"When something big is going on in the news. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that you can get tired of hearing about it. We need to be able to Mute the Internet. So often we refer to Twitter, or news in general, as a “firehose,” Tweetbot gives you the luxury of turning the firehose down, if just a little bit. With Tweetbot, you can mute users, services, hashtags. It gives you the option to mute something for a period of time like a week. Or mute it forever. You can mute my tweets completely (without unfollowing, if you wish) and I’m none the wiser."Zack Shapiro
Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everyday-ness. As long as we are online - which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal. (via The Technium: The Improbable is the New Normal)
Brian Eno: “The artist is now a curator.” →
From Kevin Kelly’s fantastic 1995 Wired interview with Brian Eno (17 years ago!):
An artist is now a curator. An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, What I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things. If you read art history up until 25 or 30 years ago, you’d find there was this supposition of succession: from Verrocchio, through Giotto, Primaticcio, Titian, and so on, as if a crown passes down through the generations. But in the 20th century, instead of that straight kingly line, there’s suddenly a broad field of things that get called art, including vernacular things, things from other cultures, things using new technologies like photo and film. It’s difficult to make any simple linear connection through them.
Now, the response of early modern art history was to say, Oh, OK. All we do is broaden the line to include more of the things we now find ourselves regarding as art. So there’s still a line, but it’s much broader. But what postmodernist thinking is suggesting is that there isn’t one line, there’s just a field, a field through which different people negotiate differently. Thus there is no longer such a thing as “art history” but there are multiple “art stories.” Your story might involve foot-binding, Indonesian medicine rituals, and late Haydn string quartets, something like that. You have made what seems to you a meaningful pattern in this field of possibilities. You’ve drawn your own line. This is why the curator, the editor, the compiler, and the anthologist have become such big figures. They are all people whose job it is to digest things, and to connect them together…
To create meanings - or perhaps “new readings,” which is what curators try to do - is to create. Period. Making something new does not necessarily involve bringing something physical into existence - it can be something mental such as a metaphor or a theory. More and more curatorship becomes inseparable from the so-called art part. Since there’s no longer a golden line through the fine arts, you are acting curatorially all the time by just making a choice to be in one particular place in the field rather than another.
Emphasis mine.
The new Digg is placid by comparison, and purposefully so. Much of today’s Web is sliced up into “feeds”—infinitely scrolling streams of links that zoom by you on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flipboard, Reddit, BuzzFeed, and on and on. You could make a good case that the old Digg inspired much of today’s craze for streams. But the new Digg takes a different tack. It eschews the stream. (via Digg’s new look shows the virtues of slowing down and savoring the Web - Slate Magazine)
"A paper titled “What Is It We Are Longing For?” published in The Journal of Research in Personality, breaks down these “life longings” into essential characteristics. They target aspects of our lives that “are incomplete or imperfect”; involve “overly positive, idealized, utopian imaginations of these missing aspects”; focus on “incompleteness on the one hand and fantasies about ideal, alternative realities on the other hand”; result in a “temporarily complex experience” combining “memories of the past, reflections on the imperfect present and fantasies about an idealized future” (this is called “tritime focus”); and that “make individuals reflect on and evaluate their life, comparing the status quo with ideals or successful others."Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With ‘Curation’ - NYTimes.com
"The relationship between ease of access and motivation seems to be inversely proportional because, as the sheer volume of information that becomes available and accessible to us increases, we become increasingly paralyzed to actually access all but the most prominent of it — prominent by way of media coverage, prominent by way of peer recommendation, prominent by way of alignment with our existing interests. This is why information that isn’t rare in technical terms, in terms of being free and open to anyone willing to and knowledgeable about how to access it, may still remain rare in practical terms, accessed by only a handful of motivated scholars."Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance » Nieman Journalism Lab
via Frank: The Anthologists →
How do you balance the stream’s relentless push forward? You circle around, and step back into your own footprints in the snow. You find familiar places, look again, and pull the good things out of the past’s abyss.1
There’s always been a desire to archive things for posterity. It’s the itch…
"As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I’m fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it’s not actually curation, or anything like it."You Are Not a Curator, You Are Actually Just a Filthy Blogger | The Awl
The fight to maintain a centralized, comprehensive, and publicly accessible national archive is losing ground in Canada. According to a recent update from a group advocating the rescue of the Library and Archives Canada (LAC), efforts to digitally archive the nation’s history are being cut back significantly, with the LAC saying that only a “representative” collection is possible in the “digital” age. (via Canada slowly abandoning efforts to digitally archive its national history | The Verge)
