The Extra Mile

In a recent essay in The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka writes about the "new generation" of online culture creators: curators, who "guided by their own cultivated sense of taste, ... bring their audiences news and insights in a particular cultural area, whether it’s fashion, books, music, food, or film."

In a previous era of the Internet, we might have thought of figures like these simply as influencers, whose ability to attract large followings online gives them a power that sometimes surpasses that of traditional publications. But the idea of an influencer has, as Reilly put it, become “a little flattened over time,” connoting shallow, uninformed, even misleading content dictated by sponsors. “There’s a distinction between influencing and what I do,” [Magasin newsletter author Lauren] Reilly insisted. The archetypal influencer produces life-style porn of one form or another, playing up the aspirational glamour of their own home or meals or vacations. The new wave of curators is more outward-looking, borrowing from the influencer’s playbook and piggybacking on social media’s intimate interaction with followers in order to address a body of culture beyond themselves.

I like this, although I'm not sure that this is as new as Chayka posits. I think of the work of Jason Kottke, Maria Popova, and hell even myself with Hack Education and HEWN that have long collected, analyzed, and shares interesting stories from the Internet. But if there is something new about this practice, perhaps it's that, as Chayka argues in his book Filterworld, algorithms are flattening culture; it's growing increasingly necessary to turn to human guides online as the technological ones we've relied upon – tools as fundamental as "search" – simply no longer work.