{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title":"Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781032023007","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","uuid":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title":"Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures","normalized_title":"curationintheageofplatformcapitalismthevalueofselectionnarrationandexpertiseinnewmediacultures","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781032023007","isbns":["9781032023007","9781032023014","9781003182801"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":177,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Curation%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20Platform%20Capitalism%20%20The%20Value%20of%20Selection%2C%20Narration%2C%20and%20Expertise%20in%20New%20Media%20Cultures","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/search"},"page":{"printed_page":106,"pdf_page":116,"physical_index":116,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"94130435193722940aff93dcf8a50eaa53ea86cd0c82fd22449093ca007454a2"},"chapter":"CURATION IN THE AGE OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM","content":"The argument in Pine and Gilmore’s book has been employed in diverse business settings, from retail shops to theme parks, giving rise to a new field of marketing, customer experience marketing, where the focus of potential monetization regards the experiential relation the consumer builds with economic oferings. In this broader employment of Pine and Gilbert’s idea, the consumer should generally feel pleasant when they consume, as “ugly feelings” may prevent them from spending money and time (Ngai, 2007). At the heart of this business imperative then is the experiencification of consumer time, which is time mediated by capital. For instance, Sanat Rao (2021), a Chief Business Oficer writing for Forbes, exalts the persisting potential of the experience economy (“The Future Is Experience”), arguing that the currency of the new consumer is time: in a hectic metropolitan context, consumers have to calculate whether time spent in economic activities is worth it and assess future transactions accordingly.6 This drive of capital to compartmentalize time into commodifiable moments has the efect of shrinking free time, that is, the time not policed by commodity relations. For instance, a curated two-and-a-half-hour tour that specializes “in the most Instagram-worthy sights around Athens downtown”7 occurs at the expanse of the time that could have been spent discovering the city by simply roaming around; if the latter’s time is up to a degree free from the commodity relation, the former subsumes time into it. There is yet a further demand from this experiencified time, as the time spent in an Experience should ideally connect to the future as potential investment, in the sense that spending experiencified time should yield cultural or symbolic capital (e.g., raising one’s status, expertise, social circle, networks) so that the future looks more uplifting. The Experience guarantees that posting these Instagram-worthy highlights from Athens would gather more positive reactions than posting “ordinary” ones. Or, in the case of the babushka, the Experience implies the possibility of unique stories, memories, tags, and pictures that can magnify one’s cultural or symbolic capital among social media followers and friends. As the virtual and the physical interweave, experiencified time—which is ideally all time under the regime of capitalist consumption—is heavily marked by the question of aspirational investment, in other words, experiencified time colonizes the future; rather than time simply spent on present gratification, it is time spent as a future venture mediated by the commodity relation.\n\nThe drive to experiencify time corresponds to the internal dynamics of capital accumulation and growth for continuously bestowing value upon previously non-commodified areas of social and biological life in order to avoid social crises, delegitimization, or collapse. Given the physical constraints that the environment sets for unlimited growth (e.g., Harvey, 2007), capital needs to intensify consumer desire by colonizing the emotional, communicative, linguistic, biological, and cognitive capacities of human beings as evermore spheres are subsumed to the value relation and the sociality of capital (Virno, 2004; Harvie and De Angelis, 2009). In this regard, the experiencification of time interweaves into the fabric of social reality as it attempts to colonize free time and the feelings, thoughts, and lifepaths connected to it. In a disorienting world of the constant outpouring of information, the curation of experiences in the form of memorable moments taps into the broader demand “for meaning in life” in the form of stories that captivate (Mei, Hågensen, and Kristiansen, 2020: 94). The stories around “I cooked pelmeni with babushka” are richer, more unique, and more unusual than the stories around “I cooked pelmeni”. The storytelling involving a babuskha tells us that I have spent my time in a memorable way as I participated in something local and authentic. This is not to say that the babushka, or the nonna who we discuss later, are themselves driving this process; on the contrary, they are productive vessels in an expanded labor regime that capitalizes on their properties. Both the physical persons and their properties are used to perform platform work for a globalizing gastronomical imaginary that regards originality, locality, and authenticity as signs of superiority (see also next section).\n\n106\n\nCultures of Platform Capitalism","previous_page":105,"next_page":107}