The Mystory: The Garage D'Or of Ereignis

The performance of identity involves impression management, social skills, and self-reflexivity. To perform identity in media environments involves writing our identities into being. Media environments have facilitated a new kind of selfhood—brand—in which we model our identities on celebrities. However, because brand identity has no ethical grounding, it raises legitimate concerns. To incorporate ethics, I perform my identity through mystory, Gregory Ulmer’s genre of reflexive writing. By composing a mystory, I consult with an avatar—which in Hindu tradition was a god descended into earthly form—that reveals my ethical condition and a pathway through it. This consultation functions as pharmakon (Derrida, 1995), revealing truths to me which both wound and heal. I use mystory to address a personal question, “How do I lead an ethical life?” and a policy problem: water pollution in Florida. The conclusion of this essay presents a response to this problem: a performance art piece designed to teach manatees about mortality

Our Best Hope in a World Filled With Emergencies? Education

When we die, the knowledge stored in our brains disappears. But through education, each generation of people can pass their knowledge to the next via spoken language, books and other media, and this knowledge can accumulate through the ages

How Do You Make a Society Wise?

A wise society looks after the well-being of its citizenry. In order for there to be a wise society, though, many or most of its citizenry also must be wise since they create the society. But the society must educate its citizens to be wise

Censorship Is Not All Bad

Censorship is not all bad! Free-speech idealists argue that the solution to bad speech (misinformation, lies, abusive language, etc.) is not censorship but more speech. But bad speech can, and often does, drown out the good

Making Sense of Digital Humanities Subtitle: Transformations and Interventions in Technocultures

Taking up the challenge of navigating the complex world of digital humanities, Making Sense of Digital Humanities offers readers an exploration of the many ways scholars have employed the diverse toolkit of digital humanities to create a better understanding of the synergies and disruptions created by technological change. Rooted in a concern for the daunting tasks associated with teaching and learning about the digital humanities, this volume hopes to provide easy entry into a complex topic while highlighting how an understanding of digital humanities can transform our thinking about technology in the modern world