I started out thinking I would write a post questioning the evolving definition (and dilution) of the word “curation”, but ended up wondering if it is I who has been operating under the wrong definition all along.
I’ve always thought of curation as a great notion. In today’s media-soaked environment, regardless of what your interests are, there are simply too many stories, blog posts and videos generated every day to possibly visit, and we all get the sense that we are missing the good stuff. A curator fills an important role, not in generating more content to add to the mix, but in taking the time to review that content and, based on personal taste and life/work experience, selecting items that may be of particular interest or are thought-provoking, perhaps adding some context or analysis along the way.
Curation appears to be a growth industry, and much as one might follow a movie reviewer that they tend to agree with, people are searching out curators that can add value and help them get the most out of their limited media consumption allowance each day.
When I hear “curated” in regards to the web, I tend to assume that the person doing the curating is actually reading the content under review and, based on those taste/experience factors, selecting it for me. Yet, is that what is happening today?
Try this experiment: Pick one or two of the curators you follow, Twitter probably works best. Open up each story linked to in the last 24 hours and do a word count, then add these up. What’s the total count? Is it the equivalent of a small novel? Maybe War and Peace? Is it reasonable to assume that the curator hasn’t read even a fraction of what he is pointing to?
What this means is that, rather than the implicit assumption of “I have read this and found it useful or interesting, you might also”, what we are saying with today’s curation is “I saw this headline, check it out”. Then we, as consumers of this curation effort, see the tweet, decide we don’t have time to read the actual story ourselves (we are busy after all), but immediately retweet it out to all our followers (thereby making us curators as well).
If nobody is reading the stories before they “curate” them, the only thing they can rely on to select from is the headline and perhaps the author, and we know that for headlines, the more provocative the better. Hint – using the word “tyranny” in a headline gets a lot more page views (my own little experiment).
I started out by saying that I was confused. Confused because when I look around at the current definitions being used for curation on the web, it appears that people simply mean “organization”. There may be a filtering mechanism at play, but likely not.
Using that definition, if I organize the books in my home by the color of the book jacket, and you come along behind me and sort them by author’s last name, we have both “curated” the collection, but neither of us has cracked a single book open, and wouldn’t be able to tell you the first thing about what they contain.
Doesn’t the curator of a museum actually need to view and evaluate the artwork being considered for display?