When people follow me on public social networking, their immediate response is the quantity of my accounts. How did you get this number of that? Well, honestly, time is one defining factor. The other? Well, simply put, it’s quality.

Living in a world where numbers and quantity seems to measure the credibility of your online persona, the quality of your publications can be caught in the undercurrent of the ocean of information. As talked about last class with Jason, there are people out there making ‘really really good shit’ and are experts at what they do. But online, what makes an expert seen so to speak? Google– for example- calculates a web page’s rank through the connections, history, keywords and links that intertwine in and out of the publication. Within those circumstances, it could be suggested that it really is about who you know and who knows you- but what’s the solution or revolution in this?

For one, your online presence is both limited and unlimited. You can have multiple accounts and persona’s representing your own interests, talents and sociocultural expressions. However, you only have an X amount of time to dedicate yourself to these musings. This is where quality and quantity collide as there are no real rules on the internet; only limitations and responsibilities that command your attention. This attention (as murmured in the first symposium) can be projected into the idea of industrialisation and the mass creation of products for a demanding, ever-growing population. When reading up on the concepts of quality and quantity in a general search, I stumbled across a quote by Massimo Vignelli to which questioned and validated these thoughts. It pressed:

“Quality stems from intellectual elegance, and is precluded from the vulgar mind. The great utopia is to have quality in great quantity. To some extent, industrialisation can multiply an object of quality in great quantity and make it accessible to large numbers of people.”

This scarcity between quality and quantity is what infatuates my interests when delivering content online. I can copy/paste an image 100 times and not have to fret if my pixels are in jeopardy, however, if I were to publish the same image 100 times one after the other inartistically, viewers may deem my work a lower quality due to unexplained repetitiveness. With this, I contemplate my writings critically with ‘intellectual elegance’; I question, ‘who is this for’ and ‘what will they take from this image or idea?’ Perhaps there may be no real rules on the internet, but there are experts out there delivering quality in great quantity; and this great quantity is time spent.