attention industry

Creation vs. Curation / Remix vs. Reblog

This is an old topic, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about recently, especially in reference to a recent quote from Drake in an interview with Billboard:

“I’m really scared for my generation, you know. The thing that scares me most is Tumblr. I hate what Tumblr has become. […] Instead of kids going out and making their own moments, they’re just taking these images and living vicariously through other people’s moments. It just kills me. Then you’ll meet them and they’re just the biggest turkey in the world. They don’t actually embody any of those things.”

This isn’t to say I agree with the argument at all, but I do find it interesting, suggesting that curation is both 1) inherently an attempt to express actual identify rather than affinity, and 2) that curation isn’t a creative skill. I feel like these positions are incompatible, when you dig into them.

Curation is becoming essential, especially for brands operating online - not just on Tumblr, but on Facebook pages, twitter feeds, etc. Finding enough stuff to talk about, or the Blank Box Problem, as the brains behind Percolate have dubbed it, is a lot of hard work, albeit a completely different type of hard work than creating something yourself.

I personally consider curation a low-order creative skill, because it does require some talent to do well (an eye or POV that is distinctive and developed), as well as dedication. But it’s not (to lapse into copyright lingo) transformative - and there’s a reason gallery curators are not generally considered artists in their own right. But this leads us to a solid point - curation is at core a developed form of appreciation, not one of creation. Building a collection isn’t about expressing what your life is, but instead about expressing your taste.

And doing so online means that it can be an order of magnitude removed from what you live, or could possible achieve.

Creation is an utterly different thing. When you create, you express some aspect of yourself, whether it be talent or intellect or perception. And the biggest issue that curation faces, as what is now the leading participatory activity online by my estimate, is that comparison with creation, with the generation of original work.

Because people are adding commentary, because they’re hitting a publish button, it’s easy to, without thinking, lump these two actions into each other. We use the same function on tumblr or facebook or twitter to share a meme we found amusing, as we do to share a carefully composed photograph we’ve taken with a new DSLR.

What we can’t continue to do, is pretend these are similar activities. Sharing is a class of action, but there are significant differences between the subcategories - debate and wordless screaming are both technically elements of vocalization, but we don’t insist that one has to be interpreted by the lens of the other.

Creative sharing involves originality, development of the content, and distribution. Curative sharing involves discovery, distribution, and possibly commentary. These are not comparable activities, and yet online we seem to insist they are.

If we don’t begin to draw the line between remix and reblog, in other words, we’re going to continue in the flawed assumption that we can learn the same things about a person, a brand, or a collective by looking at what they create, and what they curate.