Curation: The power of selection in a world of excess

Description

'A terrific and important book . . . it's a great, fresh take on how the 21st century is transforming the way we select everything from food to music' David Bodanis, author of E=MC2 In the past two years humanity has produced more data than the rest of human history combined. We carry a library of data in our pockets, accessible at any second. We have more information and more goods at our disposal than we know what to do with. There is no longer any competitive advantage in creating more information. Today, value lies in curation: selecting, finding and cutting down to show what really matters. CURATION reveals how a little-used word from the world of museums became a crucial and at times controversial strategy for the twenty-first century. Today's most successful companies - Apple, Netflix, Amazon - have used curation to power their growth, by offering customers more tailored and appropriate choices. CURATION answers the question of how we can live and prosper in an age of information overload. In the context of excess, it is not only a sound business strategy, but a way to make sense of the world.

Michael Bhaskar is a writer, publisher, researcher and entrepreneur. He is Co-Founder of Canelo, a new kind of publishing company. Between 2017 and 2019 he was a consultant Writer in Residence at DeepMind, the world's leading AI research lab. He has written and talked extensively about the future of media and technology around the world. He has been featured in and written for the Guardian, the FT and Wired and on BBC 2, the BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4 and NPR among others. Michael has been a British Council Young Creative Entrepreneur, a Frankfurt Book Fair Fellow and a Visiting Researcher at Oxford Brookes University. He has written a prize-winning monograph, The Content Machine, and Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess. He is also the lead author of the Literature in the 21st Century report and is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Publishing. His books have been translated into nine languages, and he can be found on Twitter as @michaelbhaskar.

A terrific and important book . . . it's a great, fresh take on how the 21st century is transforming the way we select everything from food to music. A fascinating account . . . and also a useful guide In his outstanding new book, Michael Bhaskar reveals that curation, formerly the preserve of art galleries and specialists, has become an essential part of our overloaded lives. Dispelling the old mantra that more is better, Bhaskar teaches us that value today lies not in creating more choices, but training ourselves to choose better. Whether operating a business or choosing your own self identity, Curation rightly shifts our focus from producing more and more to finding what matters. This book is a must have . . . Bhaskar penetrates to the very essence of man- and machine-made choices Full of illuminating detail, Bhaskar's writing eloquently confronts problems of excess.