The importance of collaborative curation in a world of speed
Over the last three years I spent and increasing amount of time engaged in multiple acts of self curation. I define self curation as engaging with content for my own benefit. Sorting through, reading and archiving media that I have consumed which has influenced or helped me to grow my thinking in some way. By understanding the drivers of curation I think that we can start to better understand broader shifts in human behaviour.
Lets begin by rewinding the clock to a time that allows us to think about the curatorial behaviour of early humans that lived off the land and held a direct relationship with their immediate surroundings. Looking back on history, human beings have always been gatherers of things. We have gathered things to survive, pieced components of what was gathered together to create food and shared the knowledge of what has worked and what didn’t through generational exchange.
This gathering behaviour is still present today, however the exchange of stories and generational learnings feels as though it has been lost since the introduction of industrialisation and our shifting focus towards acts of production.
While our focal points might have shifted to prioritise acts of production over acts of gathering, I think that people deep down long for areas that allow for the gathering of things without the demands of feeling like they need to be pushed into or fuel the means of product. Despite this longing I think that this space feels forever out of reach because of the high speed context with which we lead our contemporary lives.
Competition which is a core tenant of human nature has led us to become obsessed with creating moments of speed. Now this obsession is not necessarily bad, but unchecked and unchallenged it is one that can lead to a derailing of our interactions with the world around us. Quite literally throwing us off balance.
As I consider the implications of the loss of space that allowed for generational learning I am drawn to the principles of the honourable harvest that I learnt about while reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book — Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.
- Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
- Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
- Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
- Never take the first. Never take the last.
- Take only what you need.
- Take only that which is given.
- Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
- Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
- Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
- Share.
- Give thanks for what you have been given.
- Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
- Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.
By engaging with the principles of an honourable harvest we allow ourselves to intentionally acknowledge that there are different moments that exist with in the process of curation. We don’t just simply arrive at the end destination.
In an environment that is optimised for speed, the importance of collaborative curation becomes increasingly important. It’s why we have seen the rise of recommendation media and machine learning across a number of spaces in our digital lives.
By engaging with acts of curation we introduce ourselves to new spaces. Curation allows us to engage our sensibilities and to make start to make sense of the world around us through gathering different types of information. Curation allows us to pause, to create moments that we can engage with, and to process the abundance of information that seems to be ever growing as we bring more of our lives online.
It is natural to seek out curated spaces when we are looking to learn some thing new. We are consciously developing our own patterns of meaning and sense making. One of the biggest challenges that we face though is that a lot of this curation is done in private not public spaces. This in turn means that there is often no time made for discussions or for cross pollination between different environments.
By tapping into the act of collaborative curation and joining smaller curated spaces together we allow for shared paths of communication to be developed. This in turn allows us to create a shared language, points that we can relate to. The missing piece of the puzzle is that we need to consciously makes space to nurture environments that allow for cross generational exchanges. Because without these spaces we are all just curating in silos and building information rich environments that are socially poor which means that we will not be able to thrive in world of abundance.
