Nailed It or Failed It: Culture of Curation

This is the type of blog post I don’t like to write because basically all I’m doing is complaining about something.   In my world, complaining is the first step in a multipart process.  First you complain, then you look for solutions, then you implement the solutions and finally review the results.  Repeat as necessary.

But here’s the thing, Gentle Reader, I am bored by the Internet lately.

Of course, this brings me to another Glassmeyer Rule – if you’re bored, it’s because you’re boring.  It’s not the job of the world to entertain you, you need to find things out there that engage your imagination and get you excited.  That is doubly true for the Internet which has an area dedicated to every niche interest imaginable.

I guess it all started about 10 years ago with the rise of blogs and Web 2.0.  I LOVED BLOGS.   They could be what essentially amounted to someone’s personal journal to a series of essays on Important Topics of the Day or anything really. I loved reading a piece of thought by someone and then resultant conversation in the comments.   But mostly it was about seeing what people think.  But it’s a lot of work to maintain a blog. As perhaps evidenced by the fact that I can barely be arsed to write more than one post a month here.

Then social networks became big and that was great because it’s a lot easier to post a status message or link to a news article than write up a blog post about what you’re doing and thinking.   Thus began the slippery slope into what I call the Culture of Curation, where the back and forth and complex thought development began to end and people began to substitute snapshots of existence for actual being.

(They also allow for a laziness in social interaction where “friending” someone on these sites and occasionally liking or commenting on something they post starts to substitute for other more  meaningful conversations and interactions.  But that’s a slightly different rant for a different day.)

I first noticed a real decline in quality of interaction with the Facebook like button. (Which actually was first developed on FriendFeed, I believe.)   Instead of commenting and interacting with someone based on what they post, you can get away with just “liking” it.  And since there is the only option of “liking”, you get weird situations where someone posts that their parent died and dozens of people liking the post as an offer of sympathy.  They probably don’t actually LIKE  the fact that the person has had a loss, but that’s all that’s available unless they want to make the effort of typing “I’m sorry.”  Which is clearly too much for some people.

Facebook has also developed “check ins” that, similar to FourSquare and other location based web 2.0 services, allow for people to announce that they are at a place or event.   Which is somewhat interesting to see when it’s a “big” event like a conference or somewhere noteworthy like a national monument or even kind of fun when you see a few of your friends together.  But when you check in every day at the same gas station?  I really don’t care.    And now there’s GetGlue where people “check in” to a tv show, movie or book.  That really makes me want to scream.  All you’re telling me is that you are sitting on your couch watching something – do you like it? Is it interesting? Tell me something that you think about it! Please!

I feel like people are curating their lives now via social media check ins and status updates.  How often have you been to a conference or other meeting of people that you usually interact with online and they spend the entire time posting updates about the meet-up online?  Or seen people posting vacation photos on facebook while still on vacation?  There’s now a filter that everything has to pass through before people can actually enjoy an experience.

And now there’s the actual curation websites like Tumblr and Pinterest where people don’t even have to come up with a witty line to say about something they want to share on the Internet and, more distressingly, the ability to hold a conversation about something posted on these sites is very very difficult.   Granted, there is a talent to curation – that’s what librarians do, after all – but for me, anyway, finding a excellent collection of something is only baseline interesting.  I want to know WHY someone pinned something. WHAT do they like about it?  I want to say what I find interesting about it.