One of the people I relate with on Facebook is a young man by the name of 
Jojo Malig, a journalist from the Philippines. This week he introduced me to the term curation and sent me scrambling to the Internet to try to figure out what the word meant. As a result, he exposed me to a whole new realm of internet editing which captured my interest enough to stimulate me to write about it.
The best way to describe Content Curation (the technical name for this field) is to think about the work a curator of an art museum undertakes.* The curator sorts, evaluates, and selects pieces of art which are pertinent to a specific show to be created. In doing so, the curator sets aside irrelevant pieces which may be fine art, but which do not pertain to the theme of the show being assembled. That sorting process emerges as an integrated show of pieces which demonstrate a specific purpose, style, or genre.
Similarly, then, a Content Curator is one whose function is to sort through the massive amount of information being circulated on the Internet and assemble it in a manageable way for a corporation, a company, or an agency to have access to it. The curation process is a form of editing, in that it discards inappropriate material and retains useful pieces which can be accessed with ease. The result is a client who is well-informed in a timely manner.
After reading through numerous pieces on the Internet about curation, it is clear that there are two applicable examples:
- a person who uses skills, talents, and expertise to assemble the material
- a technological instrument, a software, which functions in a similar manner.
Mr. Malig focuses upon the person who is employed as a Content Curator. In doing so, a great deal of trust is placed in the hands of an editor whose selections may well shape the content of major decision-makers.
“Curation is the new role of media professionals.
Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and – most importantly – giving folks who don’t want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It’s what we always expected from our media, and now they’ve got the tools to do it better….
Curation shifts the balance of power back to brands and publications. While anyone can make content, the decision to gather it, and present it by trusted content curators has more risk, and therefore more value.
— Steve Rosenbaum, Can ‘Curation’ Save Media?”
The massive quantity of information circulating on the Internet is overwhelming. When I think about the fact that the Internet is such a recent development, it makes me wonder what the quantity of information will be in twenty years. I wonder if there will become a time when the information available is so extensive as to blow out the system. Obviously, the system is going to need to re-invent itself on an on-going basis in order to manage the quantity of information that will be available in the future. Sorting and re-distributing the information into manageable quantities is obviously a necessity. Even in my limited use of the Internet I find myself overwhelmed at times and have to walk away.
It occurs to me that while there is a need for Content Curators at the macro level where corporations depend upon huge amounts of information input, there is also a need for an individual like myself to learn to practice curation for my personal needs. Malig points to the Huffington Post as a good example of curation in the current medium. Throughout the day the HP sorts through the news coming through the Internet and assembles it into smaller bites that the public can manage.
The key to the Huffington Post comment above is the word assemble. If the curator of a museum simply sorted through pieces of art to find relevant examples, but stopped there, the process would be truncated. The curator goes to the next level, however, and assembles a show. The content curation process requires the same thing. Once the materials available have been identified, they must be assembled into a user-friendly site. That is where the gifts of the curator come into play.
In order for a person like myself to practice personal content curation it is necessary to access the pertinent information and then assemble it into a setting like this blog in a way that it is useful to the reader. The blog is a resource for people who are writers or who simply like to expand their personal language repertoire. There are billions of words and phrases out there in cyberspace which are inaccessible to the average person. But by identifying some which may be useful or interesting to you as a reader, my attempt is to make some of the global language available and understandable.
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(*It should be noted that museum curators are not excited about this term being applied to the Internet field.)
Photo Credit: masternewmedia.org
