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…
In reading Rivers, I cannot shake the image of the Nine of Swords; the messenger of the Tarot to say that something is uneasy, or perhaps one has been “tossed around by world” (57). I believe a throughline in Rivers’ piece is that in the act of consensual attention, we take up a certain degree…
A student recently accused me of not replying to “any” of her emails, when I had only not responded to a singular one that I had addressed in another email. This is just an itsy bitsy of all the entitlements that come with technological consensus. It’s my email (or any messaging app), yes, but the…
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…