{"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":69,"pdf_page":79,"physical_index":79,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"73badee2d2e7929370b502067ee56b20b4321e3a7e788bb98d985b442716c6ac"},"chapter":"CURATION IN THE AGE OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM","content":"3.6 Conclusions\n\nThe new categories which curation inhabits can be endless as micro-expertise covers more and more areas of social life, from skinfluencers (skincare influencers) to petfluencers (pet influencers) to wine and low-calorie cooking experts. This chapter discussed how curation, as a new apparatus of intermediation, emerges in the shift from communicative capitalism, where information and communication are simply valorized as acts of data, to platform capitalism, a socio-technical model that encourages new market encounters and the organization of communication under narratives and metadata. This model amplifies the social imperative to curate and be curated by making use of platform architectures, tools, audiences, and afordances. Thus, while viral animal videos circulate in a disorderly and exponential fashion on the internet, for The Dodo, the example with which we opened this chapter, they are vehicles of channeling specific emotions, such as empathy, fun, and positivity—the narrative of an entrepreneurial initiative. Curated entities, such as that of The Dodo, aim at commodifying shapeless and disorderly communications under such specific narratives. The internet is a machine enabling an incessant production of connectivity and communications, regardless of the content of these communications (Dean, 2009; Andrejevic, 2019), and platformized curating strives to capitalize on these communications by organizing them.\n\nPlatforms, as any technology in modern capitalist societies, are “an expression of the economic objectives that direct them into action”—they inhabit the logic of profit and surplus value rather than being a natural outcome of historical development, (Zubof, 2019: 22; Sadowski, 2020b). In the domain of work, digital platforms shape the aspiring imaginary of flexibility and independence by renting their technical capabilities to aspiring celebrities and ordinary users. If we were to give a spatial analogy, we could think of fairs or festivals renting their spaces to diferent sellers where the exhibitors pay a rent to borrow the place for a certain period of time. As such, a remote language teacher in Preply, for instance, has to rent the platform space by paying a commission to the platform for the class they conduct in return for visibility, easier customer reach, scheduling, and trusted transactions. Inside the platform, the teacher becomes a self-entrepreneur who uses the curatorial imperative to appeal to their customers, including the writing of an attractive description and making an introduction video of themselves. Or, for instance, in Airbnb Experiences, the organizers of tours, seminars, or classes pay a commission to the platform per customer booking. This new platform-based entrepreneurialism increasingly compels a middle-class precariat to perceive themselves “as a form of capital to be invested, and of their income as the return on such investment” (Bandinelli, 2019: 5; see also, Bandinelli, 2020). As new landlords extracting wealth from “renting” labor in a neo-feudal regime, platforms intensify the formation of self-entrepreneurial subjectivities in conditions of gig labor (Wansbrough and Dean, 2021; Sadowski, 2020a). In the domain of consumption, if information capitalism brings chaos, curation promises order, packaging information together in narratives and forms of storytelling. In this sense, curated consumption arises when the content of communication for data extraction purposes becomes largely irrelevant, and when the communicative form largely detaches itself from the imperative of the content. Curation promises to emotionalize and rehumanize communicative exchanges at a time when these exchanges are defined by the logics of inhumanity, automation, and computerization.\n\nCurating and Platforms\n\n69","previous_page":68,"next_page":70}