Infra-ordinary

We can easily introduce new categories and subcategories – but we can’t describe what social media gives us with a single term. Often, it is more than unmediated everyday, but less than highly mediated news. Neither this nor that, but everything side-by-side. And it is this side-by-side which gives social media its uniqueness as genre of representa... See more

People often stage their lives for social media, and they use Instagram’s own and third party image editing tools to refine the aesthetics of their images in ways that in the 20th century were only available to professional photographers.

Another important difference from infra-ordinary is the tiny number of images people intentionally share per day.

Humans are always looking for signals standing out against noise. But as modern society developed techniques to generate progressively more data, this became particularly important.

“What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist... How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs ev... See more

Introducing the book, Perec writes:

"Many, if not most, of these things have been described, inventoried, photographed, written about or itemized. My intention in the following pages was to describe what remains; that which we generally don’t notice, which doesn’t call attention to itself, which is of no importance: what happens when nothing happens... See more

So in principle, our frame can capture the infra-ordinary along with the exceptional. So does it?

In view of these characteristics of social media, what does our frame captures? Some of it is the exceptional as news define it – but that’s only a one part. The rest is something else, but it is not Perec’s infra-ordinary. People often carefully construct their “ordinary” for Instagram. And they also do share what is exceptional to them: birthday ... See more

New medium of photography could in principle capture the “real” real, as opposed to types. But in its first decades first it was too slow and cumbersome for that. Eventually, it was artists rather than photographers or filmmakers who finally focused on making visible the everyday without generalizing, aestheticizing, or editing it: Andy Warhol’s Sc... See more