“The content farmer is the dystopian new journalist, producing online content, typically for a large company, in an attempt to garner more advertising revenue because of the popularity of the topic. Here, the value impartation is done by others (droves, really) via algorithms. Value is thus proportional to popularity, and audience courting is synonymous with it. There is no better example of the darkest, most tautological aspects of accelerated curationism: rather than the simulated democracy (or, at least, simulated beneficence) of curated works being presented as attractive to a potential audience because they have been chosen exclusively and carefully for their value, the value in these content-farmed works lies not in preciousness but in popularity.”
— David Balzer, Curationism

Annotation

Balzer vs. Fiske: How do we achieve a balance of popularity and preciousness? More urgently: If what defines popularity are analytics developed by corporations to make money; how do we understand the contours of preciousness? Who is the arbitrator preciousness? How do they define the contours of preciousness? To what end does this preciousness serve the human actors?

Tagged: Digital Content, Digital Content Economics, Proportional Value, Relevance, Defining Quality, Cultural Elitism vs. Democratic Consumerism
Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Read:
Curationism

Explore more quotes:

Beach Quotes (42)
Deep Quotes (500)
Encouraging Quotes (30)
Funny Quotes (120)
Inspirational Quotes (501)
Quotes about Love (854)
TV Quotes (1,000+)
Movie Quotes (1,000+)

About the author

This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.