Paul Soulellis' the post, the feed, the never-ending scroll: PERFORMING THE FEED
PERFORMING THE FEED by Paul Soulellis depicts how static blog posts lost favour to algorithmicly amplified and trending recently posted social media snippets. From Cybernetics 2018.
What is the balance between curation and performative work ? A history of the post, the feed, the never-ending scroll.
Start with the post -- the blog post, a news story that's been posted, a posted tweet. I see the act of posting as one of the foundational gestures of making public. Especially now, when we have an expanded field of publishing that includes anyone with a device who can amplify to the network.
All of this smoothed out into a performative stream of data that infiltrates like an atmospheric presence -- and so it's fitting to mention Manuel Castells' now twenty-year-old idea -- the space of flows. He says that flow is the space of power and domination over experience, because forces may act all at once, in a unified way, outside of contiguous space.