Most of us have no idea what the word curating means
so I looked it up and found the following definition: to pull together, sift through, and select for presentation, as music
or website content: “We curate our merchandise with a sharp eye for trending
fashion,” the store manager explained.
It’s the kind of thing Amazon does with
targeted advertising when they track your shopping history to send you ads
related to the kinds of products you have either bought in the past or looked
at on their site. I’ve noticed recently that my Google searches are starting to
show ads for more things that I have shopped for as well. For most people
that’s a good thing. If I was searching for extra wide shoes (I wear a 4E width
and those are very hard to find in my local stores) I will see ads for wide
shoes when I make my next search on Google. Even if I’m now searching for
hardware for my vintage trailer, those shoe ads will continue until I do enough
searches for some other item.
There is a movement to do the same thing with
your news feeds. The concept is that if you read articles about the latest
presidential candidates then you'd like to read more articles about them. That
actually sounds like a pretty good service, right? The scary part is that if
you begin to focus on just one candidate that same system may focus its future
recommendations on that one candidate as well. This naturally narrows your
reading to what your “curation” software is spoon-feeding you. It's kind of
like limiting your social interactions to just the people you know.
This kind of curation is different from a
television news show. The new show has a large and varied audience that has
equally varied tastes, so it presents a collection of unrelated news stories.
Some of them are very interesting to you while others not so much, BUT if you
watch the whole half hour report you get a range of information about a variety
of subjects. In other words a well rounded view of what is happening. If on the
other hand you only listen to a news station that reports on a narrow range of
topics from a single view point you don’t’ get fresh ideas. Most of us
know that guy at the gym or office that only listens to the extreme political
talk show; whose entire world is bounded by a single view. The one who is
always talking conspiracy theories and never accepts that sometimes it’s not a
conspiracy it’s just a coincidence?
I currently use a news aggregator that requires
me to manually add new feeds and doesn’t look at what I am currently reading
and make recommendations about similar sources. I like it that way because I
prefer an eclectic collection of sources so I get a broad range of subjects and
viewpoints. I know people who look at a number of different sources:
newspapers, radio, internet websites, and even al jazeera america.
Dudley Field Malone was co-counsel for the defense of John T. Scopes in the famous "Monkey Trial". In response to William Jennings Bryan's argument
against admitting scientific testimony, Malone gave arguably the best speech of
the trial in defense of academic freedom. "I have never learned anything
from any man who agreed with me," was one of his famous quotes. In exactly the same way your world of ideas can be
circumscribed and limited by software that tries to show you more information
that supports or is like what you are already reading. Fresh and new ideas that
challenge your existing concepts and accepted wisdom are the food of
intellectual thought.
Yes, after you read an opposing viewpoint
you may well decide that you were right the first time. Unless you continually
challenge what you think you know how you can grow and learn.
Sitting in a classroom being
presented with new facts or viewpoints, all of us have experienced the awakening
that new information gives us. That moment when we think “Oh, if that’s true
then this is true too! I never thought about it like that before.”
If you accept the software driven
news aggregators you may well find your intellectual boundaries becoming
smaller and more homogenous with little new or thought provoking ideas.
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