This semester, more of my work has been public-facing than at any other time up to this point in my coursework. Unexpectedly, I have become increasingly resistant to writing anything. It was suggested to me that this might be a product of my own pride. I’m inclined to believe the person who said that. It…
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…
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…
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…
Arola’s argument that “the seemingly landless place of cyberspace is always already part of the land,” as well as an extension of our bodies and relationalities moved me to look back at my MA capstone project, a multimodal, digitally housed text that incorporated images and audio recordings (212). When I set out to archive my…
Hayles’ “Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes” in the context of teaching first-year can be used as a pedagogical tool to paying attention to students with neurodiverse needs. Crafting Writing prompts and fostering interactions in the kairotic space (classroom) demands deep attention from students and both teachers. This approach recognizes the diverse cognitive modes of learners,…
Cued up from Hayles (2007) and Folsom (2007) I find the ponderance of databases as carefully plotted but also as wildly human, as collateral to whims and unbidden fantasy, and somehow distillable down to a character, an avatar made of code and thought and poorly translatable emotion. Can databases be alive, not because of their…
Haas (2018) calls for making digital cultural rhetoric an inclusive space for all bodies and identities. In Case Studies of Communities in Digital Practice, I noticed that Digital Cultural Rhetoric need not be situated in specific cultures if we want to achieve social change. Instead, the field needs to expand to value communities of practice…
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…
Rhetorical velocity (Ridolfo & DeVoss 2009) for the sake of generating plagiarizer-friendly texts that can be recomposed for additional purposes perhaps outside the intentions of the original rhetor or rhetors is a nifty pedagogical strategy for teaching students about the vulnerability of their texts, interconnectedness of their rhetorical subjectivities, and the impact of the dromosphere…