Surviving Social Chaos

Giuseppe Mauriello: This is my “scoop” article for today. I found this article written by Suw Charman-Anderson in November of 2006 from her first professional blog “Strange Attractor”,  now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com.

Suw is journalist, social technologist consultant and writer, one of the UK’s social media pioneers. 

Returning to her article... the author describes the scenario of the digital industry at the time (2006), then she raises some interesting  points about the need of content curation and the importance of the curator role. Here are some gems excerpted from it:

“We already have more movies available than any one person can watch; more videos on YouTube; more blogs… more everything. It’s not like we’re starting from a point of scarcity here. And the flood of stuff is going to turn into a rampaging torrent as more people get online and more people get excited by their ability to participate and create.

In the past, the media acted as gatekeepers.

They were the ones that went to the movie previews…
They were the ones who got the advance copy of the game…
They were the arbiters of taste, the people in the know, the ones with the connections needed to get at culture before us plebs got at it.

But we don’t need gatekeepers anymore. We don’t need people who stand between us and our stuff, deciding what to tell us about and what to ignore. We don’t need arbiters of taste.

We do, however, still need help. There’s just too much stuff around for us to know what’s out there, to keep up with what’s good, what works for us, what is worth investigation. What we need are curators.

We need people who can gather together the things that are of interest to us, things that fit with our tastes or challenge us in interesting ways, things that enrich our lives and help us enjoy our time rather than waste it on searching.

Curators already exist. Some are people: Bloggers who sift through tonnes of stuff in order to highlight what they like, and who, if you have the same taste as them, can be invaluable to discovering new things to like.

But curation of the web has barely started. Much of what you could call curation that exists today is flawed: too many noisy opinions and not enough capacity to understand what I as an individual want…”

I loved this article and title that the author chose for it.

Read the original article here:
http://strange.corante.com/2006/11/08/the-democratisation-of-everything-and-the-curators-who-will-save-our-collective-ass

***** Yes when gatekeepers like editors attempt to continue the market removes tht power. Could argue that curation could have saved the newspaper business, but hard to be a curator if you are used to gate keeping (apparently). Marty