[MUSIC PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
MICHAEL BHASKAR: Thank you
very much for coming and taking
the time out of your day to
come and listen to me talk.
Hopefully it'll be
worth your while.
Why curation?
Actually it's a word that used
to really, really annoy me,
and I used to think that people
who used the word curation
were just trying to
be really clever.
They were being a
bit pretentious.
They were just trying to
take a little bit of cool
and just apply it to
something, and at the time--
so my background is primarily
as a book publisher.
And I guess about seven
years ago, maybe even more,
there was this great
wave of digitization
and the e-book revolution that
hit the book publishing world.
And I would go to a
lot of the conferences,
mainly just because I thought it
would be an interesting day out
and more interesting than
staying in the office,
unlike here at Google,
where it's always
interesting to see our talks.
Anyway, so I'd go to
these conferences,
and constantly people would
be talking about curation.
And I thought, no, this
has got to be ridiculous.
And then the more
I started to go,
the more I started
to think, hang on,
maybe there is
something in this idea.
Maybe when people are
using the word curation,
there is actually something much
more interesting and powerful
going on.
And I got so interested in it,
I then wrote a book about it.
And I'm now forever going to
be associated with this word
that I once thought was
hopelessly pretentious.
But I'll just have
to live with that.
So anyway, before
getting to exactly why I
think it's so interesting
and important,
a bit of background
about this word itself.
So it all comes from
the Latin word curare,
which means to take care of.
That's sort of always,
I think, an element
that has remained in
curation, taking care of.
And actually, if you look at the
Roman Empire, you had curators,
and it was-- the curators
were the people who
built the infrastructure.
So the Colosseum,
the roads, they
were built by the
Roman curators.
They planned it all.
And then years
later in the church,
you had curates, who
were priests, vicars.
So in this idea of
a curator, you've
got the bureaucrat
and the priest
and this kind of idea of hidden
knowledge and hidden power.
But that's where it might
have just been left.
But then in the 18th
century we started
to get the first big museums.
This is the British Museum.
That building came later.
But the British Museum combined
these three great collections,
and for the first time you
had a national collection.
And then in Paris--
this is the Louvre--
you had pretty much
the same thing.
What happened in Paris was
there was the French Revolution,
that the old king had
probably Europe's biggest art
collection.
And after the revolution,
they said, hold on,
we're going to show his
collection to the public
and we're going to do
it in his old palace,
and that today is
the Louvre Museum.
And in both the British
Museum and the Louvre,
you had a new problem.
You had loads and
loads of stuff to show,
and that meant you
needed a new role.
You needed a curator to
come and put on exhibitions,
to kind of say to
people, this is actually
what you should see.
This is how the
exhibition works.
And over the 19th century you
got more and more museums.
They got bigger and bigger.
And this role of a curator
as the key person in museums
became something
really important.
And that takes us up
to the 20th century.
And then something
sort of interesting
happened in that curation
jumped over to the art world,
and specifically the
contemporary art world.
This figure here is Marcel
Duchamp, who you may or may not
know is famous for just putting
a urinal in an art gallery,
signing it with a fake
name, and then calling it
art, which at the time was
obviously pretty controversial,
and people are like,
what are you doing?
And anyway, by doing
that Duchamp kind of
started this revolution
of conceptual art.
And art over the course
of the 20th century
became something where
you needed somebody
to say it was art
for it to be art.
Who does that?
Well, a curator does that.
So suddenly you
have-- the curator
in the art world
becomes the key person.
And now what you get--
so this is Miami, where there's
the big Miami Art Basel,
and you get these big biennales
like this where the curators
jetton for a few days.
One art critic calls them
now the popes of art.
That's because it's the curators
who are the real power brokers.
It's not the artists.
It's not the gallerists.
It's not the collectors.
It's not the public viewer.
It's the curator who
ties it all together.
They're the one who
says, this is art.
They put together
these big exhibitions,
these blockbusters.
And anyway, that's a kind of
potted history of the word
curation and curator, and it
kind of-- at that level sort of
would have stayed
as little niche.
It's something
for the art world.
It's something for museums.
But of course, something
bumped it out of its niche,
and that was the internet.
And actually you can look at the
very early days of the internet
and you see-- actually if
you look at the Google Ngram
Viewer, the uses of
the word curation
really starts spiking
from the mid to late '90s,
and that's because actually
on a sort of GeoCities
style site-- do
you guys remember
GeoCities, the early
website, you know,
where you'd have sort of
nice design like this?
People were starting
to do things that
looked very much like curation.
And so what happened was that
this old kind of fusty concept
from the art world suddenly
became really mainstream,
and that was all down to
what was going on on the web.
Suddenly everyone was
becoming a curator,
and it became a really
kind of hot, hot topic
and then has just sort
of mushroomed from there.
But that doesn't really explain
what's important about it.
Here's what I think,
actually why did we
need curators on the internet?
Because a context of
abundance changes everything.
When you've got too
much, when you've
got problems of
having too much stuff,
that's when you need curation.
And on the internet, we
suddenly had too much
of basically everything.
But it's not just the internet.
This is a chart of economic
growth throughout history.
If you look at Western Europe
from the years 1000 to 1500,
there was less growth than in
years 2012 to 2016 in China.
Basically for most of history
we didn't have economic growth.
The world just stayed the same.
Then look at what's happened on
a global scale in the past 50
years.
Productivity improvements,
manufacturing improvements,
the whole gamut of
digital technology
and what it's enabled
people to unleash.
We actually have
problems of too much.
And I say that, and
people think, well, do we?
Of course, it's a kind
of privileged position
to be in, to have
problems of too much,
but it's still a reality
in those privileged parts
that we have too many
things coming at us.
For example, books.
I'm a publisher, and I
work in the book world.
In the English
language every year
we have a million
new books published.
And if you think about it,
there's already a lot of books
out there.
There's already a
lot of classics.
There's already a lot
of books building up
on your bedside table that
you really should read.
There's already a lot of
publishers and writers
like me just churning
out another book,
and yet a million new
ones come in every year.
That's not including all
the self-published material.
That's not including all the
other languages in the world.
And of course,
that's not including
the massive information
overload that we
experience everywhere else.
This is a statistic from the
American neuroscientist Daniel
Levitin, and he thinks
that if you kind of add up
all of the tweets we look at,
the adverts we see on our way
to work, the TV
that we watch, it's
basically equivalent to
175 newspapers just being
downloaded into our
brain every day.
I'm sure this is a problem
people think about here quite
a lot as well.
So as a kind of humble
book publisher, when people
have x number of
TV series to watch,
they've got social media,
how do you compete with that?
We don't have a problem
of a scarcity of new books
at the minute in the UK.
We have a problem that
there are far, far too
many books competing for
an ever-shrinking number
of readers.
And so to me that
kind of changes
the whole equation of just
producing more doesn't work.
Actually what's the
value in me publishing
the millionth and first
book against finding
you the exact perfect book
that you want to read next?
And that I think is why
curation is important.
And it also ties into choice.
So what all of this means,
what all of this expanding
production means is that
we all have more choices.
And actually if you look
at government policy,
it's all about expanding choice.
If you look at most businesses,
all about expanding choice.
As individuals, we like to
think the more choices we have,
the better.
And actually this is
wrong to some extent.
So there's a famous experiment
from Sheena Iyengar, who's
a Columbia University
psychologist in the States,
and what she did was
she wanted to see
whether this idea that
more choice is better
is actually true.
And the initial
experiment was with jam,
and she did this
around the Bay Area.
She went to supermarkets,
and on some days did
a presentation of 24
jams, and a lot of people
would come and look at the jam
and try it and think, oh, yes,
very nice.
But then almost no one
actually went on to buy jam.
On other days she put four
or five different jams
on the same table.
Slightly fewer people
went to look at the jam,
but a huge proportion of
them then went on to buy jam.
And this sort of
principle has now
been repeated many,
many, many times.
I tend to be quite
skeptical often
of these psychological
experiments that you do once.
You kind of come up with a grand
conclusion, and then move on.
This is actually pretty solid.
And what it comes down
to is that there's
a limit to the amount
of choice we want.
After about four or five
choices, we switch off.
We don't want to do anything.
Why?
Well, it all comes down to the
by now well-known principle
of loss aversion.
So the idea is that if you've
got, let's say, 15 choices,
you're quite likely
to potentially make
the wrong choice.
You're quite likely
to think, oh, I
could have chosen
something better even
on something as trivial as
jam, and because of that,
you don't want to choose.
So you just move on.
And this is a psychological
principle that we see again
and again and again.
We anticipate our own regret
at making the wrong choice,
and so don't choose.
We still like the agency of
feeling like we've chosen,
but we don't want too
many different choices.
And so I think
this is a principle
that in too many
areas in the world
we've totally lost sight of.
We'll just go into shops
and it's just filled
with tons of different choice.
That's not what we want.
We want to have things that
are very finely chosen.
We want to know that somebody
has put a lot of effort
in beforehand.
So then all of this,
I think, takes us
to what I see as
the core definition.
This is what curation
is really about.
When you hear people at
fancy conferences talking
about curating this, that,
and the other, what I think
they really are
trying to say is,
when you're selecting and
arranging to add value,
that's the meaning of curation.
I think it's
something that Google
does in numerous
different ways every day,
and that a huge
part of the business
is probably premised on is
this idea of adding value
through selecting and
arranging things for people.
And that is often all it
really amounts to, yet
that is where a huge part of
the economy today is going.
We're not in the stage of
just producing more and more.
Actually the value has shifted
to this kind of activity.
Anyway, so next time
you hear somebody talk
about curating something,
make sure this is really
what they mean, because
if they don't, then
I'm afraid to say they may
just be waffling and looking
pretentious.
So, yeah, I think we are
now building and seeing
the evolution of what I
would call broadly a curation
economy, an economy
that is built
to manage the various kind of
excesses that we've produced.
Let me give you a few examples.
This is an island
called Saadiyat Island
that they're building off
the coast of Abu Dhabi.
Now, Abu Dhabi has an
interesting situation
because right now it's a very
wealthy, oil-led economy,
but they're desperate,
like Dubai up the road,
to diversify.
And how are they
going to do that?
They're going to do it by
building a whole island that
is full of museums, and
they're buying art collections
in a very careful way
for these museums.
And it's almost
like they're trying
to shift their economy up
scale through this kind of very
careful curation of museums.
It's sort of like the old Bill
Bauer tactic of build a museum
but supercharged with
curation at its core.
A very different
example would be roughly
what you might think this is.
I don't know about
you, but in my family
when I was growing up, on a
Saturday night we'd always go
and we'd rent a video.
We'd go for some fish and
chips, and then we'd go home.
We would have rented a
video, and we'd all watch it.
And I'm sure you remember
going into Blockbuster
and it had big racks
of, yes, blockbusters.
And that was it pretty much.
It wasn't a huge selection.
In 1999, it had the
opportunity to buy a then
fledgling start-up
for $50 million.
It turned that down because it
thought that was outrageous.
That start-up, of
course, was Netflix.
And today Blockbuster
is no longer with us.
I think there are many
reasons why Netflix took over
or the Netflix model took over.
And there's a lot in
there about convenience,
but there was a different
model of selection
at work in Netflix.
In Blockbuster, you
just have a few things
that are just put everywhere,
but there's not really
any deep selection.
In Netflix you have all
these tailored choices.
So you never see everything,
but the overall catalog
is much larger.
So let's say you
like art house films.
You won't ever find
those in Blockbuster.
You will find them
in Netflix, and they
will have been taken
from a large catalog
and chosen for you.
So what I call that
is an evolution
from an industrial
model of selection
to a curated model of selection,
and in the curated model
you have much more
possible choices
but always whittled
down for you.
And I don't think Netflix--
I don't think any
of us would say
they've got it perfectly
right, but it's
an example of how that
business model has changed.
We don't just want the
same things for everyone.
And of course, in music--
we were just listening to some
music from a streaming service.
There are millions
and millions of songs.
All of us can go on
the internet right
now, sign up to
something, and have access
to basically all the
music in the world.
And I'm sure you, like me,
will have been there facing
all the music in the world
and really not having a clue
what to listen to.
And so now what we're
seeing is a real arms race
in the kind of
curation of this music,
and I'm sure Google Play
and others like Spotify--
huge amounts of
investment is being
made on building playlists
for people, creating
the kind of algorithmic
infrastructure
for recommending things
in very good ways,
but also hiring experts.
Spotify and Apple Music are
hiring deejays, as well as
putting a lot of technological
resource behind it.
Again, it's this idea of a
curated model of selection.
You have everything,
but then you
have to find ways of really
making it work for individuals.
This is the IFC Tower and
Shopping Mall in Hong Kong,
and this has pretty much the
highest rents of any shopping
mall on Earth because you have
wealthy Hong Kong people going,
mainland wealthy
Chinese, people from all
over Asia and Southeast Asia.
They're all going to this mall.
The upshot of that is
that every single luxury
brand in the world is just
desperate to get in there.
It's just a must-go-to
kind of place.
But the manager-- he
just says no to people,
and he says no, no,
you're not right.
Instead he's constantly
searching out
the new cutting-edge
brands, the people who don't
have any other stores in Asia.
He wants to find a unique
mix of different shops.
Now, if you go to a traditional
art curator and you say,
well, your job is similar
to a shopping mall manager,
I guarantee you'll get a really
bad response because I have
done this, and
there's nothing more
anathema to a
traditional curator
than being compared to
a shopping mall manager.
But what I say is there is a
familial resemblance there.
They're both about
carefully selecting things
and pulling them
together in a way that
is unique and valuable
and interesting.
There are plenty of
shopping malls in Hong
Kong with the same shops.
He wants to make sure this is
an absolutely unique experience,
and that's the value in it.
That's why this is such a
destination because it's
exhaustively selected.
And then talking
about retail, this--
I don't know if any of you
would have been to one of these.
This is in Italy.
Alas, we don't have
one here in the UK.
But people talk about this as
the supermarket of the future.
Think about Italian
cooking for a minute,
and it's incredibly complex in
that each area, each village
has its own recipes, its own
style of cooking, its own very
unique ingredients.
And what Italy does is it
really literally goes down
to the fields to choose the
very, very best possible
products and food from Italy.
It's a kind of super curated
version of a supermarket,
and you really go
in there and you
see the effort and the
care with which everything
is put together.
And really I think this is
kind of emblematic of what's
happening in the retail
world more widely,
and what we're seeing
just time and time again
is that the middle of retail
is just falling apart.
At the bottom end
you've got discounters
who are doing very
well, and they're not
really about selection.
They are about price,
and they're doing OK.
And then at the top end, you've
got really curated environments
like Italy that are finding
a good kind of grounding
for themselves by offering
something really special.
Every single thing in that shop
has been pored over and thought
about before it goes in there.
But the middle of retail,
that's where you're in trouble.
If you're not doing
either of those,
that's going to create a
really big problem for you.
And I think that-- that,
again, just sort of shows
this kind of curation economy
that we are moving towards.
I'm just checking the time.
So I guess it all for me comes
down to this general shift.
The curated model of selection
trumps the industrial model
of selection.
People don't just want these
kind of big categories that
really aren't chosen, that
really aren't thought about,
that aren't personalized.
And then in media terms,
it also comes down
to the kind of collapse of the
broadcast model in the sense
that I mentioned music
services, streaming services.
We have playlists, not albums.
And those playlists are
constructed very specifically
for us or for things
that we might like.
In media, again I think
there's a shift in the sense
that what we used to see
was journalists were just
going out and taking all
of the footage, but then--
and this is something I talk
about quite a lot in the book
is if you look at the
revolution in Egypt, in Cairo,
or you look at what
happened in Kiev and Ukraine
when they had their
revolution, suddenly you
had these kind of complex,
fast-moving environments,
and news crews couldn't
keep up with it.
And the role of
being a journalist
slightly shifted from
being the one who goes out
and gets the news
to being the one who
pieces together the news from
sources that are out there.
Everyone is there with their
phones just taking video.
What you actually
need is an expert
who can verify
what's happening, who
can piece together a narrative.
So again, it's just a
kind of subtle shift.
And actually if you think
about what an editor has
done at a newspaper,
they've always
been about putting
together different things.
And now that the curation
of our news environment
has become a really
kind of hot topic,
and this is something I wish I'd
talked more about in the book
actually.
Who decides what's
fake news, and how
is that going to be something
that we can do algorithmically
or machine learning,
or is it always
going to need a kind of
human component as well?
Whatever way you
cut it, the kind
of-- the controversies,
the value of news today
is as much about the
curation of what news just
exists in the world as in being
the one going and getting it.
The big distinction that
I make with all of this
is between explicit
and implicit curation.
So explicit curation, that is
people in East London with kind
of cool glasses and galleries,
kind of getting-- doing--
deejaying and so on.
That's explicit curation, and
that's the kind of curation
that I used to think was
just a bit everywhere.
But actually so many industries
are implicitly curated.
What is-- I think a lot
of what Google does.
No one sort of sits there
and says, oh, we're curators,
although I have to
say Eric Schmidt does
say that Google is a curator
of the internet in his book.
Actually what it is about is
about selecting and arranging
information for people.
And so even if it's
not called curation,
I think it very much
is part of that.
My wife is a buyer,
a retail buyer.
She'd never say,
oh, I'm a curator,
but actually what she
spends her days doing is
choosing things that are
going to go on the shelves.
It's very much
similar to curation.
And it's this implicit
curation that I
think is reordering so many
different industries, from TV
to books to retail to
internet businesses.
And that's what's
really exciting.
And when we talk about
curation, more often than not,
explicit is fine.
It's sort of art galleries.
It's when it's things
that implicitly curated,
that's when it's very powerful.
And around this
idea of selection,
I think it's worth saying
that there are a lot of things
that I call curation
effects, other things that
are part of curation, because
it's not just about selecting.
First and foremost, I think it's
about arranging things as well.
And I've got a
couple of examples
of the power of
arranging things,
like, we don't actually have
to necessarily do new things.
Sometimes just
simply rearranging
what we have can have
enormously generative effects.
So this building here
is building 20 at MIT.
It's now been knocked down and
replaced by the Stata Center.
It's probably the building
from the 20th century
where more innovation
happened than
in any other single building,
and this is its story.
So it was thrown
up in World War II
to basically pioneer
new kinds of radar.
It was an urgent
effort for the war.
They needed to do this.
Because it was built just for
the radar in World War II,
it was just always going
to be knocked down.
So it was just jerry-rigged
and it was dodgy.
After the war, a load of misfits
from across the MIT campus
moved in there, and
all the people--
it just didn't
really have a home.
And actually what they
started to do was--
there were no regulations.
They just started knocking
through all the walls,
knocking through the
ceilings, and that
meant it just became
totally kind of open plan.
And then all of these
strange collaborations
started happening, and people
would just get together
in totally different and
new ways in Building 20,
and then all of
these innovations
started spiraling out of it.
And a huge part of that was just
that everywhere else on campus
and at every other university
at the time departments
were just these serried rows of
offices, whereas in Building 20
they were all smashed together.
And now, of course,
we're completely
used to the idea of having big
atriums where everyone can meet
and open plan offices,
but at the time
it was totally revolutionary.
Really what I think it's about
is saying that they had all
of these amazing people
on campus anyway,
but just simply by throwing
the arrangement around,
you suddenly became
enormously generative.
And that's all it
took to spark all
of these different sort
of micro revolutions
in various disciplines.
And it's also how we
arrange and present things.
So this is a map that was
done in the mid-19th century
and it's been called by some
graphic designers the best
visualization in history.
It's really kind of the
first data visualization.
And what it shows is
Napoleon's Grand Army marching
to Moscow and then back.
So the marching to Moscow
is the kind of beige line,
and back is the black line,
and the thickness of the line
tells you the size of the Army.
So you really see
just in a second
how disastrous this
whole campaign was.
But what he did was
clever in that all of this
was based on tables of
data that people had found,
and obviously in France it
was a major national sort
of catastrophe.
Looking at just tables of
data and time sequences,
there were six
different metrics that
are actually displayed here.
No one really got it.
Simply by changing the
arrangement of it all
and putting it in
visual form, bam,
you suddenly realized
this is a disaster.
So again, that's about how
we arrange information.
So selecting, hugely
important, expert selections.
That's what curation is.
It's not just choosing
things willy-nilly.
It's about really
knowing what you're
on about, and then arranging
it in powerful new ways
to bring out the most.
This is all where
the value lies.
And then quite often
I'll spend a lot
of time talking
about the internet,
but I sort of feel like too much
of an idiot to come to Google
and lecture you guys
about the internet.
So I won't spend too
long talking about it.
But the way I think
about curation on the web
is that there's a
curation layer which
would fit into the
overall scheme of layers.
And at times it's
very thin, and that's
where you might have some--
a page has been
indexed and that's it.
It is kind of curated in a
sense, but in a very thin way.
And then you have portions
of the internet that
are very exhaustively curated.
If you've got a--
let's say a blues
fan who runs a blog
on a website about the blues
where he reviews one CD a week
and writes a huge essay
about that, that's
kind of thickly curated
portion of the web
because it has all of
the automated parts
and yet it also would have a
very kind of personal aspect
as well.
And I think a really big
theme of the past few years,
of course, has been about
the rise of machine learning
and how important that is
and algorithmic curation,
and obviously Google is--
of any organization in the
world is probably really
at the forefront of that.
And of course, I think that
is absolutely essential, given
the datasets we have
in almost every area,
you need algorithmic curation.
You need things that
can be automated.
But to me, that doesn't
imply that the human role
is completely redundant.
Actually for me they really
complement each other well.
And we see that-- let's go
back to the music example.
You go on Spotify, there'll be
huge numbers of algorithmically
curated playlists.
Then they'll also have
a deejay or an artist
who'll put together a playlist.
You're interested in both
actually because sometimes you
just want to know
what somebody thinks,
and there's a kind of
personal human story there.
Actually if we want to
do things as individuals,
we have to rely on the
machine learning element.
We can't just do
everything blind,
but sometimes our own input on
top of that is also important.
So for me the future of
curation on the internet
is these kind of intricate
blends of human and machine.
And what I actually
think is amazing
is how a lot of the
work that goes on here
is about enabling that and
providing tools for people
to do that and providing
the underpinning of it.
I guess the last point that I
would make is about how to me
it's the more thickly curated
areas of the internet that
are getting more
attraction, and I
think you look at something
like Twitter and for a long time
it was very uncurated
in the sense
that it was just a
fire hose of tweets.
And a big part of their strategy
over the past few years,
trying to become more curated.
That's why it lodged
moments and has
put in all kinds of
features to basically make
itself a more curated
space, with varying
degrees of success.
And again, like
news, all of this
is now such a hot button topic.
It's just not going to go away.
There are just too many
things at stake now in
how we curate our news
and our information
and who says what
about what and how.
And I think last year
that's what we saw.
Just sort of before wrapping up,
I think this whole sort of idea
really goes very deep, and
it really changes how we live
and how we experience the world.
So go back 50 years or
60, 70 years and people
had fairly set identities.
If you were an
accountant, you probably
wouldn't look like and do
the same things as a punk.
People had kind of a clear
life world that they lived in.
Now it's much more confused, and
a very concrete example of that
is holidays.
So in the '60s, '70s,
'80s, the package holiday
grew up as a huge
thing in tourism,
and tourism is a
massive industry.
One in 11 jobs
around the world is
based on the tourism industry.
And most of that was
in package holidays.
Today package holiday providers
are basically out of business.
Almost no one really wants to
go on package holidays anymore.
Instead people want very
bespoke experiences.
People want to go
to an ashram one day
and then go to a
festival the next day
and then maybe go to some
kind of unique extreme sports
event another day.
So what's really taken
over from the old travel
agents are these
holiday designers,
who essentially will kind
of curate your experiences.
And that's really how we
approach our own identities
in our own lives as well.
It's not the case that we
just do one set of things.
Actually we might go to
the football one day,
Glastonbury the next day, and
then the opera the next day.
We're able to mix and match
experiences, cuisines,
and so on.
We sort of have become curators
of our own lives in some sense,
and it always sounds a
bit ridiculous to say it,
and yet I think there is
a kind of element of truth
and that's how people tend
to approach what they do
and how they live.
Anyway, the real message,
I guess, of the book
is very simply this, that
in our world of excess,
where we have too much--
obviously on the
internet we just
have too much of literally
every single thing--
value shifts to where
things are more curated.
The more that is produced,
the more that is true.
And every single year more
and more is just produced.
So to me it's the
individuals and businesses
and business models that
can capture that that really
have a good future.
And it's worth saying on that
point about business models,
rarely is curation
itself a business model.
You don't go into, let's say,
a very high-end fashion store--
they don't make their
money through curation.
They make their money
through selling clothes.
But in order for them to
sell clothes effectively
in our contemporary environment,
curation is essential.
So it's kind of folded
into businesses,
it's folded into our world,
for better or for worse.
I think probably for the better,
but you can make up your mind.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER: If anyone has
questions, we have time.
I will open with one.
What areas-- what businesses do
you think are more ripe for--
I hate the word disruption.
It's overused, but curation?
MICHAEL BHASKAR: Well,
so I think we're already
seeing that the
whole world of retail
is being, as I said, totally
divergent into those who
are curated and those
who aren't, and those
who aren't are basically
disappearing slowly.
Anything that is
about producing stuff.
So if you are a company that
is making programs or a company
like mine that is
making books, if you
don't have curation at the
heart of what you're doing,
you're, I think, going
to be in trouble.
For me, it's producers
that are people
who really have the problem
these days, producers
and sellers.
Service companies
that can manage excess
are much better placed.
And so it's really just like a
huge, huge range of companies,
and it all comes down
to the idea of if you
look at almost any market
in the world today--
if you look at the
market for bottled water
or the market for books
or the market for pens,
it's not like there's
a shortage of them.
You can go and buy--
if you want to get
any-- if you want
to start a new business
producing pens,
you really won't
have any success
because it is a
saturated market.
There's really
not a lot of room.
So anything that's
about producing
is working in the context
of a saturated market,
and it's unlikely
that you can just
continue to kind of grind out
more and more and more, whereas
to me anything that can
make things easier--
if you were to do
something with pens,
you'd say, right,
actually what's
the best possible pen you
can buy for this price?
That's probably what you do.
SPEAKER: Do you
think that puts us
in a place where the
best curators will
become monopolies?
MICHAEL BHASKAR: I'm
often asked that.
Yes, and yes in the
sense that it's possible,
and there's certainly a lot
of tendency towards that.
No, in the sense that
there's no such thing
as an absolute best curation.
And this is where I think
you get into this question--
obviously in terms of automated,
it would tend towards being one
platform dominance, but that's--
actually we always
want something more.
We want something
idiosyncratic at the same time,
and that that's counter to that.
AUDIENCE: Is there a space
or a certain business model
or something that you think
should never be curated,
that's kind of left
sacred and separate
and shouldn't be-- for ethical
reasons or anything else?
MICHAEL BHASKAR: Actually
no, I can't think of one
off the top of my head.
Maybe you have an idea of
what you'd be thinking,
but to me good curation-- having
a kind of ethical component,
is part of what good
curation should be about.
So expertise is one thing I
think good curation needs.
It has to come from a deep level
of knowledge and understanding
and an ethical
component as well.
And I think-- actually
there's far more
risk of kind of ethical
problems without curation.
I think it's important--
it can be a really
important ethical filter.
And you just think
of, say, the internet
and let's say on Facebook
there were no kind of curation
mechanisms, it would just
be full of terrible things
all the time.
And actually a huge
amount of effort
goes into making sure
that spaces like that
aren't just full
of awful material.
So to me almost every
area of the world
can be made better and not
just in a superficial sense
but ethically if it has
careful good curation of it.
I'd love to know if
there is an area that you
think wouldn't benefit.
AUDIENCE: Dating.
MICHAEL BHASKAR: Well, you
know, but even that, of course--
the curation of dating has
become a huge industry,
and yeah, maybe, maybe not.
But I guess that's
something that yeah,
it's interesting to think about
that because to some extent
dating has always been
curated either by--
in some societies by
your parents and others
by your friends, now by Tinder.
And so it's probably
always been the case
that dating has been
curated to some extent.
But maybe it would be
better if it wasn't.
Potluck.
SPEAKER: There's a
question behind you.
AUDIENCE: My question is mostly
between balancing curation
with scalability.
So you kind of touched
that through the talk.
I do-- I am passionate about
what they call curation
and personalization
conversation,
but at the same time, I
know that for some business
it's not just feasible not to go
with the scalability approach.
So what do you think is--
what's the best way
to balance those two?
Is it artificial intelligence
or data analysis?
What kind of tools
and mechanisms
do you think that companies
can use to balance those two
approaches?
MICHAEL BHASKAR:
So, yeah, I mean,
the question about
scalability really comes
about building really good
automated systems, and yeah,
of course, then that's now about
really sophisticated AI machine
learning techniques.
And so you think
about music, just
to come back to
that, or books, I
interviewed the guy who wrote
the first recommendation
algorithm for Amazon,
and that actually
made some important advances
in machine learning at the time
and now is in many
ways the template
for a lot of subsequent
recommendation systems.
And that is about just having
a really deep understanding
of how that kind
of dataset works.
So Spotify bought a company
called the Echo Nest,
which was a spin-out from
MIT, and they developed
the technique of
audio fingerprinting,
which can look at songs
in kind of really good--
really incredible detail and
then abstract that information
and then use it to find
other similar songs.
And it's that kind of-- that
was a group of pure research
scientists working
over the course
of their PhDs and
their post-docs
to develop that software.
And then you use that
and then you give that
to a bunch of deejays.
So let's say you've got 30
million songs in the catalog.
You can use Echo Nest
software to build
you a list of 1,000
songs, and then you
get some deejays who are
just sort of totally immersed
in that world to
narrow that down
into a playlist of 20 songs.
That's a kind of scalable
solution and also
a personal solution,
and both sides of it
come out of having a very
deep understanding of what's
going on.
So for me on the
engineering side,
it is about just the same level
of expertise, more expertise
potentially, and using every
single tool in the armory.
So all-- any kind
of, yeah, evolution
of software or techniques
and so on should be deployed.
AUDIENCE: I was
just going to say,
is there a risk in
curation that you
are narrowing the field
of what people get to see?
I think the word echo chamber
was being thrown around
last year on Facebook,
you see the same things.
If you're curating to
the extent that you're
narrowing something,
you don't get
to see a multiple
number of views.
Is there a risk in that?
MICHAEL BHASKAR:
Yeah, definitely,
and that comes back to the
whole idea of the echo chamber
of the filter bubble.
And right now I'm experiencing
the filter bubble every day
when I go on my Twitter feed,
and if you look at my Twitter
feed, then there's
only one party
that's going to
win the election,
and it's not the conservatives.
And that may not be
an accurate reflection
of what's really going on.
And so that's a huge
risk, and this is to me
where it comes down to making
a bit of a finer distinction
between good and bad curation.
And this I think is actually
the biggest challenge for big
curators, major curators,
like Google, like Facebook,
big tech platforms is-- good
curation I think should be able
to break out of echo chambers
and filter bubbles and should
be able to--
at the same time as
reflecting our world
in terms of our groups
and our beliefs,
should also be able
to remind us sometimes
of the context in
which they work.
And good curation is the
antidote to filter bubbles,
yet they are driven themselves
by curation mechanisms.
But they are bad
ones, if you ask me.
So I think the real challenge
for the next few years
is to find ways to build good
curation into our systems
more than it currently is.
And I don't really know
how that's possible.
I'm sure there are a lot of
really, really smart people
thinking about it, but yeah.
And actually, if I
wrote the book again,
I'd almost just spend all of
it talking about that question
because I think we saw last year
so many times everyone was just
stuck sort of mercilessly in
their own well that was just
being reflected back on them.
You turn up on a news
home page and it's
just stories like stories that
you've clicked on in the past.
So it is curating.
But is that good?
Is it being done well?
Probably not.
SPEAKER: Any more questions?
One in the back.
AUDIENCE: It seems
like you see curation
as a combination of
saying you will like this
and you should like this.
You talk about the example
of the museum curator,
but then Netflix.
Do you see them as kind of
part of the same process,
or are there some
places where one is more
appropriate than the other?
MICHAEL BHASKAR: So I
definitely think that both are--
both are part of it.
I tend to think that, going back
to this idea of good curation,
for me that's where you're
saying you should like this.
And actually, if you think-- one
thing to think about in terms
of what curation is search,
a basic search functionality
is saying I want this, and
then search brings it for you.
Curation is when
you don't even know
what you want in the first place
and someone is like, ah, this.
So it's kind of
that distinction.
For me, it is both, and again,
you might say that on the--
that you will like is perhaps
the more automated side.
You should like is perhaps
the more subjective side.
So I think it's totally
got elements of both.
I think it's the should bit
that is more interesting, more
tricky, more messy,
and probably ultimately
will have more value add.
AUDIENCE: And just come
back to the question of good
versus bad curation, and is
the issue that there's nobody
to pay for the good curation?
So if we can take
the politics example,
I'm not sure who's going to
pay to give you a balanced book
curated view of what's
happening, whereas if I think
I'm going to win the election
and it's profitable for me
to pay the [INAUDIBLE] gets
the right people to vote,
then I pay for the bad curation.
MICHAEL BHASKAR: I think
that is probably exactly it.
And if you're a shop and
you curate really well,
you hope that means that gives
you a competitive advantage
that more people will
come into your shop,
and that is indeed
what we are seeing
across the retail sector.
As a publisher, we spend so
much time at my company thinking
about what books to
publish, and actually we're
a digital publisher.
We can publish thousands
of books every year,
but we really limit it to
very few because we want those
to be really
meaningful and to have
really good chances of success
and to catch an audience.
So both those
cases I think there
is a kind of clear confluence
of a business imperative
and a kind of
curation imperative.
But on the internet, I
don't see that at all.
And actually, what
you want is just
to kind of get and
retain traffic and keep
users interested.
And if that's just serving
people up their own opinions
again and again and again until
they believe that is a total
reflection of the world,
it's-- yeah, it's non-aligned.
Actually, I've even
wondered whether maybe there
needs to be some
kind of regulation
about how news is displayed.
On television news,
for example, you
can't just report with
total bias in this country.
There are very kind of
strict controls on what you
can say on the television news.
Maybe that's ridiculous,
but I certainly
would agree that the
payment mechanism
for good curation in some
contexts really isn't that.
Although if you look at--
Google has managed to find
some brilliant ways of actually
aligning good curation with
the business model of ads
that are themselves curated.
So maybe there is a model,
but I don't know what it is.
I'm sure somebody at Google
can and will figure it out,
but it's a tricky one.
SPEAKER: Great.
With that, please join
me in a round of applause
for Michael Bhaskar.
MICHAEL BHASKAR:
Thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
[APPLAUSE]
