Radhika, To me, there are no "stupid" or "silly" questions, only thoughtless ones. In addition, the listserv format for this group makes it rather difficult to go back into the archives to see if a question has already been asked and answered. Besides, one of my favorite professors once said to never be afraid to reinvent the wheel; some important dimension of any subject is always missed because we are imperfect humans. Glad the previous ramblings were helpful. Frankly, I think the taxonomic arguments on Internet phenomena can be saved for a while since classification often creates artificial constructs with little true validity... because they break so often in the multitude of "tweener" cases. By the time we get done agreeing on whether one netplace is this or that it will become "the other thing" *grin*. Jonathan Cornwell -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of radhika gajjala Sent: Monday, August 28, 2006 4:58 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] maybe a silly question.. but both Jonathan's and Mary's suggestions are very useful, methinks. r
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...]
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-- Radhika Gajjala Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator School of Communication Studies 302 West Hall Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, OH 43402 http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik/index2.html For queries about BGSU's School of Communication Studies Grad program, email comsgrad@bgsu.edu For info on the Theory Research cluster at SCS - see http://scs.bgsu.edu/Research/ResearchClusters/theory.php _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/