A word cloud showing top 100 popular words from a set of texts

Diving in the RIDE Blog: Indexing Avatar & Identity

The RIDE Blog connects the ideas of avatar and identity with many different aspects of incarnation and affinities. The following entries went deep to unwrap the associations. Here is just a glimpse—only five among MANY words that are being seen and used from different lights. They open innumerable possibilities. Consider this as a database and…

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Beyond the Looking Glass of “Likes”: What a Move to the Country Taught Me About Context Collapse and Relational Repair

It’s October of 2018. I’m moving to the rural fringes of my college town, and I’m anxious. I brace myself for lawns adorned with confederate flags and Trump memorabilia. I have imaginary dialogues with bible-thumping, gun-toting neighbors who would likely peg me, at first glimpse, as a liberal “snowflake.” I feel as though I’m venturing…

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On the Metaphorization of Land and Conscious Digital Composing

While reading Arola’s essay and her preoccupation with digital design and cultural materiality, I recalled Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism and how she also uses the metaphor of “Land” to agitate for cultural sensitivity. The two scholars tend to metaphorize “Land” as a cultural symbol of both the material and immaterial, including humans whose identities are…

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Crowded Zoo, Empty World

One of the most manipulative aspects of the like vs. dislike framework is how much it limits our encounters with ourselves and others. Odell writes about how algorithms “incrementally entomb” us until we become a static, deeply monolithic sum of our likes—an ‘us’ that fosters self-understanding through tidy, world-shrinking formulas shrouded as play (137). Meanwhile,…

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