Critical Reading

Wednesday was somewhat of a harsh day for me - I took a while to get ready, didn’t find anything I wanted for breakfast but did have an energy drink and consequently spent much of the Critical Reading session feeling ill and unable to properly concentrate. While I had a nice lunch and felt much better after, I then found a major bug in my project while setting up for the exhibition, and had to spend the second session focused mostly on producing a hotfix. What a stressful day!

Decolonizing and peripheralizing e-lit in Latin America

Even in my queasy, light-headed, basically mute state, I found the paper on a decolonization-focused approach to archiving e-literature fascinating. The process of archiving social media e-literature seems nightmarish: social media platforms are ephemeral by their nature, and there’s so much of it that I’m impressed by their approach and results.

There are multiple vectors of colonization that were touched on by discussion in the session: Brazil, as part of Latin America, faces colonization from Europe and the United States. Mato Grosso faces “internal colonization” from residents of richer areas of Brazil who have access to higher quality education and more resources and then move to the area to find work. Then, the regions of Brazil have indigenous populations who are victims of colonization themselves by Brazil. There are a variety of angles to consider here, and I’m deeply interested in seeing the continuation of this work both directly as well as further decolonization-focused archival projects.

Digital Junkfood on Social Media

I do not have many observations for this presentation on a constructivist approach to how users perceive “digital junkfood” since, at this point, I was getting too light headed to focus. I found it interesting, but I think the metaphor may simply be too loaded: personally I felt like the definition of “digital junkfood” simply isn’t actually similar to real junkfood at all.

I, personally, don’t understand the regret angle (if I enjoy food, why do I care if it’s from a chain or not?) and I think a critical difference is that junkfood is real food. You may regret it, but if you eat it it will digest and provide some level of nutrition. That feels like a major incongruity when compared to digital junkfood which often feels vapid and meaningless, if not actively harmful. Eating too much Burger King doesn’t risk slowly turning you into a flat earther.