Curation in the age of the Internet is an interesting thing to think about. I hear that word more these days. In radio I hear ‘human curated’ instead of a Spotify playlist. The thing I saw that got me thinking about this was a used/vintage store that had ‘Curated & Handmade’ painted across its exterior.
I remember, and I can still find, junk stores that seem to be whatever detritus from the past ended up in a single room. These can be fun to spend hours digging through. Much like wikipedia or the Internet Archive.
But there is increasing value in the ability of a human to act as a signal processor to separate signal from noise. To add their special knowledge to create a curated collection of things. These could be tangible items like in a junk shop or a list of songs or files or even ideas.
“Ideas worth considering, curated by Gloopy Purple Liquid.”
When we are directly exposed to everything all the time we need mechanisms to both sort and order. To sort things we want to surface from things we don’t. To order them in a way that can be easily engaged with. It’s a mixtape for all cultural output.
Not just identifying things that should be paid attention to but things that are good jumping on points, or jumping off points to dig deeper into a subject. Even the interplay of how ideas, books, songs, tv shows, all of our cultural output imply one another.
This song leads naturally to the next song in a well curated mixtape. This song could also lead to that movie which could lead to this comic book which leads to this novel to this painting to this philosophy.
In the same way that it is easier to appreciate Joy Division if you know the post punk musical environment they came out of, it’s easier to appreciate certain books and other works of art if you understand their context. What proceeded them, what informed them.
Identifying patterns is something that AI is very good at. Story telling however is something that it struggles with (see attempts to create an AI dungeon master). Story telling is something that humans excel at. I might argue that story telling is at the foundation of what it means to be human.
As the pattern matching, the categorization is passed more & more to AI it seems like humans will spend more time in the act of curation & story telling.