I have made in the past few weeks in my nineties to answer the question, “What are digital rhetorics now?” and “What, as rhetoric and writing…
Reading Borges in the past, I remember regarding the infinite permutations of “garden”-pathing, forecasting hypertext, abundant, wonderful, and inviting. But this time, the fourth? or fifth?, a Friday afternoon in late August, am struck by the inexhaustible and therefore exhausting (for mortal humans) infinitude. A garden does not plant, nor water, nor curate itself. The…
I stopped posting on social media websites this past summer. Thinking back on why I did so, I cannot really recall why I made that decision; Reddit was going through its latest phase of drama, having to do with APIs. Many subreddits at the time went dark, but in the end, I do not know…
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…
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…
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…
From Greek -ismos > Latin -isma > French -isme > English -ism, this suffix indicates a system or ideology. A system is a set of rules, and ideology is a systematic set of ideas—as first used in socialist and communist writings with reference to class—is related to political and economic conditions. Dataism (the term coined…
I don’t think I’ve ever thought of all the ills connected to “the environmental unconscious of digital composing” until I read these articles. Each word added flesh and bones to my ignorance, and then ignorance turned to guilt, and guilt to perplexities. And then I could not stop thinking about how many people are actually…
In response to Hayles, Ed Folsom discusses the interplay of narrative and database, noting that the most powerful narratives become like databases in themselves, their plethora of meanings and throughways—like the Garden of Forking Paths—always exceeding any singular account/interpretation. Notably, Hayles positions narrative as a potential “common ground between hyper and deep attention” (197). If…