Curation is valuable to the Community?
As a matter of fact, news and information shown on the traditional news media are not perfect substantially. Therefore, someone’s curating the news and information of the other media would indispensably keep the people at a farther distance from the real truth. The journalists with self occupational morality are only seeking for finding out the truth.
Curators are proud of their sense, intelligence, effectiveness, and efficiency, but are only cunning, intelligently middle-leveled, deceptive, speedy to obtain others’ efforts, lazy to make their own endeavors.
Curation is a sort of a business tool for making money under the internet-centered communication. Curation is not journalism, the curators do not produce something new, and exploit journalists’ products. They seem to be similar with wicked private bankers of the Wall Street, exploiting deposits and taxes.
Anyway, journalism is also an evolving being. It has the fourth periods of the development and changes. In the first one, the news media only carried the big or small incidents’ news and events’ stories. At the second period, they expressed their opinions or sights with the straight news and analyses. They stood for or against the political parties overtly. The third form is the objective model, which was evolved naturally from the second one for the broader readership and revenues. The just born television adopted the objective model. Now is on the fourth change, which is destroying the objective model of news media. While the curators of the internet are diffusing journalists’ products at a light speed shamelessly, the business grounds of news media have been collapsed in the deepest dark holes.
News media have two elements, facts reporting and critical analysis. The curation made the reporting facts of news media little valuable commercially. As a result the news media is returning to the third form, i.e. the subjective and sectarian model. Because the sectarian voices can at least keep the limited readerships, in the circumstance of being unable to get the broader people through the objective model. In the U.S.A, even some televisions and radios deserted the neutral and objective attitude, satisfying the separate viewers. Seeing the present situation, sectarian model is kicking the neutral news media into making adopting the same one.
Curation is substantially a sectarian model. So the curators and the returned sectarian news media are in fact separating the bonding linkage of the community.
In Korea, Naver, the tremendously powerful portal, is exploiting journalism profitably. Naver rapidly grew out of the curation of news reportings and netizens’ knowledge. In my opinion, the knowledge contribution of general users seemed to wither away, with the netizens’ curiosity lost and the knowledge section polluted by cunning keywords marketers. Holistically, the curation is superceding the journalism. If people are continually choosing the curation media, most news media will disappear. A very few news media carrying the traditional functions of facts-gathering and objective analyses would survive in offering their contents for the very smaller groups demanding objective information such as business persons, investors, politicians, specific groups in needs of their jobs.
And what is worse, the news media offering rumor-like information, and sectarian voices for the curation media will survive like wild weeds. In Korea, the latter are already prospering with unfortunately neutral news media losing their readerships. These bad news media are writing anything aggressively and threateningly more and more. They even have the posture that objectivism and neutralism are ‘rubbish’.
It could be natural that the mass are slanting toward the curation, because the curation is convenient with the whole displaying of news, and satisfied with the same parochialism.
The problem is whether the curation model under the weakening journalism is helpful or detrimental to the community. The answer is, the curation is damaging the sound ecosystem of the community. The curation model is deforming the community. The curators do not go into the scene, sitting in the safe area, so they do not feel and share the hearts and sadness, isolation of the people concerned.
The inventors of the internet could not have expected this malfunction of the easy curation of journalism and knowledge. (The end)
