Curators Are The New Creators

For starters, nothing is original. Secondly, we’re experiencing a content overload.

Curation as a collection of artifacts

• Most non-fiction writers curate a bunch of resources/notes/research and bundle it together to create an essay or a paper. Is this curation?
• When we realize that nothing we ever make is going to be "new", or "original" (something I'm still learning), creation becomes about remixing existing piece, about combining ideas and about finding connections.
• [[Steal Like an Artist - Austin Kleon]]

Curation as separating signal from noise:

(notes on a Medium article I remember reading a long time back)

• It seems that every time we blink there’s a new podcast published, or blog post to read, or book recommendation to order on Amazon. To make a long story short, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to disaggregate signal from noise.

• [[The Attention Deficit Trait]] With more creators, more content, and more choice than ever before, consumers are now being consumed by a state of analysis paralysis. The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s attention. When it’s impossible to absorb everything from the flood of information, the best we can do is pick and choose what matters to us most — or, better yet, find the people who can do the curating for us. 

• As the amount of content grows, so does the market for credible curators.

• Curators are the new creators, and as consumers, we’re going to be willing to pay someone with good taste to help us sort through the ever-growing mass of information at our fingertips.

• Online content consumption seems to exist on a pendulum of sorts: we love content to the extreme — _Unbundle!! Give us more! — _until we are overwhelmed with choice and analysis — _It’s too much!! Bundle it back up again! — _and swing to the opposite side. In the end, we always end up somewhere in the middle… but it’s a lot of swinging back and forth on this creation/curation pendulum until we get there.__

• It’s clear that curating content within a particular niche can be an incredible way to build an audience and add value. Content curation hooks people in with the promise of learning new skills while saving time, and it keeps them coming back by building a sense of community around a particular subject or vertical. Bundling and curation can be a strategic decision for your business, as long as it’s done correctly.

• Curation, in a sense, is its own form of intertextuality, or the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. Content doesn’t exist on the Internet in a vacuum: it takes up space, and it forms a web of influence and connections. We have the content. Now, the question becomes: what will we do with it?