Curation

Software has eaten the world, and now it’s a commodity. It’s not about the technology anymore. The era of the engineer has ended; the era of the curator has begun.

Arguably, algorithms already curate the information that we encounter online. They are, as Kevin Slavin puts it, “like an invisible architecture that underpins almost everything that’s happening” (Slavin, 2011). In doing so, they reshape how our culture works and how we understand the world. Unlike Brand, whose view of the curating done by the... See more

The more our world becomes measurable and quantifiable, the more we need spaces that preserve what can't be measured—the hunches we can't explain, the patterns we feel but can't prove.

For brands, archives serve a parallel function: heritage as intellectual capital. Referencing your own past demonstrates institutional depth, creative continuity, and legitimacy that new brands cannot manufacture. In a world of conglomerate acquisitions and proliferating labels, archives prove you were there first. And that you still matter today.

Technology treats the process of consuming and the process of creating as distinctly different, when the reality is that for our brains, the process of absorbing a book is not all too different from the process of producing one. We are always seeking new connections, combining and recombining old ideas to produce new ones. So why is it that we... See more

The curator of the digital world is positioned as mediator and tastemaker, using content created elsewhere as raw material for the making of meaning.

So that, I think, is the role of information curators: They are our curiosity sherpas, who lead us to things we didn’t know we were interested in until we, well, until we are. Until we pay attention to them — because someone whose taste and opinion we trust points us to them, and we integrate them with our existing pool of resources, and they... See more