There was a time when you were able to draw the line.
Facbook was for the personal You. LinkedIn for the professional. Your friends knew you as the crazy party girl/guy, your team as the sensible and slightly serious manager. But Facebook’s f8 updates have changed the way in which ‘you’ are represented online; suddenly the timeline is capturing everything that you do or say on Facebook, Google plus will show your friends, family and associated others the restaurants or stores you’ve recommended and Spotify is automatically sharing your love of Queen to anyone unlucky enough to connect with you.
What’s the value of curation?
In The Atlantic Philip Bump makes the pithy point that ‘our curation itself is representative’; what you choose to share and what you want to be remembered is as important to the person you outwardly (and perhaps inwardly) become as what actually happened.
This may at first seem like a way to create a fiction of your life; only post photos of the fabulous parties you go to and your life suddenly looks far more glamorous than it really is. But frankly this is just human nature – even before social media we’ve always wanted to create a public self that is all our best bits combined. Take some of our greatest movie stars for example; how close was the real Marilyn Monroe to the icon that we all ‘know’?
Yet now by being part of social networks, by being logged in to programmes we use on a daily basis such as Google, Facebook or our email provider, we are automatically sharing more and more of our lives. As Danah Boyd puts it ‘We’ve moved from a world that is “private-by-default, public-through-effort” to one that is “public-by-default, private-with-effort.’ Boyd talks about how, it’s easier to keep conversations private by obscuring the meaning of what you are saying rather than going to the effort of having a private conversation. He talks about people using song lyrics, codes or referencing real life events in public conversations all in an attempt to keep things private.
So curating becomes something different, it’s not you choosing your favourite bits of the web and piecing them together, it’s you removing the parts of your online life that you don’t want people to see. Rather than a putting together of content, curation becomes as exclusion; It’s detagging yourself, removing the bits of life that you don’t want to remember, saying no. The new Facebook timeline is a great example of this; it offers the chance to fill in as many blanks in your life before timeline as you feel necessary or to remove those events you’d rather forget from the timeline of your life forever. You are deconstructing the bits you don’t like rather than building up the bits you do.
Only the domain holders will be free
One way to avoid the need to negatively curate is to opt out altogether, eschew social media and be whoever you really are. Adrian Short advocates this, comparing social media use to “‘digital serfdom’, an evil to be avoided at all costs. Short’s argument is interesting in that he sees those who own domains as more in control of their online identity, an argument with an interesting subtext; is this a digital native reassuring himself that because he has a blog he is still free to continue building his online self rather than deconstructing the image others make for him?
Maybe I’m over analysing this – Short is right in that you pay now to be able to control. But the question is, do the majority of people care to be able to control their online behaviour. Humans love to share and people now want to share even the smallest minutiae of their lives. There is less shame in letting go now, less need for a stiff upper lip – it’s fine to announce that you are hungover on Tuesday morning or to post the picture of you drunk the night before. So maybe curation is not about removing, but accepting the bits that before you never would have made public?
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