{"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":6,"pdf_page":16,"physical_index":16,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"d3dfc70ef5d5174b17da5ab82a232fc4cef173ab80f3b4ea36453cf8548c4d9a"},"chapter":"CURATION IN THE AGE OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM","content":"Second, as mentioned, curation indicates a logic of value production, self-presentation, and performance, according to which selected items are conceptualized under the vision of an expert. In platformized cultural activity, the spread of this logic, once mostly confined to the corporate world of branding and advertising, difuses sociality at large; it sprawls from presentations of the self in social media, ranging from posting texts, photos, and videos to mentioning, tagging, and location-sharing, the boom of industries of positivity, life coaching, and mindfulness, the sharing of cool imagery of traveling, art openings, and other “exceptional” moments, the potentially constant updating of friends, followers, and fans, the gearing of aesthetics and design to attention-grabbing quests and the overall commodified artification of life. Digital platforms mediate the intensities and degrees of all the above. The logic of curation also informs popular culture discourse, including headlines such as “I have a smaller penis than my girlfriend’s exes—should I get surgery?” or “17 Cute Bikinis Options for Bigger Butts”, published in newspapers as diverse as Guardian and Cosmopolitan respectively, and occupies even the biological futurology, as in the case for instance of CRISPR where people could potentially curate bodily and psychological aspects of their ofspring by editing their DNA (Greely, 2022). In a nutshell, the curatorial logic inhabits the imperative of what to choose amidst the extremes of mass conformity and informational chaos that are both accelerated outcomes of the internet economy. It deepens the ideology of neoliberal capitalism and what Illouz calls “the self as a ‘chooser’ ” (2013: 79); since consumption promises to be a status-bearing practice with ramifications for one’s future, the chooser-self is symbolically uplifted and legitimized. If we zoom out to the larger picture of social class, the imperative to curate and be curated directs working class desire into an aspiring middle-class ecosystem in which meaningful choice is critical for actualizing one’s social identity. Thus, at the anthropological level, the logic of curation, that is, the stories to select and present to the self and others, pushes not only market actors but also everyday users to think of their practices, emotions, and life paths as expressive of a higher vision, “the story you should be telling on your own”, a vision that they choose amidst disorienting complexity, instead of living through random moments.\n\nWhile curation is a concept that, I argue, can help us codify the cultures of platform capitalism, including the cultures of coolness, authenticity, and inspiration that I will discuss later, this does not mean that these cultures are sui generis or totally new. Quite the opposite: pre-existing cultures are mass communicated, magnified, re-purposed, spread, and diversified across local ofline and online settings resulting in new qualities in attitudes and behaviors as practically anyone with an internet connection and a smartphone encounters platform impositions and afordances. In his reading of an astrology column of Los Angeles Times of the 1950s, Theodor Adorno likewise argued that while superstitious irrationality existed before the formation of mass societies in varying geographies and degrees, it was in mass societies that its “institutionalization has reached, by means of mass production, a quantity which is likely to result in a new quality of attitudes and behavior” (1974: 15). I follow a similar line of thinking in the book. The impositions and afordabilities of platforms recycle and popularize pre-existing values, which were specific to restricted or niche milieus. For instance, the value of meaningful consumption, that is, the idea that a choice should be innovative, authentic, inspired, cool, experimental, individual, or customized, which was limited to exclusive cultural formations, becomes massively dispersed through platforms as vehicle for aspirational class belonging.\n\n6\n\nHomo Curatorius","previous_page":5,"next_page":7}