The verb curation has its origin in the noun “curate”. A curate was:
n.late 14c.,“spiritual guide,” from Medieval Latin curatus
“one responsible for the care (of souls),”
from Latin curatus, past participle of
curare “to take care of”
That the origin of this word, now widely used in social media marketeer lexicons, is both religious, and pertains to guardianship of the soul, is of particular interest. For me, the sheer volume of information on everything, never mind just the topics I find of note, is overwhelming, and I feel in need of exactly this sort of guardianship: SOS -Save Our Souls!
Increasingly, I am looking to specialists to help me distil this noise into something manageable:
- I have subscribed to newspapers and journals, blogs that are subscription only, and experiments run by notable news sources in an effort to only receive media that matters.
- I have stopped my own behaviours tuning into the endless stream: Facebook and Twitter are no longer on my phone, I do “my” stuff before I look at my inbox in the mornings.
- I only look at media feeds when I am ready for them.
- I am more comfortable with the delete button, and get a lot of my subscriptions in print these days, in preference to digital. I may be behaving like a luddite, but the physical feedback I get from paper helps me recall and retain in a way that the digital interface does not allow.
I, based on my own experiences, think the online future of media consumption will be about curation.
Already there is a proliferation of services being offered that help us to make sense of this new abundance. From food boxes, to what to read, to where to live, to what to wear, it’s clear we are overwhelmed by choice and need help — which a variety of services are springing up to provide.
So far, it’s the consumer that is benefitting from this pre-shopping shopping, but I think the corporate sector could be the next beneficiary. I’m interested to see how these fledgling curation services scale to serve a business clientele that is equally overwhelmed by choice.