Curation: A Dead Idea Of Dead Thinking

Source: NY Public Library Digital Gallery.

“Curation” and “curator” are the new buzzwords the dying dinosaurs of oldthink print publishing are clinging to just like overboarded Titanic passengers clung to skimpy lifebuoys in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic.

It’s their last gasp at trying to remain alive — and relevant.

I got news for you kids: Ain’t gonna happen. No how no way.

“Curation” is just another term for what was buzzing in the early days of the Internet: Portal.

“Oh, look,” the Suits schemed, “If we aggregate all this material in one place, millions will have to come to us — and only us!!11one1 — for it. Nyahahaha.”

And where is Time Inc.’s Pathfinder today? Where is Netscape’s portal? Where is ABC’s much-promoted (on nationwide TV no less!) GO Network?

Gone, gone, gone.

Time Warner to shutter Pathfinder

The decision to take it down was “based on the fact that 98 percent of the traffic doesn’t go to Pathfinder’s home page, but to the individual sites,” said a spokesman for Time Incorporated New Media.

Said Coomes, “There was more power in the individual brands than the Pathfinder brand. Why bury them under the Pathfinder name? Basically that’s what the market told us.”

Boldface emphasis added by me.

Portals are dead.

And so is that idea of “curation.”

This is the Internet. If you haven’t learned the lesson of decentralization and distribution, what have you learned?

Here are the oldthink print publishers on one side, bewailing the falling dominoes of print newspaper book review sections.

Wow, let me see. How many of those book review sections made bestsellers out of Tom Clancy? James Patterson? J.K. Rowling? How many people who read popular books wake up in the morning thinking, “Gee, I wonder what light entertainment The New York Times will recommend I read this day?”

Answer: None.

Popular bestsellers are scorned by the very people who tout the idea of “curation.” Genre fiction is especially scorned. Hey, all you readers of Harlequin and other Romances, how many of those books were “curated” to you by your local newspaper’s book review section?

I see no hands waving in the air for my attention.

Upwards of ninety-percent of the books I have read in my pre-Internet life were based on this:

1) Stumbling upon the book in a store
2) Stumbling upon the book in a public library
3) A passing mention in a non-fiction article
4) Having another writer mention the book

Where is the “curation” in any of that? Half were chance encounters, half were also chance encounters with mentions by others. There was no Curator tapping me on the shoulder to get my attention.

And in this Internet Age? It’s come down to number 4 — writers recommending other writers — and a new one, number 5: readers mentioning books.

There are very few websites I hit to “find out what to read.” Because I don’t like book reviews. They’re irrelevant. Why do I need to have somewhere else tell me what they thought of a book when I can simply go to a publisher’s or writer’s own website and read a sample chapter and judge for myself?

Even people who try to act as their own “curators” — via RSS feeds into Google Reader and the like — fail at that effort! I can’t count the number of tweets and blog posts I’ve read in which people have inevitably reached the point of throwing up their hands and declaring a bankruptcy of self-curation, dumping all unread items and beginning again.

Get used to the world as it is: overwhelming and without any center.

Serendipity — chance encounters — are the norm, especially on the Internet, where there are no equivalents to the bookshelves of stores and public libraries.

Books are recommended to readers by other readers and by writers those readers are reading.

Anyone who tries to sell you a scheme for “breaking through the noise” is a con artist.

The secret is hard, hard work. And luck — chance.

And anyone who utters the words “curator” or “curation” is irrelevant, period.

Source: NY Public Library Digital Gallery.

Please leave the Internet.