Curation

“ True curation is a quiet rebellion. Amidst all the social noise, top curators are trying to slow down, be intentional, and curate what actually matters. Not what’s trending, but what resonates and links to a true insight. It’s also become more personal. People don’t want mass taste, they want someone whose lens they trust. ”

That shift - from mass... See more

So when we wonder where all the websites have gone, know it’s the curators we’re nostalgic for because the curators showed us the best the web had to offer once upon a time. And the curators— the tenders, aggregators, collectors, and connectors— can bring us back to something better. Because it’s still out there, we just have to find it.

Here’s the... See more

A curator’s authority comes not from personal relatability, but from perspective, context, discernment, and intellectual labour that has since been lacking in recent social media years. That authority is epistemic, not interpersonal as they reduce cognitive load and sort signal from noise. In other words, they cannot credibly hawk sheet masks or... See more

Unlike influencers, curators do not lead with self-exposure, but with interpretation. A curator’s authority comes not from personal relatability, but from perspective, context, discernment, and intellectual labour that has since been lacking in recent social media years.

The richest insights are found in overlooked sources and connections that are beyond the reach of the internet and the incentives of its curatorial algorithms. My inspiration comes from unexpected places: the yellowed pages of out-of-print software books, modern science fiction essays, the writings of early religious leaders, and unique items in... See more

This problem of overabundance is why I wrote my piece last year. As consumption of digital media increased, we began to see a larger volume of curators — coolhunters, just like Gladwell had outlined in ’97, but this time in a digital space. On Tumblr, this looked like blogs of curated art or photography; on Pinterest, we saw well-crafted... See more

Curation has historically emerged at moments when institutions failed to provide coherence. Salons rose when the Church and monarchy lost epistemic control; DJs rose when record labels could no longer define taste; curators rise today because algorithms are riddled with decision fatigue, influencers are intrinsic to their own needs, and the... See more

As information volume and complexity grew, simply keeping pace became a specialized profession. In other words, information specialists who do nothing but track developments in more and more narrow domains emerge.