<
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-new-generation-of-online-culture-curators>
"The current Internet landscape sometimes feels like the Zone in Andrei
Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker”: directionless, inexplicable, bound to change in
confusing ways. Our social-media feeds don’t offer much except the forward
acceleration of algorithmic recommendations. Google and other forms of search
are becoming clogged with content generated by artificial intelligence. Knowing
what you’re looking for doesn’t always help you chart a path, because niche
communities can be difficult to locate and to keep up with. We are in a
transitional phase of digital culture, and thus more in need than ever of
friendly faces, personable human guides (not unlike a “stalker” in the Zone),
to help us navigate this treacherous ground. Such guides go by many names—call
them influencers, or content creators, or just “this one guy I follow.” Guided
by their own cultivated sense of taste, they bring their audiences news and
insights in a particular cultural area, whether it’s fashion, books, music,
food, or film.
Perhaps the best way to think of these guides is as curators; like a museum
curator pulling works together for an exhibition, they organize the avalanche
of online content into something coherent and comprehensible, restoring missing
context and building narratives. They highlight valuable things that we
less-expert Internet surfers are likely to miss. Andrea Hernández, the
proprietor of Snaxshot, a newsletter and social-media account dedicated to
“curating the food and beverage space,” told me recently, “Curation is about
being able to filter the noise.” (I follow Hernández for her skill at
discovering the wildest examples of direct-to-consumer drinks startups, such as
Feisty, a purveyor of “protein soda.”) She continued, “I go out and I scour
through the Internet and I come to you with my offerings.” Unlike a museum
curator, however, the digital personalities I have taken to following also
become the faces of their work, broadcasting recordings of themselves, on
TikTok and Instagram, as a way of building a trusting relationship with their
followers."
Via
Garbage Day: The CEO Passive Content Obsession
https://www.garbageday.email/p/ceo-passive-content-obsession
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
