Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess by Michael Bhaskar

Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess Reviews

• 
  Boy Blue

  Interesting read but could have been half the length. Ironically a better curation of the material in the book would have made a better read. It is well written but the premise is pretty obvious from the start and some of the anecdotes are wearisome and many points are over worked. This is probably because there's not all that much to talk about. SUMMARY: As the amount of data we produce grows exponentially curation has become increasingly important, you can look cool and make money out of this phenomenon if you get the formula right, here are some examples.
• 
  Nastya Khyzhniak

  I really took my time reading this book, because I wanted to remember as much as possible. For me there is no specific type of reader for this book: though it touches sometimes complicated matters, the languages is really down to earth, Michael B also gives a lot of examples (using the companies well-known to the most) from completely different spheres of life.
  The content is well-organized (well curated, I guess): from The Problem or how we got to the point of excess to The Answer or everything you need to know about the curation and then to The Reality - where we see curation nowadays.
  It doesn't give you all the answers how to fight the excess, but it gives you the idea (and some instruments). Now I'm really curious what will happen next, what new and probably unusual forms it will take in a couple of years
  The only thing I'm not quite in to is the Curate yourself part. Not sure that these choices add value or whether we can really add value to ourselves. Other than that, it's a great book and I really recommend to read it.
• 
  Divija Rao

  It is quite interesting on how the author talks about evolution of the word ‘curation’ and spins the the thread around multiple industries and tie them all together with a perspective on how curation is playing and will play an important role. I highly appreciate the intensive research that went into writing this book. While we understand the gist within couple of pages of reading this book, it is nice to know how it applies to various fields of industry and lifestyles.
• 
  Einu

  Whether you like the buzz around curation or not, it’s hard to deny that it has become a valuable tool to make sense of the world we live in. There is so much of everything now – music, clothing brands, novels, holiday destinations, financial information – that without curation we would be completely overwhelmed. The enormous quantity of options would drown out quality, and we would struggle to find what we’re interested in among the sea of possibilities. What we need, in other words, is better filters. This is what curation does, it’s about selecting (and thereby reducing), arranging ("making the most of what you have”), refining, simplifying and contextualising.
  
  Good curation has a vision and direction:
  

  It’s no good exhorting the world to less, if you don’t consider what that less should consist of. There is little point reducing if you aren’t also refining. Because curation is built around expert selection with concrete goals, curation ensures that reduction and refinement happen in lockstep.

  
  Becoming a good curator, the author argues, takes hard work; there are no shortcuts. Good curators have spent years gathering experience and knowledge in their fields:
  

  Their curation is based on judgements and instincts honed by tens of thousands of hours of learning and immersion. Good taste, one diffuse but central idea behind curated selections, is carefully cultivated.

  
  The combination of vision and experience, with times, turns curators into trusted curators:
  

  The best legacy organisations have spent decades or even centuries building and augmenting that vision. Which is why the Financial Times and Penguin, Gagosian and William Morris Entertainment are all gatekeepers that remain influential, profitable and relevant. For the new emerging gatekeepers, building credibility is the challenge – but they do, and that’s why we have things like Laughing Squid, Vox Media and Wattpad.

  
  Good curation is also often a mix of machine-powered selection and human-powered curation. Relying on algorithms alone often creates a filter bubble, it confirms what you already knew you wanted. Good curation breaks through this by showing you something you didn’t know you wanted:
  

  Without a blend and balance of different kinds of curation we will fall into self-reinforcing loops of taste and opinion. Rather than open up and explore the world, curation would close it down. One form of curation – let alone one curator – represents a totalitarian vision. A diversity of models and curators mitigates the risk. It opens rather than closes.

  
  One way of diversifying and thereby improving curation is by increasing the number of curators:
  

  Having a strategy for letting others curate, for outsourcing to those on the frontlines, will be more and more essential. It’s a model we have seen time and again on the web and it’s not going away. Social media relies on networks of trust, intimacy and knowledge, amplified by connectivity – given how much curation is about personality and connection, it’s hardly surprising this model is so prevalent.

  
  According to the author, there is no manual for good curation. It depends on what you’re curating and who you’re curating for. But one thing all good curation shares is that it provides a service. In fact, I think the author is right that the reason many people dislike the word ‘curation’ is because it’s increasingly attributed to self-conscious activities like curating everything from your wardrobe to your Instagram feed. It trivialises the concept and threatens to make it irrelevant. But curation can be much more valuable:
  

  When curation is built around a sense of what others want, imbued with a service ethic, when it cares about what it curates more than the curation itself, those charges are unfair – curation here is rightly valuable.

  
  The key message of this book could be summarised in a few pages but I enjoyed it as a whole regardless because of the research that clearly went into it (although it got a tad too repetitive towards the end for me). The many examples and anecdotes throughout (including the curation strategies of platforms like the App Store, Netflix and NYT) do a good job illustrating what the author means by ‘good curation’, and they show how ubiquitous the practice is in our modern world, even if we often don’t notice. If you’re only theoretically interested in curation, this book will give you a good idea of what it is and what it is not. If you also have a practical interest, the various anecdotes together with the author's insights will undoubtedly give you new ideas for your own curatorial pursuits. Let me share three of my favourite insights to give you an idea:
  
  1. We’re drawn to choice but it can paralyse us
  An experiment in a supermarket showed that people are initially drawn to having lots of choice but that it ultimately leads to less sales:
  

  consumers initially exposed to limited choices proved considerably more likely to purchase the produce than consumers who had initially encountered a much larger set of options… The more options you have, the more opportunity costs you have incurred, psychologically speaking. We don’t just experience regret after the event either – we anticipate regret. We ruin our own pleasure anticipating regret we might feel about other choices we could make! Which again impedes our ability to choose, inhibiting our desire to make a choice in the first place.

  
  I think this is a big part of why modern Westerners are never content, but that’s a different story...
  
  2. Too much information confuses us
  

  More information, we assume, means we’re better prepared. Yet this isn’t true. After considering about ten parameters our ability to make decisions is impaired. We get confused and lose sight of our priorities. Even ten is a stretch and many psychologists argue anything beyond five is suboptimal. Saturated not just in choices but in information about choices – from the fuel efficiency of an engine to the size of the boot – we struggle to grasp what we want and why we want it.

  
  3. Complexity makes systems more vulnerable
  

  More complex societies are more costly to maintain than simpler ones, requiring greater support levels per capita. As societies increase in complexity, more networks are created among individuals, more hierarchical controls are created to regulate these networks, more information is processed, there is more centralization of information flow, there is increasing need to support specialists not directly involved in resource production, and the like. All of this complexity is dependent on energy flow.

  
  When something happens to that energy flow, it can have far-reaching consequences, as it did in 2008:
  

  Shocks that would usually be tough – like a dip in demand for Sunbelt real estate, the initial US trigger for the 2008 crisis – became critical. The system was too complex for the ‘quants’ and economics PhDs to predict or manage. As with the Mayans, a complex superstructure teetered on a base that couldn’t support it. Complexity, which had driven such outsized rewards for bankers and hedge-fund managers, turned into the enemy.

  
  By now you probably see how curation can help:
  

  The more complexity we encounter, the more simplification matters. By selecting and arranging, curation takes what is complex and while keeping the essential elements, makes the whole simpler. This is the balancing act of curation – to keep what is important and valuable about complexity, without the overwhelming, overleveraged and overloaded aspects of it.
• 
  Ícaro de Brito Pereira

  Li esse livro pulando várias partes porque eu queria saber sobre curadoria é como fazer isso de um jeito funcional, então só quis ler o que interessava a esse objetivo.
  
  De resto esse livro parece aqueles “guias para o sucesso” na lógica neoliberal capitalista pra caralho. Fica tentando provar que o problema do excesso é maior do que é de verdade e que técnicas de curadoria são úteis para o mundo empresarial.
  
  Daí tem um monte de “cases de sucesso” e muitos argumentos superficiais que poderiam ser facilmente desmentidos. Nossa, tem um excesso desses aqui.
  
  Porém, mas partes em que fala de curadoria, tem uns insights bacanas. Então vale umas 3 estrelas.
• 
  Jonathan Chambers

  A broad survey of the development and application of curation, focusing on the principal of increased curation/reduction of choice as a pathway to increasing value. "Curation" is extremely readable and full of interesting factoids, tackling questions of pure human curation and the kinds of blended or purely algorithmic curation that are increasingly presenting the world to us in customised forms. I don't know if I actually advanced my knowledge about how to curate a great deal, but the book was well worth the read.
• 
  sam

  WHY. WHY is publishing making me read a book analysing ECONOMY. The only parts that I could read with some engagement was the history, so it gets an extra star.
  
  I’m joking. I know exactly why (and I’m not happy about it), easily summed up by this: “The message for both small and big business is clear: follow value, find curation.”
  
  But honestly I hope I never have to read the word ‘curation’ ever again.
• 
  Rajesh CNB

  I picked up this book to understand a new buzz word in the market. But I was a bit disappointed. What makes the book a good (though not interesting) read is the amount of examples that the author provides us with. However, the book has a long-winded approach and we have to struggle really to get to the point. The length could have been much shorter.
• 
  Akanksha G.

  Curation (2016) by Michael Bhaskar has this premise: since before the industrial revolution, our world has been driven by the mantra of 'more is more'--more production, more choices, more of everything. Consequently, we've reached a point of overabundance. And now, value lies in the selection and arrangement of things than in their production. Bhaskar examines this across various domains including retail, food, art, and the internet. Since the book is pretty recent, it offers recent examples that are yet to be outdated (such as Netflix, Eataly, Saadiyat Island). These case studies are fun to read. There are also some pretty neat insights from behavioral science, such as more and more choices lead to greater cognitive load and decision fatigue, and how people are coming up with creative solutions to tackle that. Although, most of the solutions under discussion in this books are strategies adopted by various brands to distinguish themselves rather than the habits of regular people.
  Still, the book drives home the fact that curation is becoming a more and more essential process in today's landscape and we can all benefit from being selective about what we keep around!
• 
  Ferio

  La curaduría, actividad proveniente del mundo del Arte e implantada en la actualidad como técnica de selección y creación de valor en Internet, se propone en este libro como salida al ruido y el exceso de oferta en la sociedad de la abundancia.
  
  Abundantes son también los escenarios que el autor propone para justificar su propuesta, desde los mencionados hasta el mercado de lujo, la tecnología o la gastronomía. Quizá por ello y por el sesgo de elevada calidad de los negocios con los que ilustra el texto pudiera confundirse lo que dice con una proposición elitista; por eso hay que leer con detenimiento sus palabras, que ofrecen una salida a un escenario agobiante con el que aún estamos aprendiendo a convivir y que debería ser transitorio.
  
  Ahora bien, un discurso tan recurrente aplicado a tantos sectores, de los cuales solo algunos serán de nuestro interés, puede llegar a aburrir. Esas partes hay que cogerlas con más paciencia; la parte en la que habla sobre marcas de coches casi hace que me explote la cabeza, ¡y mira que es breve!
• 
  Dozy Pilchard

  This book has something to benefit most people, regardless of their area of interest. I hoped to gain something of value from this book that I might use in my music production endeavours. I feel that I have, to some degree, benefitted from the ideas and thoughts in this book. I have taken on board elements around quality, context, originality and availability. All good considerations. I would be interested to know how others have employed the learning in this book to benefit their endeavours.
• 
  Wladimir Albuja

  I have read the book and I share most of the opinions shared by the community. It’s a good book to get a wider vision of the problem of excess and how curation has become a solution. It’s good reading for young students of information science studies as it covers every single aspect of the production of knowledge and it’s management in our societies.
• 
  Nia Nymue

  The divisions between chapters aren't very clean cut. I would have preferred if historical/ current contextual background info were kept isolated from the more practical applications he's trying to share.
  
  Also, diagrams would have helped a lot. While there are some, and a few pictures, more would be great for this particular book.
• 
  Debora

  This book presents an interesting topic that absolutely is actual nowadays in our world of excesses.
  However, I must say I'm a little disappointed because, even though there are some great examples, I would have preferred for it to be more focused on the publishing industry.
  
  The text is really nice to read, never boring.
• 
  Inger

  I DNF'ed this book after only about 50 pages. I really just couldn't get into it and it seems like it doesn't really live up to what the title and byline/subtitle are selling. Also seems like a lot of things I already knew from previous research into minimalism/essentialism. Some people might love this book, but it's just not for me.
• 
  Karl

  Well written and a easy to follow exploration of the concept of curation. This book helped me organise some of my own thinking about curation and curatorial processes. Lots of great examples of curation at work.
• 
  Nils

  Einige sehr spannende Ideen zu Prinzipien und Effekten des mittlerweile allgegenwärtigen Kuratierens. Verliert sich im langen letzten Teil dann aber leider in Anekdoten, denen eine gründliche Systematisierung gut getan hätte.
• 
  Seda Nur

  One of the comments here said: "The problem with this book is that it really needed curating itself." I agree with that. I just dropped after some repetitive examples. Though, the main idea is good to know and see with some examples.
• 
  Etienne Boeziek

  Een interesant onderwerp en leerzaam. Zeker in deze tijd van alles overload. Echter valt veel in de herhaling waardoor je het idee hebt dat je niet opschiet in het boek.
• 
  Laurent Franckx

  Well, okay, the book does contain one or two original and interesting ideas (e.g. why creativity is overrated and why curation is underrates). But it's a bit paradoxical that a book dealing with overload and excess needs 300 pages while it could have done with 100. Too many digressions that are completely besides the point, too much repetition, too much name-dropping...
• 
  Eric Oandasan

  I might have skimmed this booked instead of properly reading it word for word, but I did what pretty much the book suggests: curate the elements that will provide me the most value. As someone in the content business, will be definitely going back to the book every now and then to look at the numerous examples of Curation that, many don't realize, actually expands outside the realm of the internet.
  
  A good read for people in any industry that strives to win the battle for people's attention.