[N.b., to be fair, these challenges do not apply solely to us, but that’s where my focus will be.] For Thanksgiving, David Brooks brought us a casserole dish on the “rotting of the Republican mind.” It put me in mind of another article I read recently on the relationship between evangelical Christians and conspiracy theories […]
Author: Alex Reid
Associate Professor of Media Study at the University at Buffalo
At its core, a new materialist digital rhetoric tells us that media/information is made accessible, strong, and durable through human-nonhuman assemblages in digital media ecologies. This is a basic insight from Latour, DeLanda, and others. To expand briefly on this core: there is a reality in which we participate; part of that participation is our […]
There’s a good argument for looking backward now to see the last ten years as the decade of digital rhetoric. Sure the term was coined 30 years ago by Richard Lanham, and some variation of digital rhetoric had already been at work for 10 years before that. But it’s the last decade that saw the […]
Categories
Chekhov’s panopticon
Apparently 80% of the professors at my university forced online in March had never taught an online course before. Now they have been seasoned, left to marinate all summer, and, I am assuming, are ready to be grilled. I’m sure you know Chekhov’s gun. With that in mind, there are two approaches to understanding Chekhov’s […]
Unsurprisingly, when you search the web for information about “discord” in the online college classroom, you get results about unruliness or some such, but I’m talking about the application. There’s an insightful piece on the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative titled “Discord: Gaming App to Rhetoric Class,” by Kristin Ravel and her students, that details their experience […]
On FB yesterday, some of my friends were sharing a piece of research the suggested the optimal length for instructional videos was around six minutes. The specifics of the research aren’t really important here. What is relevant is that academics are trying to come to terms with the realities of fall online instruction. Others are […]
After a week or so of emailing and chin-scratching, this appears to be the title of my forthcoming book: Rhetorics of the Digital Nonhumanities. Not sure when it will appear yet–copy editing, indexing, etc., etc. But someday I expect. So what’s it about? Well, it’s along the lines of what you might expect if you’ve […]
Harper’s Magazine published a letter signed by 150 journalists, authors, artists, academics, and related folks basically in defense of free speech as we conventionally understand it and in opposition to cancel culture, broadly conceived. American Conservative followed with an op-ed in support of that letter (which, rhetorically speaking, probably doesn’t do many of the people […]
I know, I know… me and the sexy, clickbait-y post titles. I just can’t help myself. This is a brass tacks thinking through of something I’ve very rarely done, which is to teach an online course with a synchronous element. Of course many of us did it in an emergency way last spring, but now […]
In the end, when it came down to it, the decision to teach online in the fall was not hard. Many of my colleagues teach courses that cannot be successful without some in-person element (e.g. science labs, theater and dance, filmmaking, many others). Other classes may need to be in-person because they are important for […]
