I was intrigued by Brown’s analysis of the accident, particularly the idea that if we were to memorialize accidents, we would need to do so with the understanding that accidents do not exist without the technology involved, that they are therefore not accidents at all (82). As he quotes Virilio as saying, “The shipwreck is…
Throughout our semester, we have discussed repeatedly that modern technology and the “spaces” resulting from it–the Cloud, the feed, the stream–are poor substitutes for these things in our non-online world and experience, that it in fact is insulting to those things and their place in our lives for us to consider their digital substitutes “real.”…
When we talk about community, there is an inherent tension between those who happen to be around you and those you have actively sought out. How do we understand community in our own lives–something that develops physically around us, or something we have to seek out and insert ourselves into? Jenny Odell, in her work…
Consent and Zooming/Zoomers–11/05/2023 In reading Hayles’ and Rivers’ pieces for this week, I am reminded of how different our experiences of attention are post-COVID-19, and the way that consent factors into this. When Rivers writes about, as he calls it, the “moment of capture,” he is writing before a time when all of our attention…
In Adam Bank’s book, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, he uses ideas of multimodal rhetoric and rhetors as community leaders to help us understand how DJs occupy a space outlined in West African culture for the “griot,” a role Banks defines as a “master of both words and music who is…
After reading Banks’ pieces from Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age I was interested in exploring Banks’ analysis of the DJ as a community figure. In terms of examples of this figure, it is funny to me to hear the DJ referred to as someone who “helps” the MC, amongst others (Scratch,…
I find the way Angela Haas explains organization interesting, especially in relation to the relationships between database and narrative that Folsom and Hayles discuss. Haas clarifies her usage of subheadings, stating “Despite the use of subheading to facilitate spatially organized logics, it is important to read productive intellectual and practical overlaps across and between the…
I am not sure what “The Garden of Forking Paths” is trying to accomplish, but I am interested in the contrasting views it seems to provide on our future and past. The narrator offers this advice to “soldiers and bandits,” “Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should…
In Byung-Chul Han’s “Hypertext and Hyperculture,” he ends with the idea that “Re-theologization, re-mythologization, and re-nationalization are common reactions to the hyperculturalization of the world” (10). There is a suggestion that the hyperculturalization of the world will lead to a type of fundamentalism. Considering this was originally published in German in 2005, I feel it…