Meander Musings: Actual Curation vs. Networking

This has been something bothering me lately. I see a lot of people blindly accepting whatever is put in front of them. The worst part is I understand exactly why. People don’t want to crush other people’s dreams, especially if they are working as hard as they can to make their dreams a reality.

But the issue is everyone only has so much mental bandwidth with which to consume content. If you promote something, you are in practice taking attention away from things that aren’t being promoted. And what happens if you promote literally everything? Nothing gets promoted. It’s all at the same level of exposure. That is the point of curation. Real curation. To separate the wheat from the chaff.

Curation is not creating a circle of peers where you share each other’s work in the hopes that it will mutually benefit everyone. That is just networking. Curation is a third party finding things of high quality and giving those things a boost over the lower quality things, regardless of the reputation of the creator. This is no easy task given the sheer magnitude of content online, but that reality makes it even more important.

So why am I talking about this? I guess I don’t really have a huge point to make other than curation shouldn’t be about networking. It should be about giving the very best the spotlight it deserves. I’m not always sure that my content in particular is worthy of that spotlight, and I actually hope it doesn’t receive this boost when it didn’t measure up.

That is my simple request. Support my content(a single upvote is more than enough) if you think it is good, but do NOT if you think it is bad. Never be afraid to tell me what you really think about it in the comments. But also don’t feel pressured to comment just to encourage me. Do what you want, say what you think, and give a big middle finger to any feelings that you might hurt. That, I believe, is the essence of curation.