A fundamental difference between the ways I dealt with school work and information in general, when I was in High School (a long time ago…) and now…is that we are now awash in information. In days of yore (e.g. 1970’s), we lived in a world of information parsimony…there was only just enough to go around…
As a student back then, I had to go to the local public library to get the information I need to do research into whatever topics I needed…
NOW, I can access afar more …just with my smartphone…anywhere.
The notion that we are indeed drowning in data has some significant and long reaching consequences in how we do things. For instance, the current trend towards making the meme of ‘curation’ into something tangible is moving apace.
In many ways this is reasonably close to what journalists do…but with some interesting differences. As the following quote alludes to, news used to be: “here’s what happened,” but now it is “here’s how to follow the story.”
The later link and quote from Maria Popova takes this idea even further, positing that curating information for others is a new occupation. There is a need for someone to take the role of a ‘librarian’ for many that need some help in pre-digesting much of what is out there, online.
As a means to present this as a sort of self referencing irony, this very blog post is an act of curation. I find topics, links, and ‘digest’ much of the information for you to consider (and to possibly take the time to delve into the original articles…).
The Rising Need for Content Curation Skills and Capabilities
http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2011/05/the-rising-need-for-content-curation-skills-and-capabilities-.html
Picking up on the theme from last week’s post, Tech Reporters Losing Control of the Story to Social Media, here was an interesting tweet that could a lot of play at SXSW.
@robinsloan the way to cover big news in 2011 is not "here’s what happened." It’s "here’s how to follow the story" http://t.co/sMqGOuh
It was reported and commented in Economist article, Meet the Curators. The article notes that that "aggregation" or "curation" of other people’s coverage is becoming recognized more and more as one of the indispensable elements of journalism. They add that, “Being able to scan a vast range of material, determine what’s reliable, relevant and sufficiently objective, decide what will actually interest your particular readers and arrange it in a way that they can use are not trivial skills.”
It goes on to state that Richard Sambrook, a former senior editor at the BBC says that news organizations now face three main roles: coverage of breaking news and live events, deep specialist niche content with analysis and expertise, the aggregation and verification of other sources of information. The article close by stating that social media is “likely to become as much part of the journalist’s toolkit in the 21st century as the dog-eared address book was in the 20th.”
Maria Popova: In a new world of informational abundance, content curation is a new kind of authorship
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/06/maria-popova-in-a-new-world-of-informational-abundance-content-curation-is-a-new-kind-of-authorship
Curation as authorship
Today, the two biggest question marks about Twitter’s evolution in my subjective experience are correction and attribution. The fact that there’s no present way of correcting an erroneous tweet remains an issue, especially as Twitter becomes more and more a tool of serious journalism, disaster reporting, human rights activism, and other issues of very palpable real-life impact. As journalists and curators, we remain human — which means we remain prone to everything from innocuous (and often humorous) typos to inadvertent yet serious misinformation. By the time we catch these errors, a tweet could have easily reached thousands of people. Erasing the original tweet will only remove those retweets sent through Twitter’s official RT button, and tweeting a correctional follow-up will only reach a fraction of the people who saw the original tweet. We need to invent a way to either correct core text in tweets retroactively, or to append correctional tweets to the original tweet so that everyone who retweeted it or otherwise linked to it gets an instant update of the correction.
The second issue is something I feel particularly strongly about. If information discovery plays such a central role in how we make sense of the world in this new media landscape, then it is a form of creative labor in and of itself. And yet our current normative models for crediting this kind of labor are completely inadequate, if they exist at all. We have clearly defined systems for what’s right or wrong in terms of crediting creative labor in “text” (or image, or video), from image rights to literary citations. But we don’t have the same ethical principles for sources of discovery. In a culture of “information overload,” though, it’s through these very nodes in the information ecosystem, these human sense-makers, that this very text or image or video finds its way into our scope of attention. Via-crediting, when given at all, lacks a codified morphology of credit types. (I’ve devised my own system, where I use “RT” for a verbatim retweet, “via” for reworded, and “HT” — “hat tip” — for indirect discovery, where I tweet a link I’ve discovered through something else that person shared or through their site rather than their Twitter feed. Adding to the taxonomy, some have also started using “MT” for “modified tweet.”)
Finding a way to acknowledge content curation and information discovery (or, better, the new term we invent for these fluffy placeholders) as a form of creative labor, and to codify this acknowledgement, is the next frontier in how we think about “intellectual property” in the information age. IP, as a term, is inherently flawed and anachronistic in its focus on ownership (“property”) in an age of sharing and open access, certainly. But it also challenges our most fundamental notions of authorship. As Bob Stein put it in his thoughtful 2006 critique of Jaron Lanier’s Digital Maoism, there’s an “emerging sense of the author as moderator — someone able to marshal ‘the wisdom of the network.’”
Ultimately, I see Twitter neither as a medium of broadcast, the way text is, nor as one of conversation, the way speech is, but rather as a medium of conversational direction and a discovery platform for the text and conversations that matter. Until we find new ways to classify, codify, and talk about this medium — new language, new laws, new normative models — our understanding and use of it will remain a museum of empty frames.
