The previous chapter examined the historical and conceptual extractions of curation and the curator; this chapter examines their actual deployment in platform economies. According to Jose Van Dijck et al., the internet experience for most users is increasingly determined by “platform ecosystems”, which refer to a nearly totalizing online arrangement of platforms regulating and exploiting online behavior (2018: 12). They make a distinction between the infrastructural platforms and the sectoral ones: The “Big Five”—Alphabet (Google), Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp)—are the infrastructural platforms at the heart of platform ecosystem (2018). These serve as online gatekeepers managing an array of fundamental online activities, including “search engines and browsers, data servers and cloud computing, email and instant messaging, social networking, advertising networks, app stores, pay systems, identification services, data analytics, video hosting, geospatial and navigation services, and a growing number of other services” (2008: 13). Services, apps, and other platforms can be built with and on these platforms. These other platforms include sectoral platforms, which depend on the services of infrastructural platforms (e.g., logins, payments systems, maps) and directed toward one (or more) niche market sectors, such as music, hospitality, education, health, and the moving image (e.g., Airbnb, Netflix, Spotify).2 Platforms, whether infrastructural or sectoral, are sites which mediate aspects of social and economic life and the organizational models incorporated within systems of contemporary production, distribution, exchange, and circulation, the most important of which are the imperatives of profit and growth; or, as Langley and Leyshon put it, platforms are a “socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into the wider processes of capitalisation” (2017:11; see also Srnicek, 2017 and Nieborg, Poell and van Dijck, 2023). They accomplish this by developing sites which activate, curate, and capitalize on connectivity (Van Dijck, 2013: 12). They are not simply places where people interact online, but they harvest an environment of trust by processing payments, maintaining community guidelines, and enforcing restrictions (Woodcock and Graham, 2020: 23). Platforms appear to be reliable brokers where many stakeholders feel safe to invest their time, talents, or resources, while the mobile smartphone revolution ofering easy-to-use apps accelerates their expansion (Bloom, Jones, and Woodcock, 2021).
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Homo Curatorius