Our Modern World of Curation
This is part 6 of a 7 article series that examines the technological history and theory behind the curation of human thought and discovery.
We’ve come a long way from the days of flesh and blood curation. One technological advancement after the other gave us a new way to collect and share our insights and discoveries like never before. Writing evolved into printing, and recorded sound meshed with photography to give us film. But it didn’t end with the physical world. Through computing and the Internet, humanity built a vast digital library capable of holding the sum total of the world’s knowledge. Finally, with the development of search, we ushered in a golden age of digital curation.
But the wheel of innovation continues to spin, and we find ourselves now in a world awash with curated information ready and waiting to answer our next query.
So what does this brave new world of curation look like?
The three pillars of Web 2.0: blogs, wikis, and social media proved to be more than a fad and now serve as the backbone for much of the digital curation activity today. Online news publications regularly act as aggregators of content found on thousands of blogs across the Web. Meanwhile, Wikipedia continues to thrive and has fundamentally shaped community knowledge management in the workplace and in hobby circles around the world. However, neither of these come close to the impact social media has had in the journey towards better human thought curation.
So much so, that’s it’s getting more and more difficult to distinguish blogs and wikis from social media. Sites like Twitter combine 140 character ‘micro-blogs’ with a vast network of followers that results in an interconnected social experience not seen with the blogs of the past. Medium, another blogging platform, is following this trend as well with more full-length articles. Wikis are finding a role as information libraries for various online forums and websites. Even news publishing and social media are blending together with Facebook’s publisher platform and Snapchat’s Discover feature.
Social media has provided us a way of organizing into groups online for the purpose of sharing the most relevant information we can curate for the groups we are a part of. The followers, friends, and recognition users are rewarded with from this behavior has proved to be extremely addicting, and hints at a particular area of concern for the future of curation on the Web.
Just as the Internet proved to be a boon for curation, it has also become a platform for digital businesses. Since the late ’90s, Internet companies have been on a mission to extract as much value from the Web as possible, and that desire to retain visitors and sell products has had a pernicious impact on the ways online curation technology works with users.
This isn’t all bad. These businesses play an important part in making the Web popular, and it’s possible that without them it would be a far less useful place for curation. That said, their tactics of isolating users from the competition can’t be ignored. The biggest point of concern here has to do with the concept of walled gardens. A walled garden (or closed platform) is software that restricts a user’s access (and even sharing) to non-approved applications, content, and media. Facebook is an example of this. They can dictate what information you can share with others and even what information you can save or export.
What’s worthy of concern here is not so much Facebook’s control of information on its site. That data technically belongs to them. The problem has to do with Facebook’s size. If you want more control over your curated information and data don’t use Facebook, but that doesn’t mean your friends won’t be on there and that you’ll have to contend with social pressure to avoid using the service. This isn’t limited to Facebook either, large social sites across the web continue to adopt walled garden strategies to maintain control of their user base which they rely on for selling products or generating ad revenue.
As social media behemoths struggle for dominance over the Web, their attempts to become walled gardens places restrictions on the flow of the curated information users upload to them. This restricts the free flow of curated information and risks losing it all together when one of these companies fails and disappears. Sometimes this information can be salvaged, but other times it’s lost for good.
This is a particularly challenging issue when it comes to collaborative databases.
Half wiki and half social media, collaborative databases like Yelp and Foursquare facilitate an important curation activity on the modern Web. Users across the globe contribute to these sites in an effort to build a community database of relevant information. Reviews of restaurants, movies, books, and anything else you could need a recommendation for can be found in a user-generated collaborative database.
Despite all of this collaboration, make no mistake, these sites are often also walled gardens. Users may put the data in but the sites decide who takes it out. Again, this is their prerogative since they own the site. Still, it funnels global curation efforts into the hands of a central authority that has the power to decide how and if that information ever becomes available to the public.
Regardless of their negative impact, these communal pools of information are a tremendously important aspect of curation on the Web. They help curate useful information in one place that millions of people rely on each day.
The fight for user control extends well beyond the browser-based Web. The explosion in users these sites enjoy is due largely to the proliferation of smartphones. And while smartphones continue to serve as the ultimate digital curation tool, they also pose a threat to the accessibility of curated content normally accessed on the Web today.
Applications (or apps) are a key component of smartphone technology. There are millions of them. New phones live and die by the number of apps developed for them. They turn an already impressive device into a Swiss Army Knife of useful tools. They also serve as the ultimate walled garden enablers. You can use apps to take and hold your photos, notes, and even your medical information, and once you put that information in there’s no telling how easily it will be to ever get it out.
For those building a walled garden, apps provide one major benefit over the Web: they’re self-contained. Unlike the Web, app developers can design their experience to exclude (or discourage) links to other sites and apps. In addition, apps can’t (for the most part) be indexed by search engines.
This means any information that ends up on them can’t be discovered as easily as if it were online. That problem is compounded by the fact that if an app ceases operations the curated content that app has collected may be lost forever. This unsearchable divide between apps and the Web risks fragmenting an open platform for curated human thought.
Fortunately, many apps still live on both the Web and our smartphones today. Time will tell if apps create more or less fragmentation in digital curation efforts, but one thing is for sure, they will have a guiding impact on the future of the Web.
Even with all of the structural changes to how humans go online, search remains just as important as ever. With new users connecting to the Internet daily, search is indispensable in organizing all of the new curated information being added. This need has made it a lucrative business for those capable of adequately solving the problem and continues to encourage innovation in the algorithms and technology used to keep the digital world organized for the benefit of all.
But this extends beyond traditional search engines. Even heavily trafficked sites online are finding that they need to develop better search tools to help their users navigate the curated content they hold and also make sure those users don’t go looking elsewhere. This pressure has certainly helped improve accessibility to curated content in regards to finding it when you’re in the right place, but even more work is needed to help guide users to that right place as well.
The Web is still growing and it’s growing fast. More humans with more curated information will be arriving online to share and seek out new knowledge for themselves. This will provide a new set of challenges and opportunities for the future of curation.
And that is precisely what we’ll be looking at in our next and final installment of this series.
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