Ranging from colloquial to academic uses, references to something “curated” mostly designate the grouping of cultural items, from music to food and films to news. These hand-picked, or sometimes algorithmically picked, selections by authorized experts are expected to place these items within organized narratives. To gain legitimacy, these narratives need to be bound to the authority of experts, that is, either specific persons who enjoy symbolic capital (e.g. “Tom Ford’s curated gift sets” [miamidesigndistrict, nd]) or companies, institutions, and platforms (“Apple News brings you the world’s best journalism […] curated by editors, and personalized for you” [Apple News, nd]). These narratives are shaped by, and themselves shape, the impressions around curated content and the entity that curated them. For instance, when one encounters Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons, curating the line-up of the music festival All Tomorrow Parties,2 this encounter informs narratives both about the curated content, the line-up, the bands, and the music they perform (e.g., “Matt Groening chose them so they must be cool”) as well as Groening himself (e.g., “Groening chose both Hope Sandoval and Daniel Johnston, therefore Groening has an eclectic taste”). Or, when one encounters curated news from a platform like Apple News, they may make assumptions, implicit or explicit, both about what they read (e.g., “The news I read are customized by expert editors of a trusted platform”) as well as about the ultimate guarantor of these groupings (e.g., “Apple is now an expert in news selection”). There is then a mutually constitutive relationship in distributed curating between the items and the narrative that are certified by the authority of the expert.
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Homo Curatorius