Taste fabrics and the beauty of homogeneity

This paper asks whether a homogeneous relation can sometimes reveal more than an elaborate ontology. Favorite things from 100,000 social-network profiles become “taste acts”; domain ontologies normalize them, and co-occurrence produces a 12,000-by-12,000 affinity fabric including 600 identity descriptors. Spreading activation converts a person's interests into a taste ethos, intersects two ethoi for comparison, and surfaces neighbors for recommendation. One relation type, one propagation mechanism, and continuous similarity offer a compact complement to long chains of symbolic categories. The paper is a six-page conceptual and technical condensation of the larger Taste Fabric work, not a separate experiment. It assumes that selected interests form a coherent statement and gains uniformity by discarding distinctions among different kinds of cultural relation.