Technology has changed the way we live but humans still lie at the heart of everything – and their influence shouldn’t be underestimated! Misbah Gedal explains all
Curation is far from a new concept. For millennia, humans have curated everything from art and books to music and artefacts. There exists a strong desire within people to collect things of interest and organize them in a meaningful way. And it’s a desire that’s exclusively human.
The power of human curation
For as long as humans have been creating things, we’ve also found ways to organize them. From the crumbling libraries of Ancient Greece to the refined galleries of the Renaissance, it seems humans have an insatiable urge to capture and arrange the things that move us.
For me, the museum is the quintessential form of curation; experts taking individual artefacts and displaying them in collections in a way that adds value, context and meaning. Viewing these individual items on their own would be interesting but being able to experience them all in one place helps us to empathize with past civilizations and captures our imaginations. The single pieces may not move us but the way they’re organized does.
Content curation is a powerful way to share an idea, contextualise an issue and tell an engaging story. The art of curation is an important yet often overlooked part of everyday life, whether it’s a DJ putting together a set-list or a librarian organizing books by subject.
Finding meaningful results
The Internet offers a vast and ever-growing amount of information. For the past three decades, it’s provided access to content that would otherwise have been difficult to obtain. Search engines help us find this information but they rarely provide any context or meaning with their results. That’s where humans come in.
Despite artificial intelligence developing in ways we couldn’t have imagined, technology still finds it difficult to tell stories. Taking disparate pieces of online content and creating something cohesive is a uniquely human skill. Humans can tell incredible stories that inform and move us, both online and off.
The importance of context
Context changes everything. A song on Spotify becomes so much more powerful when displayed alongside the artist’s last interview. A YouTube video makes sense when accompanied by an article explaining why it went viral. And an item on Amazon gains significance when it’s included on a Christmas wish list.
We started Wakelet with a vision; we wanted to be a tech company that puts humans at its heart. Algorithms and AI have helped us in more ways than we could have imagined but they lack those core elements that make us human: empathy, love, compassion, curiosity and creation. It’s these traits that have inspired us to tell and share the stories that matter. After all, in the end, behind the technology, the wires, the servers, algorithms and code, it’s human beings that have created this beautiful thing we call the Internet.