Greetings all! I decided to dust off this old post from a previous course on curation to accompany our “readings” (actually listenings this week). We are listening to two radio/podcast clips: one from On The Media, and the other from NPR. You can listen to them here:
As you listen to these, think about what curation is. Is it original creation? Does it matter? Is curation something we all do? Now…on to the post from 2012.
I can’t think of a better starting place for a discussion about curation than this clip from IFC’s Portlandia. This scene in Portland’s James John coffee house provides some great commentary about the challenges of being a critical thinker and consumer of information in the digital age (even though most of the publications mentioned in this argument are print-based. More on that in a moment). Here’s the clip.
The more I start thinking about this scene in tandem with our Curation Culture class, the more I realize that our class is essentially designed to help us figure out exactly what is being parodied here, why it’s funny, and what we can learn from it.
Notice where their conversation begins. As the group sits around to wait for a friend who is running late, Carrie decides to kill the silence by asking, “Hey, did you guys read that thing in The New Yorker last month that draws an analogy between golf and marriage?” Fred responds affirmatively, and counters with his own article, a piece in McSweeney’s about music formats. Carrie enthusiastically assures him that she’s read it, and then throws out another article from Mother Jones on eco-chairs. Thus begins a kind of tennis match of “zeitgeist one-upsmanship” that spirals out of control, devolving from one honest question about an article to a slew of accusations: “Did you read Spin, The Washington Post, The Seattle Stranger, The New York Times, Paste…”. In this brave new world, no one wants to forfeit one’s hipster credibility and own up to not having read anything.
At this point we have to stop and ask a few questions. Why are these the publications that get thrown out casually over conversation at a coffee house? How does one person a) know that these are the things that allegedly smart, intellectual people read and b) actually find the time to read any of these things (let alone all of them)? Isn’t there an underlying anxiety in this scene that we, fellow culture mavens, might miss out on some bit of content that will mark us as outsiders, dilettantes who just don’t have a clue?
Or, is what’s being parodied the dissonance between simply admitting to reading something and actually having something intelligent to say about what we read? Again, go back to Fred and Carrie’s banter. Each of them respond with brief sayings, “of course I’ve read it,” “I did not like how it ended,” “it was well-written,” “we read it together!” None of these things counts for substantive analysis, but maybe that’s the point. What’s valued today is our ability to recognize surface-level bits of knowledge, and what we’ve lost, perhaps, is the ability to make, deep, meaningful connections between the things we read and the complex problems we face in the world.
Of course, it’s simply not realistic to expect that one person could possibly keep pace with all of the content in the publications Fred and Carrie list, which are but a sliver of all of the great journalism, blog writing, podcasts, news, and information that gets churned out every day. Perhaps what is really being parodied here is the mistaken notion that one has to stay current with everything in order to come across as smart to one’s friends. It’s just not possible, and we know that in this age of a swirling vortex of information, we have to find the right balance between knowing what the general buzz is and latching on to some information that we can use deeply.
This, in a nutshell, is the central challenge of information literacy, and I believe that curation, or the process of making decisions about what is good and what isn’t, is an integral skill for all citizens of the digital age that can help us become more information literate.
Whether we realize it or not, Fred and Carrie are curators. As they argue, they are revealing the decisions they have already made about what kinds of writing is important to the general public. Further, they are choosing what fraction of what they have read that they want to present to their friends. Let’s consider Carrie’s hypothetical New Yorker article on golf and marriage as an example. Even on the level of an individual publication, Carrie is savvy enough to realize that the piece was informative, well-written, witty, or getting talked about in other places. It stood out to her in a way that compelled her to bring it up at a random moment in a coffee shop. The premise of her question “have you read?” implies that Fred (and the silent guy at their table) should have read the New Yorker piece already. Why? Because it’s the New Yorker.
The takeaway here is that reading, or information-seeking in general, is inherently a social activity. We often look for information so we can connect with other people just as much as we want to learn something or solve a specific problem. So too is curating a social activity. Sometimes we share things to make a point, elicit feedback from others we care about, or simply to make new meaning out of a sea of information that already exists. Whatever our reasons, we are almost instinctively drawn to other people when we discover knowledge.
The second takeaway from this scene is the sheer plausibility of one person being able to keep track of so many publications. Notice that all of the articles Fred and Carrie mention come are print-based publications. Yet the tools that make this kind of widespread surface-level familiarity with news and culture are social media networks. Now, in the span of several minutes, we can scan through all of the meaningful articles in each of these publications, if we have done enough work in advance to organize our points of access to them.