Ben Abraham's Actor-Network Theory Notebook

Here.

Weird thing they found – friends don’t often like (not the click like, but actually ‘like’) negative, low-self esteem type posts which rings true to my observations and experience. It’s like, people perceive that as a public gripe – as an imposition on readers – and do their best to ignore it… I can just imagine someone saying “I’d much rather than actually asked me for help directly or something” rather than passive-agressively leaving statuses about situations and things.

Number 1: This is one about the difference between “curation” and simply “sharing”:

But we should not delude ourselves for a moment into bestowing any special significance on this, because when we do this thing that so many of us like to call “curation” we’re not providing any sort of ontology or semantic continuity beyond that of our own whimsy or taste or desire. “Interesting things” or “smart things” are not rubrics that make the collection and dissemination of data that happens on the internet anything closer to a curatorial act; these categories are ultimately still reducible to “things I find appealing,” and regardless of how special one might feel about the highly cultivated state of his or her tastes there is no threshold of how many other people are eager to be on the receiving end of whatever it is we’re sharing that somehow magically transforms this act into curation—that is, at least, unless we’re also comfortable with arguing that “curation” is the act in which Buzzfeed is engaged. Or The Huffington Post. Or the top contributor on those weightlifting comment boards.

Ah, the perils of democracy – and an argument I’ve made myself! But I’m hardly a disinterested outsider on the issue of online curation and I feel like there is something defensible about the kind of ‘online curator’ that does select stuff according to their own threshold of appealing. Taste is not arbitrary, I mean.

It goes on to talk about the ‘via’ and ‘hat-tip’ squiggles, and the discussion of the ‘via’ is pretty interesting:

…as far as value-adds go the “via” generally offers little more than a cookie crumb trail of others who have also read the material in question—the digital equivalent of finding the previous borrower’s name scribbled on the card in the back of a library book. Which is neat, I guess? But come on now, none of us here is Averroes rediscovering Aristotle or Poggio Bracciolini serendipitously plucking Lucretius off a dusty shelf—this is people posting pictures of yawning kittens on Tumblr blogs we’re talking about here.

Didn’t they just dig their own hole? It only has to happen once to be plausible. It already happened with library book cards, it can happen again with the internet. The argument against it is largely a social one – “too much mess! too much noise! it’s not worth it” but maybe one day it will be worth it… we can’t really judge now.

But as an ANT-esque scholar I am glad for the via.

(And here’s a pithy satire of the symbols – this seems about right to me. They’re dumb symbols, but the via/hattip is often worth doing)

Number 2: Nick Denton as the head of Gawker blogs probably has more insight than most into whatever could most plausibly be called ‘the nature’ of blog comments (though putting it like that makes me go “eww” and want to start talking about Latour’s collectives, which Denton even almost gestures towards in the final statements he makes about alternatives).

Number 3: Luke Simcoe on the FULL COMMUNISM meme, and some neat stuff about memes is contained within.