It’s funny because I’d been working on my duck face all summer only to encounter Han and get told that my engagement with an informaton turns my countenance in a non-thing that is information, or a digital illusion. But so what? If we must abide a terrestrial order, why can’t our lives be optimized to…
he critical to post-human approach is based on the concept that memory is not additive, rather narrative: memories shape a changing story, while digital mediums operate only by storing data. Accumulation and addition, characteristic of digital data, displace the narrative essence of memory. Only narratives can imbue meaning and endure. The digital realm, governed by…
In a scene from The Deerhunter (1978), a disillusioned “Nick,” played by Christopher Walken, steps onto the veranda of the hospital where he was convalescing alongside other Vietnam War soldiers. He absorbs a scene of uniformity-in-death: countless metal coffins are being stacked so that the bodies of the dead could be returned home. Nick then…
My brother and I are home for our grandma’s 90th. We sit on the floor, tailbones aching, paging through dusty stacks of family albums. We trace faces through the protective gloss of picture sleeves. We smile. We laugh. But we also complain: why is it so hard to eliminate the material glare of each photo…
I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about AI and its implications for DEI. After reading Bender et al. (2021), I have come to the conclusion that my attitude towards LMs and digital rhetorics is a fairly accurate one. The digital landscape, not unlike the “real” world, is one where access is broadly…
Han claims that digitalization derealizes the world (p. 47); as humans, we now interact less with physical objects and are more inclined to have technology solve our problems for us. I recall the physical things I used to have that I no longer feel interested in using. Growing up, I had about three hard copies…
Han reflects on communal disruption in the wake of and addiction to digitalization from different perspectives, one of which is the role of corporeality in the conceptualization of community. The term “digital community” has redefined the directionality of human relationships. It reinforces the paradigm shift in human values, including freedom (p. 10), possession vis-à-vis access…
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…
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…
Han’s discussion of fluidity of information by infomatons in ‘Non-things’ shows how hyper-cultured our society has become. The apt attention we pay to information, which is referred to by Han (2022) as “non-things,” shows that the internet world has changed our lives and reality. The digital terministic screen indeed prevents us from having access to…