This is the second part of a reflection information technology prompted by a conversation between Ezra Klein and Sean Illing on The Ezra Klein Show.
In graduate school, I loved courses on museum work and material culture. I interned at a state historic site, where I got to mess with that stuff. After finishing my MA, I got a full-time job at a museum. It was small, so even though I was the programs person, we all worked together on major exhibits, and we all learned what each other did.
The person in charge of the collection is the curator. She is responsible for taking care of the existing collection, and for deciding what gets collected and what doesn’t. She’s also primarily responsible for interpreting items in the collection—telling the other staff and the visiting public what they are and what they mean. She brings her own training and experience to the latter task, for sure, but she also pays close attention to the provenance of an item—where it came from, who donated it, what they might know about it, and what other people in the community might know about it.
In the second part of the conversation between Klein and Illing, they talk about what to do with the information overload we’re all subjected to now—if we let ourselves be. Klein says that, even though he’s a media professional, he thinks we have to regulate how much “news” we consume—and that most of us probably consume too much for own good. Going back to McLuhan and Postman, they point out that the technology of the boat, or the hammer, or the bicycle, is different from digital information technology, in that the older technologies are extensions of specific external parts of us—our hands, our feet, perhaps our whole corporeal beings—but digital information technology is an extension of our nervous system—indeed, it may be thought of as a global nervous system. Our brains were not equipped by evolution for this. Really, we can’t handle knowing anything that’s going on anywhere in the world at any time. The fact that in almost all cases, we can’t do anything about those things means that we are left disturbed, perhaps made cynical, perhaps pushed further toward despair. The algorithms relentlessly push the worst things into our brains when we plug in.
But, most of us don’t want to live in complete isolation from what is going on in the world around us. We want to feel connected, but so often, when we try to connect, we regret it. And there is so much bile, and so much horseshit—because bile and horseshit sell, and the purveyors of bile and horseshit know it. Klein asks Illing what to do about this, and Illing says he doesn’t know. The conversation ends on a note of cautious hope, noting that modern history shows us that society does adjust to the adoption of new information technologies. Their concern is that the pace of change in this technology is now so fast that they wonder whether we can keep up.
That is up to us—both as individuals and as societies. Yes, those of us who remember the three networks and Walter Cronkite and Roger Mudd et al. are sorely tempted to yearn for those days now. We should remember, though—and Klein and Illing acknowledge this—that speech is much freer now than it has ever been, with all the pros and cons of that. More people get to speak now than did when I was a kid. The price of stability in a democracy can be—and, in the past, has been—the exclusion of some people and groups from full participation in that democracy. How do we allow full participation and at the same time protect ourselves and our society from the devil loose in the world?
As I concluded in the first part of this, one answer is regulation. We have to learn how to regulate this technology, because it is clear that the path to maximum profits for the tech companies is also the path to maximum damage to our society. The good of society must trump maximum profits for the tech companies. That’s clear.
The second part of the answer is, we need curators—and we need to be curators. It may be that the skills of the curator will prove to be the most important skill set we can acquire and use to navigate the world of information technology we find ourselves in. We have to choose, wisely, what to expose ourselves to, what to consume, with what and whom to interact, and how much; how to judge what is valuable and what is horseshit.
While we do that, we have two pitfalls to keep in mind, and avoid. The first is one we are already aware of: “silo-ing,” or self-sorting, so that we isolate ourselves to interact only with a select group of people and sources of information with which we are already comfortable. Avoiding that, it’s important to note, does not mean exposing ourselves to rubbish. Far too much has been made by disingenuous bad actors of the “two sides” fallacy; one does not give equal time to garbage and evil. One gives no time to it, and works to help ensure it gets no time at all, from anyone.
Going too far, though, means we can’t engage in the kinds of healthy debates we need to have if we are to find the best solutions to thorny problems. As curators, we have to learn how to seek out perspectives other than our own—but perspectives that are worth considering.
The second pitfall is elitism. I will confess that I have always considered myself an elitist—“smart people who know things should be running things”—and, while I can still stand behind that statement, I’ve been educated more as to the tendency of elites to self-deal, to ignore those outside the elite, to exist in an echo chamber.
The curator collects things that have had significance in the lives of the community. Some of those things may be ugly and painful and wrong—a phrenology model, even a Klan hood. The display of such objects must, of course, be handled with sensitivity and wisdom—but they are part of the community’s history whether we like that or not, and must be acknowledged as such. This is why Confederate statues belong under the care of curators, not in the public square.
So, I’ll be thinking about curators and curating, and I encourage you to do the same. Talk to a good curator. Ask her what she thinks are her most important skills and judgments. Curating might save us.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-sean-illing.html
Note: that’s paywall-protected NYT content; the EK show is available on all major podcast platforms.
Indeed--or as my sister puts it, don't engage in a battle of wits with the unarmed. I suspect that most curators have more interaction with the public than they used to, given recent trends in museum work, but even if they don't, what they present is going to have at least a heavy influence on what the public takes away from an exhibit from the collection--not least because they have a major role in selecting what is in that collection. That of course is less true in some cases than others; if you are the curator of ship models at the NMM, well, that ship has sailed in terms of what's collected, but you do have a big role to play in interpreting it and in selecting what is presented to the public and to scholarship. We do indeed live in a world where elite gatekeepers have lost much control; we are well aware of the dangers of that right now, for obvious reasons, but perhaps not as well aware of the opportunities it presents if we pursue them wisely.
The analogy of curation is interesting. I was once a curator myself. Perhaps things have changed but my experience of curation is that one selects, interprets and displays things hoping that what one does is interesting and informative, but one has very little interaction with the public who view the displays. One has very little knowledge of the information, if any, that is absorbed and taken away by the public.
Arguably we live in a world where the elite gatekeepers have less control over the transmission of information and the public are more able to broadcast their opinions and what they regard as truths.
There seems to be no point in entering into debate with the malign and the idiotic. It has always been a truism that if you argue with a halfwit you have to descend to their level of argument.