Remember Curation?
“Who said it? Why do I trust them? Have they been wrong in the past?”
Once upon a time, in the blogging world, the idea of curation was an important one. The idea was that while we wanted to be generous with sharing and linking to others, we also wanted to be responsible curators. The realization that sharing junk was going to affect our own reputation, and hurt us in the long run.
Then along came blogging for profit, and social media and all of that changed. The ability to get paid to link to certain, crappy, sites was too much for many who only starting a blog to make money in the first place, to resist. So it started to become a payola scam, like the one that got Alan Freed fired as Seth Godin tells us about on a recent podcast.
Then throw in what the social media algorithms have done, letting us amass a great number of fans and followers, but only showing our posts to a minuscule percentage of them unless they can engender enough outrage, or shock, to get them to share it further, and it’s no wonder that finding sources we can trust on any social media platform is quite difficult.
And now, when we have a pandemic, and plenty of panic to go along with it, who do we trust? Do we trust the loudest voices on social media? The ones we see over and over again, but who are often wrong? Or do we seek to answer Seth’s questions that I quoted at the start of this post?
Who is it that you can trust to have at least spent some time vetting what they share? To acknowledge mistakes? To care more about telling the truth than “going viral”?
I know which side of those questions I want to fall on, even if it means I don’t have a large audience. Can you say the same for the “sources” you are quoting and sharing from? Especially now?
Go, listen to the whole episode.
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