Curated Content: Medium’s Equivalent to America’s Breakfast Cereals.
By: Joe Luca
Tags: Thinking, Humility, Philosophy, Judgement, Self-awareness

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. — Rudyard Kipling

Recently I came across a highly placed top writer on Medium suggesting rather clearly, that what Medium readers wanted on this platform — was curated content.

As I understood it, content prepared and packaged by others. Coordinated and carefully crafted to provide information in measured amounts, requiring a reasonable period of time to ingest, with minimal washing up afterwards.

Okay, so I am not a huge fan of this concept. I am not a proponent of Processed Thinking, if I may be so bold as to call it that. Not after several consecutive decades of political and social change swirling around us, where as a society, we’ve gone from a dogged determinism to understand what someone was saying and why, to accepting most things with little to no vetting.

But I may be wrong.

I may be missing a valid point that is driving mass quantities of readers on this platform to read content curated by others on a wide variety of subject. And doing all of this rather successfully, both in viewership and financial rewards.

So, what is my case? Why am I down on what others want?

By way of explanation, I’m a shopper. Not the QVC or Amazon type, but the old school version. Walking up and down the aisles of supermarkets, Costcos, Sam’s Clubs and other big box stores. Hunting and gathering for the family while indulging in a long-hidden secret passion. I love watching people.

Watching what they do, what they say. What they put into their shopping carts. In fact, I have been compiling an unofficial survey for over four decades and I am absolutely convinced that a large majority of people (especially in America) continuously buy, not what they need, but what they want.

What they are influenced into believing will be good for them or at least make them feel that way.

Influenced not by common sense or a nutritionist’s stern warning, but by the carefully crafted and deliciously silly advertising that we’ve been diligently consuming all our lives.

Walk slowly down the breakfast cereal aisle and breathe deeply. If you feel a little faint, don’t worry, it’ll pass. It’s just the airborne sugar moving through the nasal passages on its way straight into the brain. It’s what many of us eat today and have been since we first launched a bowl of Fruit Loops at our siblings.

Prepackaged with added nutrients, designed to mimic those found in Nature or somewhere nearby. Made to look appealing, clever and very consumable.

It’s what we do.

By my estimation at least 60% to 70% of all supermarket shelf and freezer space is filled with prepackaged foods. That is food, picked, plucked, pounded and packaged into cartons, ready to stick in the oven or microwave — saving consumers untold hours every year, that they can now invest wisely toward retirement.

Aren’t we just looking for a faster, quicker, better way to get something or somewhere without piling on the usual number of weeks and months of learning and trying, usually required to get there?

So, Seriously, What’s the Fuss all About?

Teacher’s teach what they have already learned. Master plumbers teach apprentices how to solder a pipe and not set the house on fire. Parents teach their children, based on what they’ve learned; from the mistakes they’ve made in the past.

So why is Curated Content different?

Think for yourself, or others will think for you, without thinking of you. — Henry David Thoreau

Curating is simply a means of providing perspective on any given subject. It’s done all the time in museums, libraries, TV, YouTube, political platforms, Medium and so on. Harmless enough, right?

If we didn’t do it this way, people would all have to spend countless hours becoming familiar with far more information than is currently necessary to end up with a succinct, clear cut version of something that we can then read, process and use for decision making purposes.

So again, why might this be an issue?

Because we are not perfect inputting machines capable of generating a continuous stream of analytically correct information. We frequently screw up.

Teacher’s teach the multiplication table, long division, why fire burns and other scientific facts that are important to know. Parents teach their children about life and safety and how to live among other people. How to survive childhood and become an adult like the rest of us.

But both of these professions, like many others, have weaknesses.

Remember the world was once flat; people were not meant to fly. All of history — according to some, including dinosaurs and comets, is less than 6000 years old. And men and women are still not created equal.

Teachers, bless their souls, tend to be lousy at teaching history. Often regurgitating what’s in the history books, written by others with a slanted if not outright biased view of what was. Frequently excluding entire swaths of peoples and cultures that played a vital role in the evolution of just about everything.

Parents are not perfect either. Remember they were kids once and maybe their parents were less than stellar at it. Parents have the distasteful habit of passing along false information, false views and perceptions about other things, that adversely affects a child’s ability to think and process information around them.

Information, that in many cases, has to be unlearned.

While it might be faster and easier to consume products and ideas designed to provide us with exactly what we need to maintain life and our equanimity towards it, can we always trust that the person providing it, has our best interests and well-being at heart?

I am not upset that you lied to me, I am upset that from now on, I can’t believe you. - Friedrich Nietzsche

A person very close to me, a Millennial, made a statement that people of her generation were born with the Internet and Social Media. Born into a world where there weren’t 6 channels of news and entertainment, but 6000. Thus, requiring them to become very adept at sniffing out the bullshit and very capable of finding the truth.

I believe her, but not without certain reservations. Borne from decades of fending off the lies and half-truths on my own way to understanding the most basic elements of our society.

Curated Content is packaged content. Is abbreviated, brushed, polished and refined content. It’s designed content in many cases, with an idea, decision or point of view at the end of the prose that someone is interested in conveying.

Is it always this way? No, it isn’t. And I am not claiming that it is or that it’s all bad. After all, what I am writing right now may be considered curated content by some.

But since we don’t forecast our own weather, or analyze our own national elections. Or write the text books that we will then read to prepare for the test that we will author ourselves. If there are countless things that we rely on in life to maintain life that are being taken care of, and written, by others, then I think it wise and prudent that we take the wheel once in a while and figure things out for ourselves.

Meaning:

That we should read source material as much as we can and not fifth, sixth or seventh generation reinterpretations of them. That we should talk to people who know and have answers to our questions as often as we can, rather than relying on others to find, interview and tell us what they really mean. That, while information is generally consumed by people in the same manner, what comes out the other end, so to speak, is often inconsistent, unreliable and prone to induce indigestion. That for untold years we have been provided with food, services and ideas that were in our best interest, as stated by those manufacturing them. How often have these been proven to be incorrect?

All I know is that adding 2–3 cups of sugar to a packet of Kool-Aid and water, just doesn’t sound right anymore. That chicken parts do not naturally come out shaped like dinosaurs, no matter what the commercials tell us. And that spending up to $2 Billion on an election cycle, funded primarily by corporations who earnestly believe they are actual people, is really not the way our political system was intended to look like.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself. If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you think you’re going east, and you will be walking east when you think you’re going west.– Malcom X

Joe Luca is writer and editor for ILLUMINATION and a published author and writer of children’s stories, short fiction, non-fiction articles, screenplays and poetry. Publications include Child’s Life, Children’s Playmate and others. There are some other articles below — have a read. And thank you for stopping by.

Paul Myers MBA, George J. Ziogas, Kathryn A. LeRoy, Ph.D., Tree Langdon, Dr Mehmet Yildiz, Britni Pepper, Jessica Cote, Michele Till, Aurora Eliam, CMP, Tony Young, Jr., Karen Madej, Liam Ireland, The Maverick Files, Alison Tennent, Bill Abbate, Roz Warren, Desiree Driesenaar