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…
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:…
A student recently accused me of not replying to “any” of her emails, when I had only not responded to a singular one that I had addressed in another email. This is just an itsy bitsy of all the entitlements that come with technological consensus. It’s my email (or any messaging app), yes, but the…
The use of social media platforms as a way of “living in the third space” (78) and digital rhetorical spaces to resist the attention economy. Odell (2017) sees attention economy as characterized by “racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, climate change denial, which are referred to as “myths and superstitions” with no basis in reality (p….
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…
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…
Rewind the tape, cup an ear, settle in: RIDE blog carnival #2 mixes with repair and context collapse, community and corporeality, storying and rhetoric’s reconstitutive capacity, and more: nine distinctive yet generatively syncopated entries. Due to longer lines at the ferris wheel ticket window and kettle corn stand, carnival #1 yielded more time for composing…
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…
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…
The Yorkie is smaller in height than an average blade of grass. To her, everything is supersized, bombastically large, critically unmoored. There is no context, no meaning to convention beyond raw joy. She is open to everything and closed to none, the natural enemy of the attention economy aside from that of tennis balls. I,…
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…