The term editorialization, in English, refers to expressions of opinion — as in, writing an editorial or a letter to an editor. In his 2016 Sens-Public article, Marcello Vitali-Rosati writes in his opening paragraph that in French, éditorialisation “relates specifically to digital culture and to digital forms of producing knowledge.” It’s part of the (digital) social practice to understand, organize, and judge. There are, according to Vitali-Rosati, five things that make up editorialization: (1) processual, (2) performative (action), (3) ontological, (4) multiple, and (5) collective.
...
trails of ideas
trails are stories
stories meander and shift
stories change over time
stories may not be entirely factual
stories contain elements of
fact
responses may not be entirely factual either... they are opinions
stories and facts and opinions are part of the human condition
part of what makes a culture
what is culture
what’s real?
words and text are “real”
threads connecting words and text are perceived and discovered
multiple pathways
fictional but based on analysis
we love stories
stories form communities
...
Around the same time I began studying éditorialisation, I also revisited Jessica Helfand’s book Design: The Invention of Desire (coincidentally also published in 2016). She writes two things (among many others...) that capture my attention:
- Retweets are buttressed by hashtags; crowd-pleasing posts are boosted by thumbs-up emoticons… With each ‘share’ the value of the original is fundamentally diminished, even as we applaud its fleeting popularity… Yet while such participatory gestures go a long way toward cementing community and reinforcing belonging, they also effectively deplete our basic sense of trust. (page 32)
- In a sadly ironic modern-day twist on the classic Cartesian notion of selfhood, we post, therefore we are. (page 38)
Opinions are traceable through online writings, by nature of things like hyperlinks, topics, hashtags, and so forth. If writing about aspects of design is becomes opinion-oriented and contextualized through éditorialisation, then what stories are produced through connections between design texts?
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