Curation – Everybody’s Doing It. Are You?
I’ve noticed lately there’s a new word out there – or rather an old word in a new context. “Curation” – an act I think of as being done in museums – is showing up more and more often in the communications field. I find it everywhere: while catching up with a colleague who tells me she’s been “curating the program for a conference”; in an article in Buzzfeed that tells me that @brainpicker, a favorite Twitter feed that I follow, is the work of an “online curator” named Maria Popova; in a Mashable review of Tumblr, a popular blogging platform and social networking site, that explains how Tumblr has started doing its own “curating.”
What “curate” seems to mean right now is find a lot of beautiful and interesting things, put them together in one place and then share your collection with others, usually via social media. And all of a sudden it’s what all the cool kids are doing – the hot new way to both experience and share things found on the internet.
Which leads me to the obvious question: As a communications professional should I be curating?
