The Art of Curation: A blog post introducing curation and why you should start curating.

The Trade Along The Silk Road

Overload. Where did it start? When did information and difference in opinion become so abundant? Well, above, I’ve depicted an image of The Trade Along The Silk Road. Middle Eastern and Roman merchants began overland. . Silk quickly became a symbol of wealth and high status in Roman society. The Silk Road saw the exchange of culture, language, and ideas.

Cultural expansion, the spread of traits and ideas of growth from one place to another without moving, can be seen in technology, which has created a diffusion similar to the Silk Road.

The web is polluted with content and trends that make us think that we’re all just part of the algorithm. It’s like creating turned into a game for views, likes, and virality, but we’re super curious.

How can we use technology to help us spread unfiltered ideas and tastes in the world? People learn of new products through Facebook, Youtube, Tik-Tok, Pinterest, and word of mouth in their community, all algorithms except for the channel with the highest ROI. 😉

Curation as a Result of Personalization

The challenge with the above social networks network are changes that compounded by a lack of specificity used to measure the individuality of our techno-human mind. This issue is significant because other research areas (for example, digital inequality) have shown that online access, adoption, or features are insufficient to assess the effects of technology.

To refer to each individual’s personality on the Internet, the curated self usually differs from the natural. We project our dream image or something that we like the most or even an idea that we don’t have or know fully but that we would like to represent.

The curated self is a natural progression of technology. For example — creating a public Spotify playlist instead of the playlist that you’d relatively hidden because it’s a little weird. Maybe it’s the outfits you post, the books you read, or even the videos you like… We all filter our tastes for the masses.

Curation as a Trend on the Rise

How did curation come up?

A personal necessity an increasing number of people need to collect, personalize, and share the resources, tools, and techniques that they find the most helpful. In the past, these were physical assets, but now in the information age, it’s turned into digital assets, nfts, and exclusive content.

A social (cultural) necessity because by curating our most precious, exciting ideas, resources, tools, and visions, we aren’t collecting for our own interests, but we are helping others discover, learn, comprehend and make new ideas and perspectives part of their own while preserving the path and signposts that led us there for those who will come after us.

For all of these reasons, a curator, a filter for others to look, see, explore and learn about maybe become both a personal and a cultural necessity for society and social networks.

By curating, we actively redefine who we are, what we’re into, what we want to live for, and so much more. We constantly follow rather than explore exciting content. We do only vet opinion instead of taking everything at face value, of course. We do so when we need “context” and in particular when we’re looking to add our own opinion and taste instead of just sharing something “as is” on our social media to go viral.

Everything revolves around duality: what we make public and what we keep private — distinguishing between what we share because we like it and what we share out of them because others will. The intent behind this is to mold our image that we want to project to the world. For example, sharing articles that don’t interest you, but you know that other people will like to see or have an image of you that mirrors what you want them to have.

This is nothing new or even exclusive to the Internet. Still, social networks make it easier insofar as they serve as a permanent display to the world of the curated self that we are continually polishing little by little. Before, you had to participate in different forums to add your two cents to express your affinity for a particular kind of literature or specific music while ignoring the trendy viral stuff.

Is it possible for any company to combine both worlds and merge both behaviors and develop an in-depth knowledge of their users?

Curation as a museum to culture

Before we can enter the museum, we must understand how to even get through the door. So, let’s ask ourselves. Who are the gatekeepers to culture? There’s three systems to refer back to:

Political: we can’t spread our opinion freely or risk offline losses that will significantly affect our life. The term ‘correction’ or #canceled would be acceptable as well. The fear of social failure is too much for people to participate in the proliferation of creativity gifted by creator platforms/tools.

Cultural: Institutions of power. The mediators of the production and spread of tastes — those that dictate what’s wrong and right. Your probably wondering, well, isn’t that political? Truthfully, no, the binary decision of wrong or right is actually tied to culture, so that is one of the larger power systems.

Technical: Simple — social capital is valued over quality opinions, and the tools available are the best channel for everybody to express themselves and highlight their culture.

So, what’s curation?

It’s a mix of intertextuality, the use of one’s views or two sense with existing text, and authenticity. But actually, it’s the selection of quality content and contextualization of content by adding knowledge — this is where creators become knowledge workers by cutting through the noise and creating new perspectives using existing content.

How does curation affect culture?

Curation is our act of filtering, adding value, and personalizing to allow others to discover, consider options and viewpoints that were until then, outside their awareness or scanning range.

Culture is a culmination of our experiences, identity, what we believe, we see and partake in, our identity is effectively turning digital and culminating as content interest graphs. Curation is a culture museum, allowing people to dive into a new niche to find new value through added filtration, different viewpoints, and authenticity.

Why curate?

Curating and presenting an identity in the digital sphere is a process that leads to the questioning of one’s own culture — seeping into many life factors with your online persona, focusing on relationships, brand affiliations, and job applications. A person’s digital identity is a significant part of their interactions on social media, and carefully curating it is essential to our social livelihood. Consequently, it can be not easy to judge what is true or false online, considering what a significant part identities play in a digital sphere. This begs how far someone will create a particular identity, and is doing so in any way morally wrong?

New creator tools must make it easy to engage with different opinions, embrace multiculturalism, and eliminate gatekeepers. — Curation is the evolution of creation and can be seen by creators seeking their cultural niche to engage fans.

(Join the waitlist for our curation tool: diffusion)