Cartography of Leisure
Published May 19, 2021
“As soon as the World Wide Web became a popular medium across the 1990s,
the problem of its cartography was given. The cleverest solution to the
navigation of the WWW came from Google’s PageRank algorithm. The first datacenter
set up by Google in 1998 […] was the first to start mapping the internet on a
global scale via vectors of ranking.” As Matteo Pasquinelli argues in his
article Meta-data Society, the web did not necessarily imply the horizontal
free exchange of information that technological utopians once heralded. Instead,
Google’s PageRank algorithm sorted the accumulation of information as towering,
hierarchical lists of links — a scroll that was, nonetheless, regarded as
self-evident and, thus, achieved to remain undetected. The social ramifications
of the humble list of links went unnoticed until its aesthetic or experiential
excess, that is the scroll, was explicitly exploited. This dangerous supplement
disavowed linked lists as purely informational tools; as mere maps of the web. Yet,
it also consolidated them as the imaginary and symbolic infrastructure determining
agency in the metadata society. In the software-mediated world wide web, the
map preceded the territory: with the aestheticization of lists came along the
configuration of novel list-like aesthetic experiences. And, therefore,
cultural processes re-signifying leisure as the divided labor of these
artificial spaces
Feautured sounds:
Break it off - Pink Pantheress
Feautured places: Bytedance HQ in Beijing, China; Bytedance offices in São Paulo, Brasil; Bytedance offices in Warsaw, Poland; Bytedance offices in Tokyo, Japan
Related to on TikTok:
@pinkpantheress
Other related media: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Further reading:Derrida, J. (1978). “The Dangerous Supplement”. In J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans., pp. 141-164). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Mitchell, W. (1987). Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pasquinelli, M. (2018). “Metadata Society”. In Braidotti, R. and Hlavajova, M (eds) Posthuman Glossary, London: Bloomsbury.
Feautured places: Bytedance HQ in Beijing, China; Bytedance offices in São Paulo, Brasil; Bytedance offices in Warsaw, Poland; Bytedance offices in Tokyo, Japan
Related to on TikTok:
@pinkpantheress
Other related media: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Further reading:Derrida, J. (1978). “The Dangerous Supplement”. In J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans., pp. 141-164). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Mitchell, W. (1987). Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pasquinelli, M. (2018). “Metadata Society”. In Braidotti, R. and Hlavajova, M (eds) Posthuman Glossary, London: Bloomsbury.