Online 'curating' is just anxiety wrapped in pomposity

NET RESULTS:IS IT JUST me, or does anyone else shudder every time they come across the verb "curate" used in the context of gathering items together for some sort of web display?

Okay, I know it is probably just me. After all, I am the one who still loathes the use of the word “impact” as a verb. Once upon a time, A could “have an impact upon” B. But then, seemingly overnight and thanks to increasing misuse in the US media, A could, without any advance linguistic warning for the sensitive among us, “impact” B.

Every time I heard it, it just sounded wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. But before you knew it, everyone seemed to be “verbing” nouns.

The culmination of this idiocy surely must be the word "gift". As in, an item given by one person to another, or a unique talent possessed by someone. Not content to leave this poor word unmolested, someone somewhere determined "gift" had to be surgically altered into a verb. Now, A may "gift" B, for example in the annoying-in-every-way example from Dictionary.com: "Just the thing to gift the newlyweds." Oh, please. Can we not just continue to use the perfectly acceptable "just the gift to give the newlyweds"?

The web-context use of “curate” is, to my mind, even more annoying. Maybe I need to find better things to do, but I cannot think of another word that has been so demeaned by association with a web process.

When I hear “curate” used in the context of a person organising or presenting web-based material, it inevitably carries a subtext: a new-media medium struggling too hard to give itself not just legitimacy, but perhaps just that little bit of superiority. It’s a word out of context that ends up sounding pretentious.

The verb “ to curate”, until web people started mangling it, was perfectly appropriate in the context of museum exhibits, art collections or displays of historical objects: areas in which it indicated that a person or persons (curators) with specific, unique areas of expertise would select, provide a context for and display items of value. Sorting through tweets, blog posts, and online news items is not curating. It is editing.

Indeed, our resourceful online friend Dictionary.comgives exactly this context among its definitions of "edit": "to collect, prepare and arrange (materials) for publication". As legal folk have long advised, posting to the internet is publication.

And most of the people who use the word “curate” rather than “edit” are preparing items for publication on a website – whether it is a selection of things to read that are culled from the web, or YouTube videos, or Instagram pictures.

So why has “curate” become the pretentious verb du jour for people who “collect, prepare, and arrange (materials) for publication” online? Why can’t they simply edit them? To my mind, the (mis)use of this word goes to the heart of a kind of striving for legitimacy in the current topsy-turvy state of the media. I still see anxiety among the digerati about proving the worth of Twitter and blogs, for example. There’s an eagerness to have them seen as equal in weight to traditional print and broadcast media.

I fully agree that they are important sources of information and often right at the cutting edge of news-breaking action. But that still doesn’t mean that providing me with a collection of blog posts, tweets, images from somebody’s Flickr account and links to online articles is a process of curation rather than editing, and it is pompous to think that it is.

For what exactly is different about this gathering of disparate formats and sources of available information – different from, say, what Reader’s Digest has done for aeons or, for the slightly trendier, the Utne Reader?

Nothing at all, except that the form of publication is the internet. The internet – fun, exciting, challenging and exhilarating as it can be – does not demand specialist talent in order to read a tweet or a blog. And sifting through online material and verifying sources does not require any greater level of core expertise than that held by any talented editor.

And to talk about that final collection as a curated exhibit is just precious. That’s why, even though both of the above publications, with their editors editing sources into a published collection, have online versions, they haven’t seen any need to change their job descriptions to “curators”. And both have editorial, not curatorial, offices.

But maybe nobody else thinks so. Maybe I’d feel better if I just went away and wrote a Letter to the Curator.