The consumer-curator-creator trichotomy is a legitimate phenomenon in contemporary culture. Anecdotally—as observed by us—and empirically—as noted by patterns and studies of participation in digital communities—there's truth to it. It may even be a signal of a deep truth of the human condition concerning wider cultural participation. As Niels Bohr puts it:
In the Institute in Copenhagen, where through those years a number of young physicists from various countries came together for discussions, we used, when in trouble, often to comfort ourselves with jokes, among them the old saying of the two kinds of truth. To the one kind belong statements so simple and clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended. The other kind, the so-called "deep truths," are statements in which the opposite also contains deep truth.
Deep truth or not, the consumer-curator-creator trichotomy is something we use to orientate our thinking and assist with decisions related to Subset. However, we're willing to admit that it is a little contrived.
The boundaries between the three types and their default orientations are a lot fuzzier than the simplistic sorting of all people online into one of three buckets assumes. In reality, people slide between these modes at different moments during the day and at different periods during their life. Our advocacy for consumer-curator-creator profiling is based on the sensed presence of an organic setpoint. A position that individuals naturally exhibit and are drawn back to in proportion to their distance from it (and the duration that distance is sustained for). It's said that haters gon' hate; well, creators gon' create, curators gon' curate, and consumers gon' insert appropriate rhyming verb.
Muddying up this trichotomy further is a more recent observation.
Prior to this post, we've described the tendency of curators to maximise surprise:
[Curators] distribute digests of the things that have interested them; they assemble Dunbar goods for the benefit of small groups; they save succinct references to the things they've found and share them with people they know will be interested in them. The perceptions and actions of curators are designed to perturb their surrounding environment and elicit surprise, again and again, and across every domain. They introduce sources of novelty and divergence and interact in ways that catalyse new relationships and insight.
We've elicited the essence of Subset and its ideal user:
These people whom we're building Subset for roam the labyrinthian corridors of the web, following their many interests to many different places. Along the way—again and again in the midst of their wandering—they will make connections between this thing and that person and attempt to form a bridge between the two.
Subset is for those bridge builders who see things and think of people. Its essence is the simple explanation given when something saved is shared with someone who'll care: "I saw this and thought of you."
And we've charted the richness of sharing patterns:
First, most sharing patterns cross platforms. They involve the transition of something from one walled garden to another. From Instagram to WhatsApp; from Facebook to email; from LinkedIn to Discord.
Second, what's shared is limited in depth. Typically, it's a link plus a little contextualising information. Often—if the shared thing is super consumable—it's just a raw link.
Third, the sharing is usually organic rather than systematic and formal. It's driven by emergent feelings and connections and is usually undertaken in a non-self-conscious, informal, peer-to-peer manner. More deliberate, reasoned patterns exist but they're the minority.
Finally, most sharing patterns are just one thread of a larger communication nexus. The sharer sending memes to their friend via WhatsApp is also sending shortform videos via Snapchat and tagging their friend in Instagram comments.
Quite accidentally, we've stumbled upon three distinct sub-modes that people move between as curators, as part of the longer pace layer undulations between consuming, curating and creating. Curators tend to:
Act selfishly
Invoke others
Construct systems
Self-ish curation isn't harmful or malicious. It's a simple noticing of the cognitive cascades triggered when something interesting emerges within one's environment. It's an orientation towards surprise. It's the acknowledgement of glimmers...
Today I learned about a term called a "glimmer" which is the opposite of a trigger. Glimmers are those moments that make you feel joy, happiness, peace, or gratitude. Once you train your brain to be on the lookout for glimmers, these beautiful moments will appear more and more.
...and the capture of some representative artefact in a sociotechnical system—for example, likes, bookmarks or just opening a new tab.
Other-ish curation builds atop this orientation towards glimmers and surprise. It evolves to incorporate someone else to the discovery of glimmers and the experience of surprise. It's a rapidly executed surprise-save-share sequence with a low time-to-save and time-to-share that builds relationships and, ultimately, generates civilisational progress.
As this sequence reoccurs and becomes ingrained within a curator's behavioural patterns, systems emerge to reduce the non-value add friction within these processes and enhance the ability to pipe the surprising things one saves to others for whom they're likely to prove relevant. This is how one ends up producing email digests or link feeds and/or running dedicated tooling and infrastructure; it's systematised curation of varying sophistication.
The consumer-curator-creator trichotomy is kinda contrived. So is the distinction between self-ish, other-ish and system-ish curation. However, like many of the best contrivances, they are grounded in reality. In observable instances of behaviour and interaction. But the most important impact of these useful fictions is that they help us to see differently and to pose new questions. So let us end with one: which curatorial mode—self-ish, other-ish, system-ish—holds the most latent value for our culture-at-large? If they were adequately served and supported, which mode of curation would promote the greatest progress?
