The Value of Human Curators in a Digital Age
The creation of this site came as a specific reaction to the world we find ourselves in today. In the event that this project continues, I’d like to establish the setting in which it began.
As I write, dozens of media companies are laying off writers, editors and journalists. Multi-million dollar acquisitions are afoot, where once-promising media teams are swallowed up by larger fish. Buzzfeed, once the famed disruptor of newsrooms the world over, has seen their stock price collapse over months and then double in one week once they announced that they will begin implementing AI-written works from ChatGPT.
As someone who studied journalism in college, I wish I could say I was surprised. Artificial intelligence may be a new wrinkle in the publishing industry’s traditional cost-cutting cycles, but the core story is one as old as time. The fourth estate has a fundamental problem, or perhaps multiple problems that have become so fundamental in their scope that it makes little difference.
As long as we are all dependent on the content diets (and subsequent voting decisions) of each other, this problem affects all of us more than we may think.
The Money Problem
The financial issues for traditional media have been well documented in the internet age. Local journalism is dead, killed by the success of Craigslist and social media. Regional papers still exist in ever-shrinking numbers, but they’re rapidly losing market share to national powerhouses with better digital content. Digital-first upstarts may shake up the playing field from time to time, but those struggle to have staying power. Even CNN has been struggling for years as cable television clings to its aging, ideological viewership.
These once vibrant and disparate sources of reporters, interviews, perspectives, ideas and facts all either fade into obsolescence or are gobbled up by amorphous media conglomerates such as News Corp, Vox Media or Sinclair. As part of these larger umbrella corps, they are now but a line item in a catalog of properties, with the goal of garnering a larger amount of our attention for as long as possible. This doesn’t make all of their content instantly reprehensible or mundane, but it does change the incentives that drive what we consume.
Why does this happen in the first place? Advertising. When we look at the internet in 2023, most of what we enjoy is funded by ads. Every news article we read has at least half a dozen ad units on the page. Our free smartphone apps are filled with ads and our social media feeds have become ever more intrusive with their sponsored experiences. Google is the bedrock of the internet, a technology powerhouse, and even they get most of their money from advertising.
You may say: “Ok, so what. I can ignore ads!” Well, what makes advertising more effective? Mostly it comes down to scale. Scale is the incentive that wrecks our content diets. Scale ultimately simplifies content based on ideology, demographics and other predictable metrics that can better serve advertiser interests.
A publisher like Vox in today’s landscape can demand more money from advertisers due to the diversity of their content library and who they can reach with that content. More importantly, the data they have at their disposal on these users makes advertising more effective. This is something that Meta has mastered. By swallowing up Instagram and WhatsApp, they secured access to new demographics of people and troves of data that they can use to entice brands to spend their marketing budgets on an easy-to-use advertising service. Oh, you thought all these features were to help you share family Christmas photos? Not quite.
In order to compete with big tech, big press has its work cut out for it. These bloated media companies need to work within the confines of social media for distribution while circumventing them just enough to earn a living. To do so, they acquire new sources of attention, like the hip, Gen Z streetwear site, or the next hot Bill Simmons media startup. Once they find and snatch up these smaller properties, they have to work it into their advertising machine. As this process continues across decades, content quality declines and intellectual diversity fades away.
Now we see how it becomes easy to fire the content creators when times get tough. Unique and insightful content isn’t the goal of their game. It’s about capturing attention, to sell that attention back to brands. Scale becomes the only goal, like a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos. This is a good time to remind you that this is the industry that determines how a majority of our electorate gets the information they need to make voting decisions. God Bless America.
Some will say that subscription-based publications like The New York Times are better off, and that may be true for them financially. But, what about us? Are we better off in a world where people actually pay to have their media diets centralized and controlled by one family? Where for a price, they can feel safe in their view of the world while they drift further away from anyone who doesn’t (or can’t) shell out $10 a month? How many subscriptions will I need to have a balanced viewpoint that doesn’t simply play to my own ideological biases?
The answers don’t matter, as most of us can’t afford to pay for our own Netflix account, let alone a handful of newspaper subscriptions that may bring diversity to our content diet. Speaking of Netflix, once a subscription-based media company that broke the old model, now is launching ads. All of these subscription-based sites also love money, so the incentives that warp content quality will likely return.
The Dangers and Promise of Independents
Let’s now take a perilous detour into the world of citizen journalism and independent content creation. The great invention of our time? These people are freed from the advertising mandates and ideological consistency of corporate media. From Joe Rogan to Pod Save America and everywhere in between, it is chaos out here. You can get any perspective you want, and anyone can monetize that perspective as they see fit. Usually, big tech gets a cut as part of the creator economy, but it’s led to some interesting outcomes.
Regardless of your political leanings, these are interesting times where people are no longer dependent on corporate media for information. We have alt-right YouTubers making millions of dollars and viral left-wing podcasts to compete. We have a socialist livestreamer who has earned a healthy living by reacting to current events. There are former members of the corporate press starting independent networks aimed at recreating the “mainstream”. We even have YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, breaking down the geopolitical implications of Turkey’s aggression toward the Kurdish people in Syria.
The scale of independent media is astounding. We have millions of hours of video content and average people on Twitter breaking news every hour. That news is disseminated and discussed better than any CNN panel I’ve ever seen at a faster clip than the New York Times. Unfortunately, we also have average people breaking misinformation on Twitter every hour, and garnering just as much discussion at just as quick a pace.
Much of this is possible due to the glory and promise of the internet. A great, decentralizing force that can make the world more of a meritocracy, free of the gatekeeping that has kept old white guys in power for far too long. Some of that is definitely coming true, but it’s an ugly reality to sift through.
Independent media gets it wrong, a lot. Most have no credentials, no obligation to be honest, and plenty of ways to lead people astray. From vaccine hesitancy to other forms of culture war brinkmanship, content is getting more extreme by the day. Independent media driven by the internet has left us no closer to a more vibrant and intelligent democracy than we were when the television was invented.
So far, the internet has just given us more diversity in our preferred media bubbles, not popped them entirely. Algorithms dictate how we access this incredibly diverse ecosystem, often just driving us deeper into our biases rather than opening our minds like it could. Many end up feeling more emboldened by their ideologies as they drift further and further away from compelling arguments or common ground to speak with those that think differently.
The Curation Solution
Independent media is incredibly powerful. You can see it by how intentionally flippant or adversarial corporate voices are towards it. Or maybe how they are scrambling to copy its appeal and stick them within their own catalogs. While independent media has potential, it’s also just as dangerous as blindly following what’s said on MSNBC or Fox News. In some ways more so. We need a healthy mix of skepticism towards every source that tries to oversimplify the world for us.
The time we sit in is both inspiring and terrifying. Billions of people, all over the world, can now get information from literally anywhere, rather than the extremely centralized sources that have traditionally been available to us throughout history. It is the invention of the Gutenberg press multiplied by some unknown factor in its eventual impact. And let’s remember that Martin Luther split Europe in half thanks to his printed thoughts about Christianity.
Left unchecked, this whole system threatens to make us dumber, more reactionary and eventually more violent. I’d contend that there is a connection between the recent rise of fascism and socialism, and it comes down to how much people want easy explanations for the chaotic world they find themselves in. I am still an optimist, and would like to also say that a digital-driven renaissance is possible. However, during a time where the world is getting more complex, we need more nuance to find potential solutions, not less of it.
We need a proper content diet, where we can synthesize many different viewpoints and come to a balanced, well-considered perspective. More information isn’t making this process easier. In fact, it’s leading a lot of people to, consciously or unconsciously, let someone else tell them what to think.
I’m not interested in that. I want to hear diverse viewpoints. I want to read things that I disagree with. I want to steelman the arguments of others, rather than strawman it to make me feel safer in my biases (or for quick retweets). If we are to make sense of the challenges we face, we must do so with authentic perspectives based on an effort to understand the world and each other. There is not a single algorithm or media company in the world that effectively does this for us. We will have to do it ourselves.
Trusted, personal content curation will become a useful currency, not for its financial upside, but for its authenticity. I am advocating for a return to the old internet practice of bookmarking websites in the hope of returning later to learn something new from whoever built the page. It’s my contention that this will soon become the only way to float above the sea of nonsense that AI-generated content, social media algorithms and ad-hungry media companies throw at us. We need each other to spend time sharing what we find valuable, lest it become lost amongst an increasingly chaotic and attention-starved world.
I don’t think I’m particularly suited for this curation, but I hope to at least be authentic in my pursuit of understanding and honest in my own biases and shortcomings. Most of my writing will be aimed at sharing thoughts formed from my own corner of the internet, along with my efforts to move outside of it. All the while my opinions are weakly held. I simply hope that writing on my digital experiences and pursuit of knowledge will open up more unique perspectives on the world. I hope you will join me.