There are no categorical imperatives requiring the use of social media in any way. I.e., we are not under any universal obligation to use social media. We should probably start there. At the other end of the spectrum, I don’t believe it is controversial to assert that social media platforms (and their corporate owners) seek […]
Category: digital rhetoric
By the end of this month, I will finish my two-year stint as WAC director at UB. As I am now in Media Study, I don’t anticipate running a “writing program” again. Before that, for seven years I was the WPA in the UB English department and spent three years running a graduate certificate professional […]
The removal of Trump from various social media platforms has been big news, as is the de-platforming of Parler by Apple, Google, and Amazon. There’s a lot of conversation about this in relation to the first amendment. I’m not a constitutional law expert, so I’m not going to focus here on the strictly legal aspect. […]
In the new materialist approach I take up, all assemblages (i.e. all people, groups of people, animals, plants, things, objects, etc.) have properties, tendencies, and capacities. Properties are singular and historical. For example, my smartphone (an iPhone XS) has its own unique history. To butcher a line, “there are many iPhones but this one is […]
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media archeology is ordinary
Yes, it’s a play on Raymond Williams. Of course he was mostly suggesting that “Culture” was not solely the territory of a particular well-educated and wealthy class of Brits. Cultural studies was and is a highly technical and esoteric set of theories, methods, and discourses, and the apparatuses of the culture industry are elitist and […]
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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 […]
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. UPDATE: so we now have a book cover (as you can see) and a projected publication date of January 2022. So what’s it about? Well, it’s along the lines of what […]
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 […]
