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…
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…
A new study reveals the immense water footprint of AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Researchers at the University of Colorado and University of Texas found that training the GPT-3 model at a Microsoft data center in Texas consumed around 700,000 liters of water. This water usage is primarily due to the energy-intensive computing resources required to…
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…
This semester, more of my work has been public-facing than at any other time up to this point in my coursework. Unexpectedly, I have become increasingly resistant to writing anything. It was suggested to me that this might be a product of my own pride. I’m inclined to believe the person who said that. It…
Over the last four decades, Hip Hop has expanded its influence across various demographics, employing principles akin to those found in technical and professional communication, which can be likened to user-localization of digital and communicative technologies. In “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America”, Tricia Rose(1994), primarily asserts the enriching an intriguing…
Actually Doing Something – 10/23/2023 Throughout my reading of Jenny Odell (2019) I kept thinking about David Foster Wallace (2005), his speech “This is Water”. Lo and behold it appears in chapter 5, “The Ecology of Strangers”. Doing the kind of nothing that precipitates action/change requires acute awareness of having other options from what you’re…
To begin with, reading Borges (2018) was quite nostalgic; it brought back memories of literary criticism, the necessity of thematic coding, and events that come to life in your mind. Now, I nearly feel confident in predicting that whoever wrote the script for The Flash (2023) got some inspiration from this short story and its…
Odell (2019) says that her book is not to be taken as a weekend retreat designed to create a more productive worker on the other side of the experience. Having read this book for coursework, I began from a place of mourning; I did not feel I had the time to savor this book the…
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…