MK

When we dress to be photographed, we increasingly dress to be distributed as an image, and thus transformed into a kind of ad.

Hyperconnectivity in the cultural realm promises abundance, decommodification and democratization. Everyone has at their fingertips an infinitely rich and varieduniverse of cultural products. New cultural forms and innovative practices have proliferated. Much digital culture is freely shared rather than bought and sold. And ever-expanding circles

Instead of being fed from above a limited diet of standardized cultural products, everyone — not just a minority of highly educated omnivores — can now craft a varied and customized cultural diet from the digital cornucopia. People create these customized diets by sharing the work of “curation” in differentiated niche taste communities. This

A democratic cultural politics would be developmentalist — oriented to learning, growth and discovery — rather than presentist. 

The inherent contextlessness of platforms like Twitter also works in the opposite direction, though: It’s easy to use the language of social justice to justify anything we want, and by doing so, weakens real, meaningful activism.

Cultural production is ever more finely attuned to attention, which is ever more pervasively measured and monetized. Commerce and culture are locked in an ever-tighter embrace.