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…
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…
This past weekend, I knelt on the concrete pad outside the back door of my house, contemplating the apotropaic gaping face of the outdoor outlet, burned beyond reconciliation by a combination of faulty cordage and bad decisions from a prior resident of this lore-heavy property. The context of this agamic, unavailing stare-off was the reel…
I’m drawn to Jennifer Clary-Lemon’s new materials environmental rhetoric for many reasons, one of which involves her call for us to “listen better” to the troubled/troubling ways we dwell amidst—and are implicated within—environmental change and destruction. I think of “listening better” as a valuable extension of “deep listening,” as both approaches to sensed/sensing dwelling provoke…
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…
In reading Rivers, I cannot shake the image of the Nine of Swords; the messenger of the Tarot to say that something is uneasy, or perhaps one has been “tossed around by world” (57). I believe a throughline in Rivers’ piece is that in the act of consensual attention, we take up a certain degree…
My scholarship attends to ghosts. By this I don’t mean looking for literal specters (can the ontologically unconfirmed even be considered “literal”—and if not, what does that mean for the unseen?), but taking stock of the ways our bodies, discourses, histories, and narratives are haunted by other(ed) ways of knowing, being, and doing that have…
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…
Hayles’ article was written before the arrival of Generation Alpha, children born into and existing in an age where hyper-attention is at its peak. I would really love to see an article that continues that conversation. I am a mom of two Alphas, and Lord help me with the daily policies and struggles with technology….