While reading Arola’s essay and her preoccupation with digital design and cultural materiality, I recalled Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism and how she also uses the metaphor of “Land” to agitate for cultural sensitivity. The two scholars tend to metaphorize “Land” as a cultural symbol of both the material and immaterial, including humans whose identities are…
A new study reveals the immense water footprint of AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Researchers at the University of Colorado and University of Texas found that training the GPT-3 model at a Microsoft data center in Texas consumed around 700,000 liters of water. This water usage is primarily due to the energy-intensive computing resources required to…
The other day I was watching video essays on YouTube as I far too often do and I came across a video on the channel Wisecrack called “Algorithms and the Death of Hollywood.” Within the video, Michael Burns notes a malady that has emerged within the entertainment industry and digital media. He argues, particularly of…
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…
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…
We have been on Han for a while now, and I may say I’m a big fan. But a thought suddenly came to my mind while reading “The Information Regime,” and it gained ground. Han speaks of technology as though it has no calculative human connection at all. I do not agree. Yes, technology is…
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…
I’m very sensitive to the precarity of doing nothing for people who are not in a position to do nothing. Jenny O writes that the “removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries” between them and their employers (15). So even in my own experience, I’ve been unfairly berated by union reps for…
This past week I watched a video called “Plagiarism and You(tube)” made by HBomberguy. He described in great detail the strategies that several YouTube personalities used to steal intellectual work from other people. The mix and match of text, images, video, and style was dizzying. The environment described by HBomberguy is a strange one, with…
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…