Ah, "curation"! The driving force behind so much of what we do online these days. Curation takes many forms and has many uses, so I know I can't really cover it all, but I just want to say a little bit (because this whole blog thing goes to my head sometimes). But anyway. Online curation. I have so many thoughts. Scooping.it, reblogging, repinning, retweeting, links posted to facebook timelines. It seems it's not what we create, but rather what we point to that has become, in some way, how we identify ourselves online. Our online personal style, if you will.
In the mid-90s, I could wear my hair messy and my ripped corduroy pants, doc martens and a child's soccer shirt (ironically, of course -- sports? me??) and the other teenagers around me at school would not have to be Sherlock to know just by looking: this is the kind of girl who listens to grunge music. But what about now? When you hang out online, people can't see your shoes. They can see the youtube videos you link to, tumblr reblogs, articles you post, or tweets you retweet. We create ourselves online by aligning ourselves with the things we point to, and those who follow us can draw their conclusions from there.
There are ups and downs to this, of course. Diversity and representation in the media. Trying to find things that adequately speak to us, it's easier said than done sometimes. Even sophisticated search engine algorithms - designed to more accurately show us what we're looking for - can effectively prevent us from finding some of the things that we might want or need to find, because google doesn't anticipate that we're interested in that, based on our previous online activity.
That, and the sheer volume of what we might find when we start delving deeper into what is available online. People are staggered by the volume of information online, combined with the fact that a surprisingly small amount of it is actually visually apparent to the average internet user. Think of it: When most of us go online, we see our facebook "news", perhaps the headlines on CBC or BBC, whatever someone we know happens to tweet about. Putting us in control of the information we consume does not always amount to us consuming a great deal of it. Especially in an ad-driven internet economy, where someone has to pay for all this stuff, so we're more likely to get exposed to clickbait videos or tabloid stories than what's going on in Venezuela, for example.
I think that's why librarians love things like Scoop.it. Naturally predisposed to want to organise knowledge, we see a tool like this and latch on immediately. Where the average person (and even ourselves at times) might be stuck inside our filter bubbles or wondering what we might be missing, we've got other people trying to pick up the slack. Collect what matters that we might not have seen.
I hadn't used Scoop.it before, so I signed up with my Twitter and found it all fairly simple. I'm not sure how much scooping I will do myself, though I can see it's a very useful tool. One issue I have with these kinds of sites, though, is the reliance on suggestions. Similar to Pinterest and tumblr, if most of the things that we scoop are the things that the site suggests we scoop, or the things we get in our feed from the people we follow, then it merely turns into a feedback loop of sameness, and doesn't get at so much of the hard to find bits of the internet. The real trick with proper curation is to find the useful things that aren't getting attention, and bring them to the forefront.
I just wrote way more than I intended to. Ack.
tl,dr: What we curate online is very involved with how we present ourselves to others. And how we curate online can help others find what they need, or it might just tell them the same old things.
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