PERSONAL STYLE VS. THE INTERNET

The other day I thought to myself, "That guy's outfit is so Tumblr." A strange sentiment on the surface, but as I got to thinking about personal style and the internet it occurred to me that the symbiosis between online style stars and the omnipresent photographers that celebrate them has created a chicken and egg situation with far-reaching repercussions. Are these people popular because they're photographed so much, or are they photographed so much because they're popular? More than that, what does their popularity mean for the sizable audience digesting their de facto style creeds on a million different dashboards?

Image-based platforms for social interaction have inevitably wound up as tools for sociocultural coding, providing a visual demarcation of who gets It and who's from Florida. You can see it in Pinterest's evolution beyond its humble beginnings as an online scrapbook and content-bookmarking service; the site now serves as a portal into a world of rough-luxe Scandinavian cabins, artisanal fig tartines and fireplace-adjacent thoroughbred labradors. The same can be said of Tumblr, with its users' adherence to an aesthetic equation that drives the popularity of most images on the blogging platform. Conformity can come as no surprise - what else could be the end result of 10,000 reblogs? Is Tumblr more of a collective digestive system than anything else?

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ORIGINAL CONTENT

The Man Repeller shot by Vanessa Jackman

Lately I've been thinking a lot about original content. What is it? How do you create it? Why isn't there more of it? Debaters seem to get hung up on creation vs. curation vs. consumption. A blog can be everything and nothing; it can be sharply edited, wholly original and beautifully designed. Or it can be an unhinged pictorial f*ckfest, a.k.a. the Tumblr of any bored teen, inevitably publishing under the username "nuclearchanukah," or "crackponies" or something. Sometimes the photolog blogs are totally awesome repositories of otherwise easily missed gems (Stuff and Nonsense, Maryam Nassir Zadeh). They are wordless compendiums, purposefully detached from their creators and expressly for the purpose of curating links and images. Other times the blogs that really take off rely solely on sharing their favorite finds from around the web, slickly edited together (Honestly...WTF). A mix is oftentimes nice to find and a nice mix is what I strive for on this blog - hopefully that doesn't come as a surprise to my readers! Said mix is a big sticking point though, as "stolen inspiration" is digital piracy to some and simply sharing to others.

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DEAR INTERNET No. 24

My favorite food, fashion and design finds from around the web...

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ARE WE INTERNET ENTREPRENEURS?

photo Garance Doré

Another one to file under, "I've been thinking about this for awhile," and I'm suddenly feeling called to action by a post this week at The Man Repeller. Blogger Leandra Medine's To Buy or DIY entry raised a critical point about thinking in the digital age re: the collective consciousness forums of Pinterest and Tumblr. The contemporary lexicon is constantly being modified with new ways to describe the act of non-thinking: we "reblog" and "repin," "retweet" and "share." We've all been given the chance to act as "curators" and "editors" - or have we? The most salient point raised in Medine's post, for me, was this idea that we are the, "Entrepreneurial Generation" (forgive all the quotes in this piece.) My question is: are we really, or do we just say we are? And what would that really mean?

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