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…
Throughout our semester, we have discussed repeatedly that modern technology and the “spaces” resulting from it–the Cloud, the feed, the stream–are poor substitutes for these things in our non-online world and experience, that it in fact is insulting to those things and their place in our lives for us to consider their digital substitutes “real.”…
– In Computer and Composition, technofeminism has emerged to critique the historical domination of male figures in the domain of digital spaces, technology and culture, which were inherently biased against women. The hegemonic designs and definitions of technology often limit women as eternal outsiders in that very realm and perpetuate harmful stereotypes as technologically challenged/inferior…
The DJ as digital griot re/de/sutures fragments of cultures whose totality has been elided by—and eludes—Western ontologies, perpetually connecting black rhetorical traditions with the technologies and possibilities of multimedia writing. Digital griots’ use of “arranging, layering, sampling, and remixing are inventions . . . binding time as they move the crowd and create and maintain…
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…
The rapid growth of information and communication technology can certainly bring challenges to archives and any theory/practice that is related to it. Internet-based services are capable of replicating all the functions of the archival institutions, as studied by Ivan Szekely. Most of the documents are available online in today’s world which makes them more user-friendly…
Many of the blog carnivals of the 2000s responded to moments and events; I remember them as informal, self-selective with regard to participation, and staggered in time so as to foster dialogue and cross-hatched linking to one another’s entries. Simply, conversations played out. The carnivals that have endured through University of Michigan’s Digital Rhetoric Collaborative…
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…
Smartphones as digital teddy bears offer incredible connectivity and access to information but introduce elements that may contribute to a derealization of corporeality by altering how individuals perceive, interact with, and present their physical selves in the digital realm. The challenge is to find a balance that acknowledges the benefits of digital connectivity while preserving…
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…
