‘You are what you curate.’ Wise words from GigaOm. But is the trend for curation dumbing down the content that we share?
I recently joined pinterest and whilst I love the fact that I can now easily curate pictures that will inspire the decor in my flat at a click, I was struck by the shallowness of the comments – take a look at a typical comment stream below (I’ve scrubbed out the names as I’m looking at a macro-trend rather than the thoughts of one or two people here)
What exactly are these people gaining from commenting? Why are they taking the time out of their already busy day to echo the exact same sentiment as the person above them?
GigaOm struck the nail on the head in his post ‘You are what you create. Why Pinterest is Hawt.’ Curating cool pieces of content or items of news has earned many bloggers their place in the digerati but Pinterest takes the notion of curation and strips it back to it’s bare bones – the UX on Pinterest means that your identity is solely defined by what you share. There’s no room for a blog post on why you thought it was interesting or what else it related to. Your identity becomes based solely on the relationship between the different items that you pin to each board.
GigaOM reckons that the desire to scrapbook our lives, likes and desires comes from a need to personalise the increasingly homogenous existence we lead. However, I think it’s more that we want the barriers removed and becoming a high power curator is easier and quicker than becoming a successful blogger.
Technology is making it easier and easier to share. Elan Gill writes a great post on how social has evolved from a long-tail interaction to push button social curation; ie. we no longer have to write a whole blog post, we can simply push a button to make a piece of content part of our online DNA.
Elan Gil's diagram to show the evolution of social from long-tail to push button platforms
And it’s about to get easier. Many predict that Facebook’s recent push to frictionless sharing will be adopted more widely, meaning that we don’t even need to bother pushing that button to share the tiniest details of our lives.
This all seems very doom and gloom. Don’t get me wrong, I love the exciting images and ideas I’ve seen through Pinterest as it’s opened me up to a whole new community of people. But the danger is that we stop thinking. That the conversation we’ve seen on Twitter or Quora stops happening and our lives become a mindless day of repinning other people’s pins, liking other people’s content and leaving one word comments. Social curation may be the trend of 2012 but how do we keep curation meaningful, and ensure that new platforms we build allow us to discuss as well as to showcase what’s new and cool in our world?
Featured image courtesy of tuckertech
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