Assistant Professor of English Brenta Blevins
At the 2019 Western States Rhetoric and Literacy conference at Montana State University, Assistant Professor of English Brenta Blevins presented a paper as part of the “Contemplating Rhetorical Futures in a Post-Desktop Computing World” roundtable with Jacob Greene, Arizona State University; David Rieder, North Carolina State University; Shannon Butts, University of Florida; and Jason Crider, University of Florida.
Blevins’ presentation, “Approaching the Event Horizon of a Digital Black Hole: Contemplation in Augmented Reality in an Era of Technological Change,” explored the tensions in post-desktop composing between attention and preservation, on the one hand, and, on the other, between distraction and deprecation. Taking augmented reality as one example, she explored how digital information risks falling into an information black hole where technology change renders digital texts inaccessible to future audiences. The digital black hole is a risk not just for augmented reality, but all instances in which human history, inquiry, and expression are recorded solely in digital media.