On “Curation Culture”

Earlier today, I came across an interesting piece by John-Kyle Mohr (via a tweet pointing to Frank Chimero's response) about the huge imbalance between original and reposted content on blogs. In it he poses this question:

“Why is it that with the ease of publishing available today people so often choose to re-post content as opposed to create it?”

It's a good question, and hits close to home: personally, I try to mix in the occasional original post when I think I have something useful to say, but for the most part this blog is unashamedly an online museum of others' work.

I suppose that I do this for the same reason that when I was a child, I kept scrapbooks rather than writing my own articles or painting oil paintings: I couldn't do those things, but I still admired the people who could and wanted to learn about them. As a species, we have always collected things that interest us and studied them; I'm thinking of geologists collecting mineral samples, or the vast galleries of insect specimens in natural history museums around the world.

This blog is my attempt to edit down the vast web into something more specific, both for myself and for people who share my interests. It's also a little bit about showing off; that tiny pang of pride you feel when you're the first to discover something, or when a great piece of work you found and championed inspires your peers to create.

Aside from that though, I think there are a couple of reasons why this type of curation has become so prevalent; the first is the advent of truly simple (and social) blogging services. To quote Frank Chimero:

“The world is starved for original content, but it's not because less people are making than any other point in history. It’s simply because more people are curating the work that the world makes. Blogs, Tumblrs, FFFFound, magazines, etc.”

This is a good point; Tumblr in particular is so easy to set up and use that it almost seems there's no reason not to start a blog, even if you yourself have nothing to say. Hence, a huge explosion in the number of Tumblelogs which do little but repost the photos previously posted by their friends.

To add to this, Tumblr's controversial Tumbularity statistic is based on the frequency of posting, which seemingly encourages users to just fill their blog with anything they can find in order to boost their score and become more visible. At this point, it's down to a basic popularity contest, and no-one can create original content fast enough to keep up with that.

The other reason is that the audience is now so massive, and their time so limited, that it's possible to attract very large visitor numbers by simply posting huge round-up lists of other people's content. We've all seen them: “70 Amazing Blog Designs”, “200 Great Web Site Footers”, etcetera. These posts are a pet hate of mine, but you can't argue with the fact that some of the blogs that post them are making a substantial amount of money from advertising revenue, so I guess I can understand why they do so.

I could probaly think out loud on this for a while, but in the spirit of brevity I'll leave it there; my two cents on a very interesting subject. I hope this counts as original content...