A decade ago I published an article in Enculturation titled "Exposing Assemblages: Unlikely Communities of Digital Scholarship, Video, and Social Networks." It concluded with this. Through the mapping of the social-material assemblages of scholarly video production, one can develop tactics for investigating and activating these thresholds, these relations of exteriority. From this perspective, one would... Continue Reading →
zoom, distance, and productivity theater
I'd be curious to know if other institutions are running surveys similar to the one UB has run. Since I can link to it here, I assume there are no state secrets within. It's a survey of students (there's another for faculty) after one week or so of this online existence. 20% of students say... Continue Reading →
Righting Writing Courses
Tomorrow I'm participating in a SUNY Writing Council webinar (at 2pm Eastern) on the challenges of teaching writing online, so here I'm working through some ideas of what I might say in my little 10-minute spiel. (If you are interested and want to know how to join, email me at Alex dot Reid at gmail... Continue Reading →
designing ethical experiences
Yesterday my grad class began its discussion of Liza Potts' Social Media in Disaster Response. It is an excellent and (sadly) timely book that examines how people work across a variety of social media platforms during periods of disaster. In particular, she looks at Hurricane Katrina, the London bombings in July 2005 and the Mumbai... Continue Reading →
the principle of illectracy?
Perhaps Ulmer has a more elegant puncept for this, but basically I'm thinking here about the analog of illiteracy within electracy. I.e.: literacy -----> electracyilliteracy -----> illectracy? For the first 25 years or so that we have discussed electracy, I don't think there was a pressing need to imagine the operation of illectracy. For one... Continue Reading →
media theory and the Video Assistant Referee (VAR)
For the American sports fan, the instant replay is a familiar feature of our viewing experience. The use of replays in the NFL actually goes back to 1986 and has been steadily employed for 20 years. I think it's about the same for the NBA and even MLB has used it for a decade to... Continue Reading →
pharmakon poisoning in the electrate collective experiment
http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436105 Without going into too much depth about it, I write ~30K words in May and June. It wasn't fun. No one told you writing was fun, right? I mean, generally speaking we don't get paid for doing things that are fun. Or as Julius Erving once said ‘Being a professional is doing the things... Continue Reading →
English Studies in the post-digital world
Though there are some ongoing conversations about the notion of a post-digital world (including Justin Hodgson's Post Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic and Mike Flatt's discussion of post-digital poetics), I'm starting here with the mildly disturbing corporate speak of Accenture on how to be competitive in the post-digital world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=173&v=dpaw_ZAHZ-Q Accenture identifies five elements... Continue Reading →
hell is other people (on screens)
There's a NY Times article by Nellie Bowles doing the rounds with the titular observation that "Human Contact is Now a Luxury Good." It focuses on both old and young: the senior citizen with a virtual pet companion; the kids taught by apps on tablets and laptops. And it notes that the wealthy eschew screens... Continue Reading →
