less hospitable, and thus less ethical

Hayles presents a convincing argument in response to Manovich that neither database nor narrative will “win” but that they are “natural symbionts.”

The question becomes the following: How do we navigate the increasingly complex relationship between database and narrative as the amount of data increases?

Ethical programs are processes (sometimes enacted in the form of software, but sometimes not) that determine the shape of networked infrastructures.

The reliance on a standard mobile-phone keyboard (which is constrained by fingertip size) and the use of character constraints are just two such affordances, and though they seem obvious to us now such simple affordances make way for users to remake and repurpose technologies:

But the human user of software is not merely making decisions on her own. Rather, each networked rhetorical situation is informed, shaped, enabled, and constrained by, among other things, software.

For Derrida, any theorization of hospitality begins from a “non-dialectizable antinomy” between what he calls the Law of hospitality and the laws of hospitality.[4] This distinction can perhaps be best understood by considering one’s connection to the Internet. For Derrida, the Law of hospitality—which he also sometimes calls “absolute hospitality”—is that which is offered to an anonymous other, regardless of identity or name. In terms of digital networks, we can consider any network connection to be suggestive of this absolute Law of hospitality. I connect to the Internet, and I invite a multitude of others. I have, in connecting to the network, entered a hospitable space that welcomes many others. And yet, at the very moment that I extend this welcome, I immediately begin to filter arrivals. From firewall software to the users that I block from viewing my Twitter feed, I find ways to sift and sort those that arrive at “my doorstep.” These filters are the laws of hospitality that respond to the Law. These laws are particular responses to particular others, and from the very start they are dependent upon exclusion. The laws of hospitality must always be both hospitable and inhospitable, simultaneously welcoming and excluding.

In this case, a spam message arrived unexpectedly,

Collin Brooke

Kevin Brock’s dissertation “Engaging the Action-Oriented Nature of Computation: Towards a Rhetorical Code Studies”

the Essjay controversy

more hospitable

procedural rhetoric

networked life is confined to our digital interactions

Robustness Principle

RFC 761

Jacques Derrida calls the Law of hospitality

ethical programs

electronic literature

Lev Manovich

Francisco Varela

Alexander Galloway

The Exploit

Carl Schmitt

I might put in place filters, blocking the troll or unfriending a former high school classmate, but each of these filters happens only after I have entered a space of exposedness and response-ability, a space of hospitality.

packet switching

Avital Ronell

Emmanuel Levinas’s essay “Substitution,”

Xbox Kinect camera

Wendy Chun

Life in a network society

ITZPATRI

intellectual

CONSERVATIVES and liberals