Mashup Mirror: A Funhouse Index of Attention

Come one, come all, to the mashup mirror—and get lost in the discursive journey of your reflection. As a response to Brown, Jr.’s call for a “mashup” approach to composing as a “matter of tuning the dial appropriately” and finding synergy between scholê and dromos (89); and Ridolfo and DeVoss’ call to consider how “rhetorical…

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Listening as Intervention

I’m drawn to Jennifer Clary-Lemon’s new materials environmental rhetoric for many reasons, one of which involves her call for us to “listen better” to the troubled/troubling ways we dwell amidst—and are implicated within—environmental change and destruction.  I think of “listening better” as a valuable extension of “deep listening,” as both approaches to sensed/sensing dwelling provoke…

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On the Metaphorization of Land and Conscious Digital Composing

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…

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Narrative Ecologies: A Living Landscape Between Hyper and Deep Attention?

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…

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RIDE Blog Carnival #1 Playback

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…

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Memory Is Not Additive, But Narrative 

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…

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Thoughts From the Couch: Technologies of Solace in Pop Culture’s Mirror

In a scene from The Deerhunter (1978), a disillusioned “Nick,” played by Christopher Walken, steps onto the veranda of the hospital where he was convalescing alongside other Vietnam War soldiers. He absorbs a scene of uniformity-in-death: countless metal coffins are being stacked so that the bodies of the dead could be returned home. Nick then…

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Another World, Another Universe: Griots and Their Hypertexts in 80’s and 90’s Ball Culture

In Adam Bank’s book, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, he uses ideas of multimodal rhetoric and rhetors as community leaders to help us understand how DJs occupy a space outlined in West African culture for the “griot,” a role Banks defines as a “master of both words and music who is…

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