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.
This means that while we love our technology, we also somehow believe we are rock stars, and should wear jeans of a corresponding tightness. Through casual research I’ve discovered that on average an Apple users jeans are 33% tighter than a PC user, and a shocking 90% tighter than a Linux user. Apple fans are also hamstrung by a lack of cargo pockets on their pants that these other users enjoy. The problem is bad with a pair of Earnest Sewns, and becomes increasingly critical when I switch to, say, my Levis 501 XX Shrink to Fit 1947 Selvedge Cone Denim.
Durex’s mating iPhone app: Taking viral marketing to another level
This is advertising nirvana. Wow. Wow. Wow.
Well done.
Can’t believe I’m this late to the party, but this is awesome. Especially impressed by leveraging the social dynamics of Facebook connect as a reinforcement.
But what drives consumer choice is a complex labyrinth of influence. Contructed of peer recommendations, family traditions, Google search results, etc. They exert that influence based upon equally complex patterns of psychology and user intent.
The causality of a friend’s recommendation, a series of online reviews, an… ad against my favorite TV show and what is returned in Google while considering a new car is just plain hard to understand.
By examining how we use our phones, our social networks, our inbox and our Web sites, we can find new ways to be of-use to other consumers and get beyond messaging to enablement and empowerment, even.
John Bell, Influence Planning Will Eclipse Media Planning: Part 1 Research (via keeptheballrolling)
I am partially reblogging this for Kyle, although I’m sure he’s already seen it.
Are bloggers journalists? I guess we’ll find out.
Nick Denton, in response to Jason Chen’s home being invaded by police and his computers confiscated over his articles for Gizmodo based on the “stolen” next generation iPhone. (via soupsoup) (via mikehudack)
I judge every public statement by the standard of Trudeau saying ‘Just watch me’, in what is likely the most badass moment of modern politics. This isn’t that awesome, but it does encapsulate what makes Denton great, in very few words.
I guess we’ll find out.
Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions
“We’re primed and ready now and have lots of experience publishing all those random opinions about people and things on Twitter, Yelp and Facebook already. It’s time for a centralized, well organized place for anonymous mass defamation on the Internet. Scary? Yes. But it’s coming nonetheless.
This has been on my mind for a long while now. Our minds haven’t evolved much over the last few thousands of years, but the spread of quick fire opinions is now moving at the speed of light and forever findable on the Internet. We’re still wired to think of gossip as something that spreads quietly behind the scenes, and relatively slowly. But we’re already in a world where it’s all completely public, there are few repercussions to the person spreading it, and it is easily searchable. No wonder people freak out. We’re fish out of water.
Sure, we’ve evolved a legal infrastructure to deal with libel, slander and defamation. Those laws worked well in an era of the printing press, and sort of stretched to cover radio and television. But they are as ineffective against the Internet as copyright laws are in battling music piracy.” -Michael Arrington (via Marc D Schiller)
See also: Facebook May Share User Data With External Sites Automatically
This has come up a lot lately, and I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s coming quicker than any of us think - so much of our social contract is possible only without the burden of documentation, we can only ignore the failings of humans when not constantly confronted with evidence.
We’re entering an age where the market on shame will be flooded, and the social value of shame will plummet as a consequence. But right now, the initial reaction will be an attempt to inflate the value and costs of shame, as an attempt to (over) correct what will be interpreted as a conflict between our values and our reality.
Reality will win. A lot of (social) lives will be casualties of a long, and doubtless brutal battle.
Reputation isn’t dead, it’s dying (more accurately, changing). And the death throes will do a considerable amount of damage.
One day, not long from now, people will look back and this is what they’ll say:
“Can you believe how stupid we were back then? All we cared about was “pageviews, pageviews, pageviews;” full stop. And all the while, we never really gave much of a damn about the quality of those views— or of the person doing the viewing. I don’t know how we could have been so stupid. And for so long.”
Here’s hoping this applies to click rates, as well. The scariest thing? This is still a step up from the generation of media when guesstimated viewership / readership was literally the only metric that anyone cared about.
And those were apparently the good old days.
![heyitsnoah:
Excellent ad.
Seduce, Don’t Attack. « The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kznleqP1wl1qz6ljpo1_500.jpg)
Two simple things that Steve Jobs could do to revolutionize the Internet video industry:
1) Allow content producers to sell podcast subscriptions.
2) Make it so you can stream ads in Quicktime files.
I’m utterly baffled that you can’t sell a podcast subscription yet. That would be of huge benefit to a large number of publishers.
caro:
Marketing fail: If you’re a product that people drink, please do not include “yellow” and “snow” in the same sentence describing a promotion.
Too bad, because Veuve is pretty savvy as far as digital marketing goes.
Seriously? Yellow Snow? Context proofing is just as important as content proofing.
