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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