User:Eleanorg/thesis/draft1.1/Online curation

Alessandro Ludovico uses the term "atomization of content" to describe the current situation of online publishing. Rather than consuming whole books or newspapers (or websites), readers today deal with smaller units - individual articles, images, posts - which may be aggregated and organized in various ways. The question for publishers is no longer how to create a comprehensive range of content, but how to aggregate the 'best of' from multiple sources. (Ludovico; Being the Media)

This shift is well illustrated by the recent history of the radical news project Indymedia. Two years ago I interviewed activists during the fall-out from the difficult fork in the UK Indymedia project. A central question in the split was whether Indymedia's role should be to provide its own platform for publishing, or aggregate existing content. Those I interviewed had come to the 2011 Barncamp, a week-long activist tech retreat, to work on Be The Media - one of two projects emerging from the fork. Unlike a traditional Indymedia site, Be The Media would offer no facility to post content to the site, and would only display pre-existing feeds pulled in from elsewhere.

This shift in approach has been more recently echoed by the London Indymedia collective, who shut up shop in November (?) 2012 with the rationale that "this Indymedia project is for many reasons no longer the one which we think is tactically useful to put our energy into... in many ways Indymedia won, because it pioneerd approaches which have now become mainstream... Self publishing is the norm." They conclude that rather than encouraging people to self-publish, "we in London see the challenges of today more in terms of collectivizing the individual outputs, of curating from within the sea of content".

The immediate quetion, then, is how this curation is to be done. Commenting on the discussion in progress at Barncamp, participant Mick Fuzz said wryly to me: "I think what's interesting in terms of projects like Be The Media, which involve existing grassroots collectives sharing content, is that we're getting to grips with some of the politics of aggregation." While some onlookers wanted the new project to take an approach of "linking everybody up and making sure that everybody grows - including people you don't necessarily agree with", another from a local Indymedia collective commented that "think[ing] you should syndicate every fucking nutter in the world" was a symptom of "liberal guilt". He stressed the difference between "censorship" (of which Be The Media has been accused), and "not giving a platform to somebody's mad ranty blog". (being the media)

The 'sea of content' we now live in will only make these debates more frequent, when it comes to choosing what to include in the limited space of a given page (whether digital or paper). Is it possible to do this in a genuinely democratic way?

There are multiple ways to resolve the dilemma of what to include, and various algorithms available for sorting and prioritizing atomized content. For example, one type of algorithm we hear much of today is the 'filter bubble', a term coined by Eli Parisier to describe a model in which readers are served a personalized mix of content that reflects (and re-enforces) their own preferences. Parisier proposes a reactionary, paternalistic alternative in his project UpWorthy - a site which promotes the sharing of 'important' (check quote) content. Or there are the more democratic, populist 'most watched' models, in which the most popular content is displayed at the top of the page - creating a self-perpetuating cycle. The problem for activist curators lies, as ever, in our refusal to resort to such elitist, individualist or populist algorithms. We don't want to be coldly pragmatic, but to reach consensus on what is important. If we want the software we use for collaborative curation to encode radical models of decision-making (as opposed to populist algorithms), then we need to look closer at what is entailed in this decision-making, and what assumptions we are encoding. I will look in detail here at one aspect of a radical theory of decision-making; namely, individual consent - which makes the link between the will of the individual and the will of the group. If this consent is to be expressed (encoded) through software, and we are to design this software, then we must make certain decisions. These include what exactly we mean by 'consent'; how it is expressed; and in what way a consenting agent interacts with others.

(give more detail here about web-to-print projects and how they use voting systems?)