What if there was an alternative to “doomscrolling,” drowning in irrelevancy, the unconscious zoned-out state? A digital tool out of many that allows us to collect perused and pored over content to create short lists or “finite feeds,” which could then be consumed by creators and humans we know?
This is the “curator economy” or more specifically, the “human curator economy.” And curation is one of the three C's of info commerce alongside creation and consumption.
Recently, I interviewed Cansu Çubukçu, the creative director of Wiser Media, a company offering one of many alternatives to the scroll and the unconscious digital consumption problem. What is it and how is it shaping the future of learning in digital spaces? It's a social curation platform and discovery tool catered for learners to curate lists from various media formats. In the current “attention economy”, we all are a little unclear about exactly which content to focus on. When we do eventually make a choice, we are left wondering if we made the right choice about where to put that attention. To aid in this process, Wiser advances human curation, different from AI-powered content, which has been considered, explored, and studied by people we look up to and by people we know [think notes in the margins of book pages but in digital form]. Like show notes, hyperlinks, retweets. Humans who added their own insights and examples. It's similar to having a conversation with your favorite curator, a curator that has personalized themselves into their list in a sense. It's a much more pleasurable way to learn. And the more pleasure we have in learning, the faster we learn.
I asked her what her job is like, what kinds of problems she deals with on a regular basis. Prior to this interview, I read her article titled “In Defense of Human Curation” which talked about how, in this current culture, we consume instead of learn [a phenomenon which interests me].
In addition to its obvious humanistic quality, Wiser has Wiser AI. The AI tags lists based on topic, media type, and vibe, personalized to our individual tastes. The “For You” finite feature fights the unintentional zoning out that happens from obsessive, inattentive scrolling. One of my favorite quotes from “The Minimalists” is “scrolling is the new smoking.” Besides being an addictive habit, we don't realize we are doing it until we become aware of ourselves.
Recently, I tried a job at a local Juicery and learned the basics of health and wellness. I appreciated that I could place all the podcast episodes and blog posts that I collected [like a digital “memory palace” or “memory castle” which I've talked about before], into these “finite feeds.”
Less professionally, another way that I've used the platform was to collect and curate all the content that I've been using to learn about sales. It includes two sales audiobooks, some articles, and a beginner sales course on Udemy. It was also used to learn about existentialist philosophy, recommending a great article to me from the publication “The Conversation” which I would have not seen otherwise; “What makes a good life? Existentialists believe we should embrace freedom and authenticity.”
One tenet of accelerated-learning is to prepare the content that you will learn from beforehand. Wiser Media uses one approach to help with this: by packing content ready into a list so you don't waste time. Content curated by humans, according to an article written by the company Glasp that I read on Substack [another Edtech startup that deals with this “curator economy”], flattens the learning curve, letting creatives focus more on perfecting their work, rather than web surfing which can delay real progress. Both accelerated-learners and content creators end up with an assortment of irrelevant information overloading their brain. AI is also working on a cure to this time-consuming search engine activity, but because it is AI, it doesn't involve deeper content, only related content based on recent likes and follows. The feeds supply the most engaging and novel content, not content that is in actuality, high quality or relevant to one's learning goals.
Infinite scrolls are addicting. I don't want a screen to take away my time. Careless internet consumption with no end in sight, learning from low-quality sources; I'm not up for that. As long as I'm mindfully learning, I'll be using Wiser Media.