Han (2022) describes the future digital community formation as phono sapiens. Han’s use of phono sapiens demonstrates how most individuals are constantly engrossed in the digital sphere and neglect to engage with others or pay attention to what is truly going on in the site-based community. The shift from a site-based world to a digital…
Dataism posits that the universe operates as a network of data flow, wherein humans function as organisms driven by biochemical algorithms, and machines rely on electronic algorithms. Both these systems are viewed as algorithms, highlighting their fundamental similarity. According to this perspective, intuition is subjective, and the growing influence of big data could render it…
We are the product of ancient philia, oriented to a discipline because of a certain affection, held lightly or tightly. We are brought together in communities because of habitus, destined paths we cannot circumvent. I’d argue that the draw to rhetoric, the most ancient of all habitus, is a special call indeed. So how does…
I often feel like we never had a prayer in winning the so-called battle against technology, and now we are rapidly headed towards the loss of the war: as we revel in the “confession boxes” of our smartphones and the digitization of faux lives online that are so much greener than our own in the…
We have been on Han for a while now, and I may say I’m a big fan. But a thought suddenly came to my mind while reading “The Information Regime,” and it gained ground. Han speaks of technology as though it has no calculative human connection at all. I do not agree. Yes, technology is…
I was thinking about how the simultaneousness of nearness and distance has been a benefit of the development of phones and other digital tools as I read the passage where Han discusses it (p. 55). When my dad and I talk about how much we miss each other, he often says, “Thank God for phones…
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:…
Movie cameras give us the “optical unconscious” (Benjamin). In a way, they’re like Kenneth Burke’s terministic screens. Because people perceive the world differently through language and symbols that lend themselves to abiding certain beliefs, we could think of Burke’s screens as revealing the “rhetorical unconscious”; or capturing interpretations that we otherwise take for granted. The…
Han (2022) says that analogue photographs are things because we take great care in keeping them safe. Sure, analogue, printed photos of a Kodak camera are probably kept in an album. As did my mom. She used to have a polaroid camera and it produced a couple of hundreds of “still” photos. I can see…
It’s awfully presumptive of Dataists to say humans would prefer a robot to the same democracy that gave them the robot. The Marvel character Ultron once observed that humans always create things that supplant them: “Men of peace create engines of war and people create children” (Avengers: Age of Ultron). He then turned around and…