Infra-Ordinary

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

“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... See more

The metaphor of mining suggests that you recover what is valuable and discard the rest. But what if we reverse the procedure?

“Only a fool will build in defiance of the past. What is new and significant always must be grafted to old roots, the truly vital roots that are chosen with great care from the ones that merely survive. And what a delicate process it is to distinguish radical vitality from the wastes of mere survival, but that is the only way to achieve progress... See more

Places that may have once been every-day, are now non-everyday places in nature, or what one might class as ‘infra-ordinary’ places of social significance within the built environment. Acknowledging that, while these places that used to present themselves as a great swath of the unexceptional, everyday life, needs only a little trauma for them to... 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.

The every-day is an arena of endless difference, a place we cannot simply go to. We are always-already immersed in it, although we typically do not realize this.

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... See more