[Air-l] maybe a silly question.. but

[Jonathan Cornwell]

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 at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of radhika gajjala
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2006 4:58 AM
To: air-l at 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 at 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 at bgsu.edu


For info on the Theory Research cluster at SCS - see 
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