The Tasting
Metadata
Highlights
- Online networks and communities continuously develop into ritual centers where lifestyle emblematization works through the institution and reproduction of discourses of metaphorical taste.
- Tastes and smells may be among the most natural source concepts for good and bad because they are among the simplest and most prototypical examples of stimuli that we have evaluative reactions to.
- Despite the heterogeneous composition of most foods and beverages, coarse-grained evaluative judgments (i.e., liking or disliking) nearly always precede any more specific or fine-grained analyses of flavor, texture, etc.
- Even if I get around to describing what I think about what I like, I end up describing what or who I want to be like instead. This is related to what Foucault meant when he wrote, “It is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.”
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The algorithm doesn’t know what we like because we don’t know what we like. We don’t know what we like because all we’ve been offered are authorizing discourses and exclusive ritual centers of taste.
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Notice more than whether you like or dislike something. Notice what a product, experience, idea, or piece of content sets in motion for you rather than automatically reacting to it and indexing your social position through your reaction.
- This is a tasting practice based on processes becoming rather states of being. It’s a patient, sensitive, anti-consumptive, anti-evaluative way of being and being online. It’s an ethical and sustainable way of interpreting the world.