The Most Important Skill For The Information Age

Living in an emerging digital society has its advantages, but the information age also brings the ever increasing concern of cognitive overload. Along with the psychological affects of social media, just the sheer amount of information available and millions of apps and digital services (one click away) lobbying for our attention is concerning enough.

Battling through the algorithms and the stream of recommendations, we search for a topic of interest on YouTube and hours later, find ourselves down a rabbit hole on a completely different topic. After all, the intent of the social media algorithm is not to feed us the content we need, it is to keep our attention.

With the rapid increase of technology, and careers consistently changing, self-directed learning is essential, and one of the most important skills to have in today’s workforce is the ability to learn. However, how one learns is equally important. It’s not enough to simply find info to learn, you have to find the right info that takes you to the next level of development.

In today’s digital age, the best skill to have is not just the ability to learn, but the ability to curate — the skill of curation.

Curation is the ability to signal out all the noise and hone in on what’s important. It is the act of finding, grouping, organizing or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue.

Content curators will collect, organize, and summarize items of a specific topic, and make it accessible to the average reader. Content curators are storytellers, guiding the reader through engaging paths. While there are certainly professional content curators that are masters at this craft, I believe it is the one skill we should all desire to become better at doing.

After all, You may follow certain people on Twitter that you think are great curators of content, but even making the decision on who to follow is an act of curation. Your follower list is your ‘curation’ list.

Curation is a skill we need to develop. Rohit Bhargava’s list of 5 models of content curation is helpful:

It is likely that in the near future, AI assistants will do a better job at curating content for us. The AI would need to know what we understand about a specific topic and where to take us next. The AI might even help us challenge our own biases, as we challenge those of the AI. But until then, and even likely then, how we curate will be our guided path.

We don’t need algorithms that target our attention, we need to learn to navigate through proper paths of curation.

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