And so, how useful it might be, then, to go "back to the future" with someone like Bourdieu, whose refutation of any notion of "individuality" and "taste" is very compelling, if taste is read as a location of culture, and as such, of the social written on the body. "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed." (from Pierre Bourdieu 'Distinction') Mary On 8/27/06 8:42 PM, "Jonathan Cornwell" <jrc@tcfir.org> wrote:
"Taste Fabrics and the Beauty of Homogeneity" by Hugo Liu, Glorianna Davenport, and Pattie Maes introduced me to the wonderful (IMHO) phrase "taste fabric". The first part of the abstract reads:
"The quintessence of an individual's taste is her aesthetic sensibility and system of preferences. Online social network profiles, such as those appearing on Friendster and MySpace, are a veritable "show and tell" for taste-allowing individuals to perform acts of taste by declaring their favorite books, what music they love, and what their passions are. By mining these social network profiles en masse and analyzing how each taste instance (e.g. a book, an author, a band, a cuisine, etc.) is meaningfully correlated with every other, an underlying fabric of taste common across individuals can be inferred." [Taste fabric and the Beauty...]