Very happy to have contributed a short piece on “the feed” for Imagining the Internet(s): A Collaborative Glossary, bringing me back to my early dissertation times when I started studying feeds, APIs, and other syndication protocols. The glossary brings together 28 entries to think about the internet as an imagined object: affordances and infrastructural ideologies, net scepticism and romanticism, vernacular metaphors and algorithmic folklore, and many others. Each entry is a keyword, be it a well-known or a new one, defined and interpreted by the scholar who uses it.
“In both its infrastructural and metaphorical roles, the feed reveals how the internet has been imagined as an inexhaustible, self-renewing source of informational nourishment that continually supplies users with endless streams of content while binding them to platform infrastructures.”
Congrats to Nathalie Fridzema and Anya Shchetvina, the editors, for putting this together! Free download at the Institute of Network Cultures!
