Author: Alex Mashny

Bathroom graffiti. Podcasts. Skibibi brain rot. Social media activism. Deepfakes. Collages. J.D. Vance Photoshop memes. In this blog carnival, the contributing authors used these ideas to explore the role of circulation in rhetoric and writing studies.  Some authors used the framework of circulation to explore how specific artifacts or ideas circulate through different systems. For example, Alexandra Gunnells, in “Digital Circulation and the Question of Publics,” examines how digital media circulates and constitutes collective identities. Similarly concerned with the influences of digital media on culture and identity, in “The SEO to Skibidi Pipeline,” Sophia Lyons, coins the term “digital linguistic transference”…

For much of rhetoric’s history, circulation—the cultural and spatio-temporal flow of texts, ideas, and images through various networks, platforms, and structures—has been less of an explicit area of study and more of an “assumed phenomenon” (Gries, 2018, p. 3) running through the field. However, since the digital turn, our focus on computers, algorithms, and digital platforms that allow texts to accumulate momentum and meaning across time and space has contributed to renewed interest in circulation studies as an area of inquiry and framework. In the introduction to Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric, edited by Laurie Gries and Collin Brooke, Gries argues…

Hello again!If we haven’t met before, I’m Alex. I’m a returning fellow to the DRC, and I’m excited to be back. I’m now a third-year PhD student at Michigan State University, am halfway through the exam process, and am still really, really interested in digital culture, technical communication, and circulation. Last year, when I introduced myself, I mentioned last year that I was taught growing up that things that get posted online are always “out there”. Who knows where my passwords cracked from databases or from key loggers have circulated to?Last year, I also talked about my past with technology,…

Hello! I’m Alex. Technology seemed somewhat inaccessible to me while I was growing up. It wasn’t that I had no access to technology. We had a family computer, and in my teenage years I was given a number of cell phones by my parents, ostensibly to be able to call them in case I got lost while in public, or there was some other kind of emergency. But, rather, I always felt that technology was something I used, but was incapable of really understanding. Circuits still seem otherworldly to me. I have no idea how most of the devices around…