Postcards from the Edge
I liked this [via an old post from Foe Romeo]. It comes from a New Statesman review by James Fenton (subscription needed) of Tom Philips’s postcard exhibition “We Are the People”.
The individual object is of no great worth on its own. It is only through accumulation, only by becoming one of a category, that it has any great chance of engaging our interest.
Fenton also decides that
There are two kinds of collecting: the selective and the accumulative. In the first, the collector seeks to assemble only the best examples of a class of object (paintings, sculptures, porcelain). The collection improves as its quality, but not its quantity, increases. With this method, sacrifices may continually be made, as objects of lesser worth are sold to acquire more desirable items. The number of entries in the inventory may remain static over the years, but the collection is seen to advance through substitution, or through a process of “trading up”.…In the second, accumulative type of collection, the significance of the individual object is seen to grow through its keeping company with such a large number of items of a similar kind: one Gabon stamp may be neither here nor there, but 50 Gabon stamps act as a spur to the acquisition of 50 more. And as the ceiling is reached, as all the Gabon stamps seem to have been tracked down, a kind of restlessness sets in - Cameroon suddenly becomes interesting and desirable from the collector’s point of view. Soon it is no longer a matter of forming a collection. Multiple classes of object have begun to occupy the collector’s attention…
Made me think of Post Secret, a collection of cards with anonymous secrets written on them. It’s compelling reading, but after a while you begin to wonder whether anyone you talk to is “normal”. As a test, I took a card at random, and it looked like this.
And yes, on it’s own, without knowing that it’s part of a collection of similar cards, it’s just a little bit odd. But when you begin to look at all of them (a type 2 collection where categories emerge) then you do begin to see some trends, albeit fuzzy ones, and with those fuzzy trends, categories. Here are a few from a quick skim:
Religion:
I tell people I’m an atheist, Miss feeling close to God, I deleted the recording of the Pope’s funeral for an episode of Survivor
Marriage and love gone wrong:
I wished on a dandelion for my husband to die, I considered Statutory Rape charges so he’d regret breaking my heart, I wanted the disease to be my punishment
Shit and piss:
I take extreme measures to poop in solitude, I want to crap on my Mum’s white rug, I only pick up dog turds when people are watching
Individuals in the Crowd: Obscure T-shirts to find best friend, Enigmatic Ceramic Blessings for stranger to find, I make everyone believe I like to be different
Anyway, there are certainly more ways of slicing and dicing them, but I stopped because I found it all a bit bleak quite quickly. What I found interesting was that multiple classes of object had begun to occupy my attention, just as with the type 2 collection. And this case with the postcards is another case of the emergence of classifications, however brittle. Read someone’s blog for a while and fairly quickly you being to spot types of post, often quite different from their writers’ given categories. Same with flickr. Same with del.icio.us.
But what about type 1 collections, where the number of items collected remains static but you trade up? The obvious arena for this in social software-ish terms is either the wiki (wikipedia “trades up” sentences on a page until it gets a valuable collection of words about a topic) or the aggregator, though trading up may well be the wrong term. (If you’re just tracking what your friends trading up is probably not something you should admit to/do - your choice - but me I don’t like it) But what would it be like, and how would it affect you be allowed a maximum of, say, 200 posts? Maybe it would be a good thing?
And I suppose what I’m really curious about is whether Type 1 collections are a natural follow on from Type 2 collections. You tag/collect/post/whatever until classifications emerge (for you or your group) and when you focus on something you think is valuable in there and then you can start trading up.
Hmm. Not sure about the trading up, it’s sticking in my throat a bit …
