When we talk about community, there is an inherent tension between those who happen to be around you and those you have actively sought out. How do we understand community in our own lives–something that develops physically around us, or something we have to seek out and insert ourselves into? Jenny Odell, in her work…
I read Mark Zuckerberg’s definition of identity (Odell, p. 163) as one and absolute as a consumerist trope, which wants to turn human consumers into a product—a product that is manifested as a brand with a distinctly monolithic self. This, I guess, helps the manufacturers of this product—the social media companies in this context—to orient…
One of my warmest memories is a pattern: me in the passenger’s seat of my grandpa’s (Bobo’s) dusty, wood-paneled station wagon, Bobo behind the wheel, sun glinting off his square framed glasses, telling me a story (probably something comedically jarring, like that time he complimented a villager’s cat in rural Burma, mistakenly using a word…
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…
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…
Clive’s idea that AI is thirsty can be witnessed in the unpredictability of AI in most contexts. In conditions where enough preamble and cues are not given to AI, its result production is questionable. It makes its chats skeletal by itemizing general points already established and premeditated information known to everyone. Gleaning from Han’s Non-things,…
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…
A product of Burma’s diaspora, I’m rooted in a country only familiar to me in its immaterial, unbounded, storied form; evoking a home that is more apparition than physical site. Yet, my roots—my linkages to the non-space of Karen oral histories—are also characterized by an abiding rootlessness: we (myself/my ancestors) dwell not in static spaces…
From Greek -ismos > Latin -isma > French -isme > English -ism, this suffix indicates a system or ideology. A system is a set of rules, and ideology is a systematic set of ideas—as first used in socialist and communist writings with reference to class—is related to political and economic conditions. Dataism (the term coined…
Using land-based literacy to understand how experiences are shaped by material and embodied interaction. Such evidence of land-based rhetorical work can be seen in the digital Samaritan project by Jim Ridolfo. The scholar works with and for the Samaritan community to increase access to their cultural patrimony through digitization. This digital work by Rudolfo was…
