Contemplating the Soft Infrastructure of Social Media

There are some really intriguing underpinnings of an infrastructure meme at the moment, which I’ll attempt to coalesce around some ongoing social media trends. Please bear with me:
Deepak Kumar, a consultant with the ICFAI Journal of Infrastructure, outlines the distinctions between ‘hard infrastructure’ and ’soft infrastructure’ in these terms1:
(The) infrastructure sector is divided into hard [...]

Skatemaster Tate, Uberselektor, Twitter and Cultural Relevance

I was never much of a skater, though not for a lack of trying. In the end, I think I was much more interested in the culture that it embodied (and was as far flung from my rural Texas upbringing as could be imagined) – mostly the recordings of Skatemaster Tate1.
Still, absurd co-opting of skate [...]

Access via Extraction?

Another in a series of good posts from Becca over at CultureSnack, this time on the news that the Brooklyn Museum has found a means by which to monetize Twitter:
…the Brooklyn Museum has figured out a way to monetize its social networking efforts without going the expected route of selling ad space. For $20, people [...]