Electronic Content Curation

Below is a fine example of what some would refer to as "curated content":


A collection of LOLcats on Pinterest

To the credit of the person having mindless fun putting these together, s/he probably never heard of "electronic content curation." Yet, that's exactly what some would like to call it.

Well worth reading is Matt Langer's blog, Stop Calling It Curation, where he exposes this new fad word for what it is: nonsense. "First, let’s just get clear on the terminology here: “Curation” is an act performed by people with PhDs in art history; the business in which we’re all engaged when we’re tossing links around on the internet is simple “sharing.” " I'm loathe to find a favorite quote in this brilliantly funny and honest article, you are urged to read the entire page.

We also have Frederic Martinet's Curation - It's Shit who eviscerates, toilet plunger in hand, "curation platforms," copyright infringement, economic freeloading, irresponsibility and the drowning of information. He writes: "Curation is the taking content from one place and putting it in another. Nothing else. Let’s remember this now – taking content without having permission to do so is an infringement of copyright." and perhaps more importantly: "Some curation platforms offer the “share” functionality for redistribution on various social networks by linking to the curation platform hosting the content rather than to the original article. It is therefore a harnessing of potential traffic and, as a result, economic freeloading." Indeed, we see an infuriating increase in Pinterest itself being offered as the original source of some material.

LOLcats are representative of the heritage of our civilization, their pixels must be preserved for future archeologists to understand us fully. This is one for the Smithsonian, to be sure!