Too much curation?
One of the great advances of modern Internet technology is the ability for a user to curate his or her own news so that stories of interest “seek you out”. This started for me with RSS and a simple set up in Google Reader which became a daily staple several years ago. I was able to keep up with dozens of blogs as well as some more traditional media sites for mainstream news.
I’ve found though, like many others, that with the proliferation of Twitter feeds from people of interest, I’m using my RSS reader less and less. Instead, my curation stream is dictated largely by my Twitter feed. Over time I’ve curated the list of people I follow on Twitter so that it’s now a nice mix of people commenting on the things I find interesting: sports, venture capital, technology, local news, and the daily dose of minutiae from friends.
I’ve found that if there are really good stories from these spheres of interest, they find me either through a direct link from someone I follow or through a retweet or a back and forth on Twitter. I round this out by checking several news aggregators like Techmeme and TechCrunch on a daily basis.
What ends up happening, though, is that the Twitter as curation tool becomes an echo chamber of only things I’m interested in from people I like. This can make it difficult to capture macro trends like politics and economic happenings given the dearth of people I follow who tweet with regularity about these topics. For instance, I heard more than I care to about caps on convertible note seed financings and next to nothing (until the very last weeks) about the trapped Chilean miners.
I point this out not because it’s a novel problem or an issue without a solution - clearly I can seek out “other” news stories or sources. Rather, it’s remarkable how quickly my intense curation snuck up on me and how narrow my world view was before I realized it. This is nothing new of course - people tune into their network of choice or read their newspaper of preference - yet today’s technology makes it easier than ever to self-select news. It’s also possible to get more narrow than ever in terms of the variety of opinions consumed. In today’s uber-polarized political environment & 24 hour news cycle, this has the potential to simply exacerbate current divides. I wonder if there will be a backlash to personal curation or entrepreneurs who attack this space from a different direction?
