ThoughtVectors2014

rarefied and highly specialized skill, would all of a sudden go viral

Not because I don’t like magazines. In many ways, I like them better. But they’re too grounded in space and time, too organized and linear, too collaborative and professional to deliver the synaptic frisson available from the stream-of-consciousness image blog.

A friend of a friend calls his addiction to sites like these “avenues for procrastination,” but I think there’s something else involved. Like other forms of pastiche — the mix tape, the playlist, the mash-up — these sites force you to engage and derive meaning or at least significance or at the very least pleasure from a random grouping of pictures. Why not dive into an alternative world full of beauty and novelty and emotion and the hard-to-put-your-finger-on feeling that there’s something more, somewhere, where you’re not chained to your laptop, half dead from monotony, frustration and boredom

So maybe we are like the rats, and what we’re seeking while idly yet compulsively cruising Pinterest is really just the reliably unpredictable jumble of emotions that their wistful, quirky juxtapositions evoke. Maybe that is our rectangularity.

This is, I think, what these sites evoke: the feeling of being addicted to longing for something; specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the feeling of longing for the thing.

frivolous and feminine

People don’t post stuff because they wish they owned it, but because they think they are it, and they long to be understood, which is different.

In fact, the company discourages people from posting images they have created themselves, preferring that they venture out into the wilds of the Internet looking for beautiful things to bring back to the cave.

“Curation” does imply something far more deliberate than these inspiration blogs, whose very point is to put the viewer into an aesthetic reverie unencumbered by thought or analysis. These sites are not meant (as curation is) to make us more conscious, but less so.

But products are no longer the point. The feeling is the point. And now we can create that feeling for ourselves, then pass it around like a photo album of the life we think we were meant to have but don’t, the people we think we should be but aren’t.

Dealing with networks means that nothing is stable, everything is constantly moving in response to massive amounts of data

"Broadly accounting for any act where a person organises visual content on the internet in a way that creates meaning through the differences and similarities of their collected images."

"curating is now linguistically deluded beyond the point of return to an artistic context

people are creating meaning themselves – online, inside, outside

The study also found that 21% of binge viewers say they remember the ads, compared to 10% of non-binge viewers.

Research shows that 80% of Generation Y, 68% generation X and 49% of baby boomers are likely to be binge viewers. In a survey, 826 out of 1,307 respondents above the age of 18, who watch televised content for more than five hours a week, were also binge viewers.

Research also shows that there is an opportunity for companies like Netflix, which can transcend the subscription-based model and incorporate advertisements in their sources of revenue. They can also come up with new pricing models and offer subscriptions with ads at lower rates.

They will pretend to care about our opinions

Therefore, with rare exceptions, there won’t be states where robots eat jobs and products get more expensive. They almost always get cheaper.