Curating The Noise

I've been thinking a lot this week about curation, and the art of filtering/editing in a world full of noise. 

If you're anything like me, then you'll struggle to be satisfied that you're ever reading or doing or involving yourself in enough, conscious that you're missing out on something somewhere, not part of an essential conversation happening around the corner. For people like me, social media is both the best and worst possible thing to get hooked onto.

We now lead personal and professional lives anchored in an overwhelming everness of information - there is no stimulus that isn't available immediately in some form, but we are left to rely on piecemeal or amateur curation (or worse still, we have to rely on ourselves as editors). Who, on earth, can we rely on to vet the noise, to steer us to the genuinely good stuff and to stop us wasting time?

Yesterday morning I had a long catch-up with always possible associate, Chris Middleton, an entrepreneurial journalist and magazine editor with whom I have worked for a few years. He insists that print media is far from dying, and - like vinyl records - is enjoying a role as a product that fights the endless noise; beautiful magazines are being produced about incredibly niche areas of thought, standing up as something carefully curated, assembled and informed. 

For me, the element of trust is vital and the most successful platforms on and offline are those that you know will filter the content that is useful to you. There is a great, rebellious power in being a good curator in a time when the accepted norm for media consumption is that we want everything, everywhere, from everyone, all the time. But who decides who should curate, filter and edit - if we follow a particular blog, hashtag, LinkedIn group or individual how do we know that they are not missing out on some of the vital conversations too? Does it matter? How informed do we need to be to still lead and create in our respective fields?

It might be a cliche to cling onto, but it's hard to deny that the last 5 years has overthrown traditional ideas of communication spaces and has democratised the voice of the individual - anyone can be a creator and commentator of content, and magnificent online collaborations can lead to more innovative inquiry amongst communities of people who want to make a difference. In the noise there are definitely wonderful ideas, but how do we ensure they get to supersede the awful ones? For those working in education, the possibilities are limitless, and the advent of online learning will become the single biggest tool for affecting global change - but limitless is a very daunting place to start. I want to say to my 6 year old, here is the whole universe, for you, and there is nothing you can't do within it - but by doing that, I've disabled her before she's even started. Everyone needs a curator to help guide them through it.

After my meeting pondering this, I was privileged enough to spend the sunny afternoon hanging out at Charleston, the East Sussex farmstead once inhabited by the Bloomsbury group. I shall hopefully be working as a consultant with the trust that now diligently owns and runs the site, so after my meeting with directors I snuck onto a guided tour of the house as - despite spending 4 years of dissertation writing on British modernism, Woolf and 1920s art, I had never been before. 

The place is astonishing, deceptively big although the individual rooms are small - almost every surface, wall, furniture piece, fireplace painted or stencilled with striking patterns and once bold colours. A whole building curated by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant for themselves and their friends and unorthodox families; a different kind of libertarian noise to that of the Internet age, perhaps antithetical to it as it was really by invite only. There is a mixture of the slapdash (paintstrokes on plaster on the wrong type of paint etc) and of the utterly precise, with contributions to the interior design evolving from 1916 through to the late 70s. The challenge for the trust is to capture the history, spirit and energy of style - a bit like a living, well-designed art magazine - whilst protecting a fragile infrastructure and making it accessible and relevant within a digital universe. 

There is a question for all of us about what role we want in the noise. And as I build my consultancy business, my own curation of advice and guidance for clients will naturally become increasingly acute, as a trusted adviser of mainstream policy and thinking, but also sniffing out the more curious and less visible conversations that may be ultimately more exciting. A goal for the next year is to come to terms with the noise, own it, distill it, filter it, make it palatable for others without over diluting it. Wish me luck.