Wolterink shoots each individual cupboard, drawer, built-in appliance—even the borders of the image. Sometimes the doors can be easily opened; other times they are removed. He then takes each frame and combines them into one image, so details of the items in the kitchen remain sharp. “My work is a combination of documentary and collage,” Wolterink said. “I usually visit each kitchen twice,” Wolterink explained about the documentary aspect of the project. “I ask them not to clean. The first time I visit is to meet them and talk about the project. When I come back the second time, I know what the kitchen looks like, and I know if they have moved things around or if they have cleaned it!” (via Erik Klein Wolterink: Kitchen Portraits examines the multicultural reality of kitchens (PHOTOS).)

Wolterink shoots each individual cupboard, drawer, built-in appliance—even the borders of the image. Sometimes the doors can be easily opened; other times they are removed. He then takes each frame and combines them into one image, so details of the items in the kitchen remain sharp. “My work is a combination of documentary and collage,” Wolterink said. “I usually visit each kitchen twice,” Wolterink explained about the documentary aspect of the project. “I ask them not to clean. The first time I visit is to meet them and talk about the project. When I come back the second time, I know what the kitchen looks like, and I know if they have moved things around or if they have cleaned it!” (via Erik Klein Wolterink: Kitchen Portraits examines the multicultural reality of kitchens (PHOTOS).)

Stuff, it turns out, is pretty easy to defend. It can be useful. It can be evocative. It can embody, as one colleague phrased it, “memories and pacts and connections.” Ancient gods and goddesses had accoutrements that symbolized their power: Mercury carried a wand. Poseidon bore a trident. Demeter hauled around wreaths and fruit. “No ideas but in things,” insisted William Carlos Williams, voicing the mantra of the Imagists (not to mention Snooki and the Kardashians). (via Graham Hill essay in the New York Times: Is minimalism really sustainable? - Slate Magazine)

Stuff, it turns out, is pretty easy to defend. It can be useful. It can be evocative. It can embody, as one colleague phrased it, “memories and pacts and connections.” Ancient gods and goddesses had accoutrements that symbolized their power: Mercury carried a wand. Poseidon bore a trident. Demeter hauled around wreaths and fruit. “No ideas but in things,” insisted William Carlos Williams, voicing the mantra of the Imagists (not to mention Snooki and the Kardashians). (via Graham Hill essay in the New York Times: Is minimalism really sustainable? - Slate Magazine)

"Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper."
W. H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (1967). Thanks to my friend and colleague Richard Gibson for reminding me of this great passage which I should never have forgotten in the first place. (via ayjay)
Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everyday-ness. As long as we are online - which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal. (via The Technium: The Improbable is the New Normal)

Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everyday-ness. As long as we are online - which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal. (via The Technium: The Improbable is the New Normal)

But even given those exceptions, looking at his of list of lists you really can see the redundancy — not to mention excess — of this annual practice. But Gutowski sees something more beautiful in it: “I am continually amazed at the quality websites I have discovered through this project,” he writes, “and am always heartened by the continued love for the written word in all its forms.” Each list is a little mini labor of love, a celebration of the year’s creativity, and Gutowski’s meta-list is an aggregation — and a reminder — of that abundance. (via The Man Who Collected 1,320 Best-Books-of-2012 Lists - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic)

But even given those exceptions, looking at his of list of lists you really can see the redundancy — not to mention excess — of this annual practice. But Gutowski sees something more beautiful in it: “I am continually amazed at the quality websites I have discovered through this project,” he writes, “and am always heartened by the continued love for the written word in all its forms.” Each list is a little mini labor of love, a celebration of the year’s creativity, and Gutowski’s meta-list is an aggregation — and a reminder — of that abundance. (via The Man Who Collected 1,320 Best-Books-of-2012 Lists - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic)

"The relationship between ease of access and motivation seems to be inversely proportional because, as the sheer volume of information that becomes available and accessible to us increases, we become increasingly paralyzed to actually access all but the most prominent of it — prominent by way of media coverage, prominent by way of peer recommendation, prominent by way of alignment with our existing interests. This is why information that isn’t rare in technical terms, in terms of being free and open to anyone willing to and knowledgeable about how to access it, may still remain rare in practical terms, accessed by only a handful of motivated scholars."
Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance » Nieman Journalism Lab
Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions. This world of old media is like a giant steampunk machine that organizes time into stories. I call it the Epiphanator, and it has always known the value of a meaningful conclusion. The Epiphanator sits in midtown Manhattan and clunks along, at Condé Nast and at the Times and in Rockefeller Center. Once a day it makes a terrible grinding noise and spits out newspapers and TV shows. Once a week it spits out weeklies and more TV shows. Once a month it produces glossy magazines. All too often it makes movies, and novels. (via Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings? — Daily Intel)

Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions. This world of old media is like a giant steampunk machine that organizes time into stories. I call it the Epiphanator, and it has always known the value of a meaningful conclusion. The Epiphanator sits in midtown Manhattan and clunks along, at Condé Nast and at the Times and in Rockefeller Center. Once a day it makes a terrible grinding noise and spits out newspapers and TV shows. Once a week it spits out weeklies and more TV shows. Once a month it produces glossy magazines. All too often it makes movies, and novels. (via Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings? — Daily Intel)

Loving something is more than the act of “faving” or “liking” something, he says. These actions are fleeting. You “like” and “fave” but you may never see it again. But when you love something, you have an ongoing relationship with it, visiting it over and over, with your experience of it deepening each time. “To love,” he writes, “is to return.” (via What Do You Love Online? - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology - The Atlantic)

Loving something is more than the act of “faving” or “liking” something, he says. These actions are fleeting. You “like” and “fave” but you may never see it again. But when you love something, you have an ongoing relationship with it, visiting it over and over, with your experience of it deepening each time. “To love,” he writes, “is to return.” (via What Do You Love Online? - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology - The Atlantic)

"First things first — “curation” is a terrible term. It has been used so frivolously and applied so indiscriminately that it’s become vacant of meaning. But I firmly believe that the ethos at its core — a drive to find the interesting, meaningful, and relevant amidst the vast maze of overabundant information, creating a framework for what matters in the world and why — is an increasingly valuable form of creative and intellectual labor, a form of authorship that warrants thought."
What We Talk About When We Talk About “Curation” | Brain Pickings
Perhaps the more pertinent question, and an important practical consideration for scholars whose primary output is long-form writing, is this: How do users negotiate the participatory immersion and fluid, ambient exchange of always-on communication with the temporary need for quiet and connection-free contemplation? Because it isn’t just an idiosyncratic group of elite authors who are using these techniques, judging by the folks talking about Freedom on Twitter. I think it’s fair to say that many internet users (hey, I’ll count myself among them) struggle to maintain attention—real, enduring, deep-writing kind of attention—on digital projects, when so many bright, shiny bobbles are just a click away, ready to relieve us, momentarily, from the stress of writer’s block. (via And deliver us from distraction: Understanding resistance to media life // Culture Digitally)

Perhaps the more pertinent question, and an important practical consideration for scholars whose primary output is long-form writing, is this: How do users negotiate the participatory immersion and fluid, ambient exchange of always-on communication with the temporary need for quiet and connection-free contemplation? Because it isn’t just an idiosyncratic group of elite authors who are using these techniques, judging by the folks talking about Freedom on Twitter. I think it’s fair to say that many internet users (hey, I’ll count myself among them) struggle to maintain attention—real, enduring, deep-writing kind of attention—on digital projects, when so many bright, shiny bobbles are just a click away, ready to relieve us, momentarily, from the stress of writer’s block. (via And deliver us from distraction: Understanding resistance to media life // Culture Digitally)