Week 6 Session: Dual curation: the fridge door and the feed
Compare the two surfaces you curate for other people — one physical and semi-private, one digital and public. They are not saying the same thing.
31 March 2027 · Module 2 — Micropolitics
This week’s question: what personas are we constructing in public digital space versus semi-private physical space — and why are they different?
Inherited from week 5: the interior conceals, and concealment does classificatory work. This week is about what the exterior displays instead.
Before the session
Bring two things:
- A photograph of a fridge door — yours, or one you have permission to use. The whole door, including the boring parts.
- Your own social feed — Instagram, WeChat Moments, whichever you actually maintain. Scrolled back far enough to see a pattern.
You will only share what you choose to share; nobody is required to show a personal feed to the room, and there is a paired alternative if you would rather not.
Read Goffman’s excerpts, including the chapter on performances.
In the session
- Reading the doors (20 min). Photographs go up, and we read each other’s households off them. People are startlingly accurate, which is the point: the door is legible, and it was meant to be.
- Two curations (30 min). In pairs, for each surface:
- Who is the audience? The feed’s is large, mostly weak ties, and partly imagined. The door’s is small, strong ties, and physically present.
- What is the time horizon? A post is optimised for the first 48 hours. A magnet stays up for nine years.
- What gets displayed on one and never the other? The asymmetries are the finding — most people discover the door is more honest, more archival, and much less flattering.
- The archive problem (20 min). Expired coupons, invitations to events that already happened, a child’s drawing by a child now at university. The door preserves too, and preserves differently from the interior behind it.
- Ethnography workshop (30 min). In threes. Not proofreading: each person states their argument in two sentences and the other two try to break it. A description with no argument is the most common way this assessment goes wrong.
Afterwards
The Fridge Ethnography is due this Friday, 2 April — before the break, not after. If you need a last consultation, email Simone Ravel today rather than over the break.
Do not tidy the fridge before observing it.
When we return, the register changes: Module 3 is where the argument stops being interpretive and becomes measurable.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have brought both a photograph of a fridge door and a view of your own feed
- you can name the audience for each, and say how they differ
- you have workshopped your ethnography argument with two other people
Teaching team
- Dr Simone Ravel — convenor