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…
This entry ponders the significance of database as an act of theory-making in two phases: database as fate and database as canon-making. The intention of this work is to extend the consideration of formation of knowledge in digital spaces as an active process influenced by the metaphysical, an interwoven academic lifemaking that penetrates into the…
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…
I don’t think I’ve ever thought of all the ills connected to “the environmental unconscious of digital composing” until I read these articles. Each word added flesh and bones to my ignorance, and then ignorance turned to guilt, and guilt to perplexities. And then I could not stop thinking about how many people are actually…
When I think of how often I repair things today as a student of rhetoric, the most recent thing I can think of is replacing a battery in a key fob. Replacing a battery is a relatively simple endeavor, but considering that until the beginning of this very month, I hadn’t owned a key fob…
After returning to our course description and August-September conversations, I have sketched the following questions to prompt and guide our RIDE Blog Carnival #1. An in-progress draft is due in your Google Folder by Monday, October 2; the entry deadline for posting is Monday, October 9. Approximate scope should be 800-1000 words, though this is,…
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…
I can’t think of the last thing I tried to repair other than myself which is ongoing. Instead, I use Question 5 of this round’s Blog Carnival as an opportunity to expand an argument originally explored in an earlier nineties post on the concept of broken world thinking, repair, and whether or not rhetoric is…
Digital rhetoric is a negotiation of information—and its historical, social, economic, and political contexts and influences—to affect change of survivance (survival and resistance) in the network spaces. Despite the space being dominated by specific dominant cultures, scholars, both indigenous and internalized, of digital cultural rhetorics have responded with research methodologies and inclusive rhetorical paths of…
Banks (2011) argues that a DJ is a multimodal storyteller, which is a manifestation of a griot—a traditional storyteller. I can draw comparisons between DJ techniques and preachers, comic creators, poets, and storytellers, not to mention how DJs juggle many topics. What Banks wants to understand is that just as DJing involves, scratch, remixing, weaving,…