"Just as its origin in the art world, curation online is premised on the idea that a curator with a point of view culls content around a theme that he or she deems of cultural significance."

"we’ll have to invent a new model of “archiving” if we are really to preserve the full dimension, context, and cultural significance of these information nodes."

"I started a Twitter feed almost like the film extras on a DVD, hoping existing readers would find additional treats there. But what ended up happening was essentially the reverse: The Twitter feed, perhaps because it allowed for more breadth and cross-disciplinary curiosity, took on a life of its own. It soon became the number-one discovery driver for new readers."

"The point is that new tools in general, and Twitter in particular, greatly challenge the binary dichotomy of attention as something that is either given or taken away, distracted. Instead, these tools allow us to direct attention to destinations where it can be sustained with more concentration and immersion."

"While “old media” fought against the scarcity of information, new media are fighting the overabundance of information."

"It does, however, allow people to discover the most relevant, interesting, and impactful information, in any medium, and then relate it to other information in a networked ecosystem of meaning that helps us better understand the world and each other."

"Perhaps more importantly than anything else, we seem to forget that Twitter is a constantly changing platform defined by its evolving social utility."

"Twitter photo-sharing service, have been introduced by Twitter users themselves because the communication on this ever-changing platform demanded them."

"it is a form of creative labor in and of itself. And yet our current normative models for crediting this kind of labor are completely inadequate, if they exist at all."

"Finding a way to acknowledge content curation and information discovery (or, better, the new term we invent for these fluffy placeholders) as a form of creative labor, and to codify this acknowledgement, is the next frontier in how we think about “intellectual property” in the information age."

"I firmly believe that the ethos at its core — a drive to find the interesting, meaningful, and relevant amidst the vast maze of overabundant information, creating a framework for what matters in the world and why — is an increasingly valuable form of creative and intellectual labor, a form of authorship that warrants thought."

"A good curator is thinking not just about acquisition and selection, but also contextualizing.” ~ Joanne McNeil"

"People really respond to other people’s enthusiasm about things.” ~ Edith Zimmerman"

"Ideas are the most valuable thing. Good ones make all the difference; bad ones can hold us back, maybe even destroy us. If we can focus on finding the right ones, helping distill them, and transfer them as quickly as possible, we can get more of that. Curation is that means to the end.” ~ Peter Hopkins"

"This may be why data, no matter their numerical grandeur, hold poor sway over the human soul; why metaphor, with its tangible tapestry of abstraction and concreteness, can move the mountain of the mind more powerfully than any human implement."

"I’ve felt for a long time that the great political questions of our time — about violent prejudice, global climate change, venal greed, fear of the Other — could be addressed in illuminating ways by considering models in the natural world."

"Some consider it unsophisticated to explore the nonhuman world for clues to solving human dilemmas, and wisdom’s oldest tool, metaphor, is often regarded with wariness, or even suspicion, in my culture."

"The goal in these conversations, from a traditional point of view, is to put off for a good while arriving at any conclusion, to continue to follow, instead, several avenues of approach until a door no one had initially seen suddenly opens."

"My own culture — I don’t mean to be overly critical here — tends to assume that while such conversations should remain respectful, the outcome must conform to what my culture considers “reality.”"

"Reality, of course, is a tapestry of subjectivities and tacit consensuses, trapped often in the frames of reference laid down by any given life and always in the limitations of human consciousness, with its myriad blind spots for strata of reality we are physiologically and psychologically unequipped to perceive."

"If we abide by the common definition of philosophy as the love of wisdom, and if Montaigne was right — he was — that philosophy is the art of learning to die, then living wisely is the art of learning how you will wish to have lived."

"We will lose everything we love, including our lives — so we might as well love without fear, for to fear a certainty is wasted energy that syphons life of aliveness."

"In their fear of death, those living fear life itself, a life that is doomed to die… The mode in which life knows and perceives itself is worry. Thus the object of fear comes to be fear itself. Even if we should assume that there is nothing to fear, that death is no evil, the fact of fear (that all living things shun death) remains."

"Fearlessness is what love seeks. Love as craving is determined by its goal, and this goal is freedom from fear… Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now."

"VIKTOR FRANKL: HAVE MORE MUSIC AND NATURE IN YOUR LIFE"

"A century after Nietzsche proclaimed with his nihilistic grandiosity that “without music life would be a mistake” and a century after Walt Whitman observed with his life-affirming soulfulness that music is the profoundest expression of nature,"

"It is not only through our actions that we can give life meaning — insofar as we can answer life’s specific questions responsibly — we can fulfill the demands of existence not only as active agents but also as loving human beings:"

"Do we not know the feeling that overtakes us when we are in the presence of a particular person and, roughly translates as, The fact that this person exists in the world at all, this alone makes this world, and a life in it, meaningful."

"One of the saddest tendencies in our present culture is an indignant intolerance for the basic humanity of being human."

"People of the past are harshly judged by the standards of the present (which their own difficult lives helped establish), and people of the present are harshly judged by impossible (and hypocritical, in the full context of any judger’s life) standards of uniform perfection across all regions of private and public existence."

"The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people."

"Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful."

"Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it."

"“it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within,” James Baldwin"

"I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time."

"Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility."

"We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope."

"RACHEL CARSON: EMBRACE THE LONELINESS OF CREATIVE WORK"

"Writing is a lonely occupation at best. Of course there are stimulating and even happy associations with friends and colleagues, but during the actual work of creation the writer cuts himself off from all others and confronts his subject alone. He* moves into a realm where he has never been before — perhaps where no one has ever been. It is a lonely place, even a little frightening."

"A writer’s occupation is one of the loneliest in the world, even if the loneliness is only an inner solitude and isolation, for that he must have at times if he is to be truly creative. And so I believe only the person who knows and is not afraid of loneliness should aspire to be a writer. But there are also rewards that are rich and peculiarly satisfying."

"In most cases of people actually talking to one another, human communication cannot be reduced to information. The message not only involves, it is, a relationship between speaker and hearer. The medium in which the message is embedded is immensely complex, infinitely more than a code: it is a language, a function of a society, a culture, in which the language, the speaker, and the hearer are all embedded."

"Creation is an act. Action takes energy."

"Sound is dynamic. Speech is dynamic — it is action. To act is to take power, to have power, to be powerful. Mutual communication between speakers and listeners is a powerful act. The power of each speaker is amplified, augmented, by the entrainment of the listeners."

"This is why utterance is magic. Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things."

"What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come."

"But the greatest peril of misplaced worry, Seneca cautions, is that in constantly bracing for an imagined catastrophe"

"The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live."

"BERTRAND RUSSELL: BROADEN YOUR LIFE AS IT GROWS SHORTER"

"In a short meditation titled “How to Grow Old,” later included in his altogether superb Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (public library), Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the dissolution of the personal ego into something larger."

"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls."

"Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

"What we see is never raw reality, pure as spacetime — what we see is our interpretation of reality, filtered through the lens of our experience and our conditioned worldview."

"Always, the way we look at things shapes what we see; often, the lens we mistake for a magnifying glass turns out to be a warped mirror — we see others not as they are but as we are."

"It is a service to reality to see with greater charity of interpretation. It is a service to other human beings to look at them, confused and self-concerned as they may be, with the eyes of love and to resist for as long as possible letting the cataract of judgment occlude our view."

"To place the wish to understand above the wish to be right — and to see, with Thich Nhat Hanh, that “understanding is love’s other name” — that is the greatest gift we can give one another."

"I use it as an information discovery tool."

"Neither transactional direction of this discovery economy is conversation in the sense that speech is — fluid, sequential, responsive."

"One major problem with that argument is link rot — the fact that a staggering amount of links go dead over time in a kind of reverse Moore’s law."

"We lose about a quarter of all working links every seven years, which deems any commentary around dead links devoid of context."

"On Twitter, however, the link — especially when it is literally a linked URL — is very much extricable, so we’ll have to invent a new model of “archiving” if we are really to preserve the full dimension, context, and cultural significance of these information nodes."

"Socrates famously lamented that writing will make us stupid because it’ll eliminate the need to remember things — and intellectual prowess, he believed, hinged on one’s ability to draw into a conversation myriad references, citations, facts, and allusions."

"implicit to every technology is an “intellectual ethic” that shapes how we discover, acquire, and debate information and knowledge."

"Instead, these tools allow us to direct attention to destinations where it can be sustained with more concentration and immersion."

"Many of Twitter’s features, from @-replies to the recently launched Twitter photo-sharing service, have been introduced by Twitter users themselves because the communication on this ever-changing platform demanded them."

"This constant shaping and reshaping of the medium and the types of messages it carries makes it short-sighted to attempt any sort of permanent classification."

"Today, the two biggest question marks about Twitter’s evolution in my subjective experience are correction and attribution."

"The fact that there’s no present way of correcting an erroneous tweet remains an issue, especially as Twitter becomes more and more a tool of serious journalism, disaster reporting, human rights activism, and other issues of very palpable real-life impact."

"If information discovery plays such a central role in how we make sense of the world in this new media landscape, then it is a form of creative labor in and of itself. And yet our current normative models for crediting this kind of labor are completely inadequate, if they exist at all."

"But we don’t have the same ethical principles for sources of discovery."

"IP, as a term, is inherently flawed and anachronistic in its focus on ownership (“property”) in an age of sharing and open access, certainly."

"Ultimately, I see Twitter neither as a medium of broadcast, the way text is, nor as one of conversation, the way speech is, but rather as a medium of conversational direction and a discovery platform for the text and conversations that matter."