One of the things I was taught as an elementary school student in Illinois was that America differed from Europe in that it was founded as, and has remained, a classless society. These days, if politicians such as Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders bring up the disparities among the classes in America, they are accused by their political opponents of conjuring up class consciousness in order to foment class warfare. Unfortunately, of course, Obama and Sanders are right, and my schoolteachers were wrong. And while class disparity manifests in all sectors of society, for those who seek careers in literature, class differences have a huge impact on who gets hired and who gets published. This, in turn has a real effect on the portrayal of class in literature, and in media depictions of the writer’s life.
In the past few years, countless essays, articles, charts, graphs, and surveys have been published making the case for greater gender and ethnic diversity in the literary world, that our literature might present back to us a truer accounting of the society in which we actually live. There remains a long way to go but we have slowly come to understand that by publishing more writers of color, by increasing the number of women’s bylines, by being more inclusive, we will increase the quality of our collective storytelling.
But very little has been explicitly articulated about the exclusion of the great American underclass, that perpetually poor group on the bottom tier of society that includes all races/genders/creeds. And as we winnow out opportunities for art about poverty, we lose so much potential for change.
Robin Good of Content Curation World breaks the findings down thus:
a) what people curate as relevant is not generally among the top ranked results according to popular metrics. Good stuff is not the same as what is considered normally popular or authoritative stuff.
b) content curation allows a community to synchronize around specific issues and subjects (as anticipated by Clay Shirky)
c) better and more appreciated curation is of the "structured" kind, providing additional info, meta-data and categorization.
d) curators that are highly appreciated are characterized by consistent activity and by a variety of interests (or viewpoints under the same theme) that they are capable to cover.
This is rather my experience; however, I usually explain it to my clients this way:
a) You can be doing an excellent job, but never receive the recognition, popularity, or traffic you deserve.That doesn't mean you won't be appreciated greatly by the smaller group of people who do find/read your curated works.
b) No matter the popularity of your curation, you can build and have conversations -- but remember, community cultivation not only requires additional time, but a different skill set.
c) If you're going to do it, do it well. Use tools, such as labels and tags, and *always* provide context as well as proper credits and links.
d) Consistent activity is nearly as important as showing some personality along with your knowledge. Your topic may be narrowly focused, but offer additional topics and information about you personally (not just professionally) so that people get a sense of you.
A research paper by Zhong, Shah, Sundaravadivelan and Sastry, King's college London, 2013
See the excellent notes from Robin Good below. Interesting to see more work emerging in this field.