Michael Bhaskar - Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess

Michael Bhaskar is a writer, researcher and digital publisher. He is Co-Founder of Canelo, a new publishing company.

Michael has written and talked extensively about the future of media, the creative industries and the economics of technology for newspapers, magazines and blogs. He has been featured in and written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, Wired and the Daily Telegraph, and on BBC 2, BBC Radio 4, NPR and Bloomberg TV amongst others. He has worked as a digital publisher, an economics researcher, a book reviewer, and founded several web initiatives.

Michael has a degree in English Literature from the University of Oxford, where he won the University Gibbs Prize. He has been a British Council Young Creative Entrepreneur and a Frankfurt Book Fair Fellow. He is also author of The Content Machine and co-editor of a forthcoming book about publishing. He can be found on Twitter @michaelbhaskar.

Published by Piatkus

ISBN: 978-0-349-40870-5

Copyright 2016 Michael Bhaskar

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Curation: using acts of selection and arrangement
(but also refining, reducing, displaying, simplifying,
presenting and explaining) to add value

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

H IPPOCRATES

In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not ecommerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time literally substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.

P ETER D RUCKER

Weniger aber besser.

D IETER R AMS

IBM

For comparison, the Library of Congress in Washington DC holds around twenty-three million books. Lets assume the average book is 400 pages long. According to LexisNexis, in its most basic form 677,963 pages of text is equivalent to one gigabyte of data.pile represents the accumulated wisdom, knowledge and culture of humanity.

Information used to be rare. Creating, collecting, storing and transmitting data was time-consuming, expensive and difficult. Mostly those processes relied on laborious copying. The materials to do so were fragile and scarce books were written on clay tablets, papyrus or vellum in isolated islands of learning. Even after the invention of the printing press, books were a relative rarity, and finding, let alone verifying, data was incredibly difficult.

The Library of Alexandria was by far the largest store of information in antiquity. It was the pinnacle of learning for a society that spanned the known world, whose trade routes, roads and aqueducts crossed continents, which maintained a standing army over half a million strong and which could mobilise millions more, whose cities were the biggest ever seen, and whose culture, engineering and economy would not be matched for 1,500 years. Based around the Nine Muses, the library was a hotbed of scholarship here the heliocentric nature of the solar system was discovered many centuries before Copernicus. Containing hundreds of thousands of scrolls, it was invaluable and unrivalled, unique and, when it burnt to the ground, irreplaceable, the very summit, the limit, of what had been thought and known.

Now we carry the equivalent in our pockets, accessible at any second. This is a kind of miracle. It is also a problem.

We have, in the space of a few years, gone from information scarcity to a tsunami of data. Information that used to be private, forgotten, disregarded or simply unknown is instantaneously available and public. But are those 2.5 quintillion bytes worth more than the much smaller collection in the Library of Congress or even the Library of Alexandria? No: much of it is CCTV footage; meaningless keystrokes; spam emails. We have more than solved the problem of transmitting and recording information. In fact, weve solved it so well theres a new kind of problem: not information poverty, but information overload. The question now isnt about how we can produce or transmit more information the question is how we will find what matters?

We dont always need more information. Instead, value today lies in better curating information. This is a lesson tech companies have rapidly learned, but one whose ramifications extend far beyond the world of digital media.

Why curation?

Why has curation become a buzzword? Why does it provoke as much eye rolling as enthusiasm? Once the preserve of a few specialists, curation is now applied to practically everything. Music festivals, shops and shopping malls, websites of all kinds, the news, TED conferences, venture capital portfolios, gala openings, dinner parties, music playlists, vacations, personal identities, fashion shows and wine lists all claim to be curated. Curation is ubiquitous.

Were all curators now, whether curating our look, our mini-break, our TV on a night in Reporter and investor Robert Scoble calls curation the next $1bn opportunity. Barack Obama is called the chief curator of George W. Bushs legacy, while in very different contexts the power broker of Russian politics and the Italian Prime Minister are also called curators. Pep Guardiola was called the curator of Bayern Munich FC. Leonardo DiCaprio is the curator of a charity art auction. Director Danny Boyle is the curator of a film festival. Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, wants to be the curator of a company culture. A glamorous restaurant doesnt just have a chef, it has a chef-curator (Nuno Mendes of the Chiltern Firehouse, in case you were wondering). The Financial Times has a Head of Curated Content while Wired magazine refers to a genetic scientist as curator of the gene pool.

Over the past few years Ive collected examples of newspapers or celebrities talking about curation: Gwyneth Paltrow curating her website Goop, Kim Kardashian curating a fashion store, Madonna curating Art for Freedom. David Bowie, Pharrell Williams and Johnny Depp have all curated one thing or another. In Doctor Who, one of the baddies is known simply as The Curator. The list continues open a newspaper or magazine and you will find someone referring to curation.

Whats going on?

Its rarely made clear what curation means in these contexts. Many in its traditional heartlands arent happy. One top commentator on curation sees it as absurd that the word should be so used. In general the art and museum worlds look on in horror as a prized concept is ripped from their grasp.

At the same time, many of us feel an instinctive distrust. There seems something frivolous and self-indulgent about the idea. The comedian Stewart Lee calls it a dead word.popularity, curation presents an easy target: something for people in self-appointed creative hubs like Williamsburg, the Mission District, East London and East Berlin; a self-serving and self-regarding art world reject adding false dignity to a host of everyday practices.

We should change how we think about curation; challenge our easy assumptions and knee-jerk reactions that curation is nothing more than a hipsterish accoutrement. Dismissing or mocking it is all too simple and tempting. But under the surface curation is powerful and interesting an approach that recognises how our problems have evolved. Weve missed too much of this big picture because weve been distracted by the conceptual legacy and all those celebrities. We get that curation is a buzzword. Happens in art galleries and the more modish eateries of San Francisco. But then we ignore the context. We dont join the dots, for example, between the term curation, the wider business environment, the new insights from psychology, science, economics and management, the impact of technologies of all kinds.