Finding four-leaf clovers
Were the Internet a garden, it would be increasingly challenging to find four-leaf clovers. We can blame the Law of Social Sharing, also known as Zuckerberg's Law, which says that internet users share twice as much information each year than the previous one. Although this theory can be questionable, the truth is that we have never had so many podcasts to listen to, articles to read, or tweets to follow.
In the words of Morgan Housel, if we close our brains to different stimuli, we risk being trapped in the small universe of our experiences. But without a strong filter of what we consume, we are overwhelmed with choices and paralyzed by inaction.
That's why we need curators - people who are not threatened by weeds and continue to look for the best the Internet has to offer. In the article Curators Are the New Creators, Gaby Goldberg writes that curation can be an essential tool to access readings, people, videos, and podcasts that we would take a long time to discover.
And if trusting curators may seem like a lazy shortcut to filter what we consume, then you are not following the right information diet. Robert Cottrell reads 1,000 articles a day to present us with the top five at The Browser. Channels Stack offers a selection of the best educational videos on Youtube, and at Slack Newsletter we find a directory of email newsletters by topics. Curators may be our guides in the wild internet fields, but we choose the cloves we pick up along the way.
💾 Memory Lane
"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again." - André Gide
Radio was the end of newspapers, television replaced radio, and the Internet destroyed television. The spiel is known, but it ignores the power of reinvention. In 2009, when the print industry was going through one of the biggest crises of the decade, the Newspaper Club came up with an ambitious mission - to democratize the creation and distribution of newspapers. By making the medium more accessible, creativity began to flow, and newspapers gained a new life. With the increase in digital events, the Newspaper Club shows us how print can bring more humanity to online exhibitions.
💻 Present Tense
"You get to decide what to workshop" - David Foster Wallace
Talking about curation, here are two curious newsletters that catch my eye this week:
The Weeklypedia is a digest of the most-edited Wikipedia articles and discussions from the last week. Last week, in Issue 337: 172,262 users made 786,307 changes to 348,342 articles on English Wikipedia.
Winning the Internet is a data-driven experimental newsletter of links in other newsletters. In the past week they found 3,348 unique links from 209 emails. The most linked story of the week was China Secretly Built A Vast New Infrastructure To Imprison Muslims.
🔍 Time will tell
“They can never know you... They won’t know the you that’s hidden somewhere in the castle of your skin." - George Lamming
Our information ecosystem determines who we trust, who we hate, who we vote for, the decisions we make, and even what wars we fight. The Thoughtful Technology Project, by the media researcher Aviv Ovadya, ensures that new technology does not irreversibly harm the concept of truth. In this article for the MIT Technology Review, Ovadya guides us on how it’s possible to limit the harm synthetic media tools might cause.
And today's question is:
🤔 “Who are your Internet curators?”
Let’s share ideas, recommendations, and thoughts!
Até já!
Inês 🌿