“Rosenbaum has assembled big ideas, bigger egos, and more than enough information to catch you up, in a hurry”
Seth Godin,author, Linchpin

“Rosenbaum has the answer to information glut.”
Douglas Rushkoff,author, Program or Be Programmed

“Bursting with fresh insights, relevant case studies,expert interviews,and revealing anecdotes–all in the service of a compelling thesis from one of the true pioneers to media and technology”
Andrew Heyward,former President,CBS News; principal, MarketspaceNext

The subtitle of Rosenbaum’s book is “How to Win in a World Where Consumers Are Creators”. My partial review!

After consuming all 274 pages with interest rising,falling and peeking throughout the sixteen chapters according to how much I’ve actually been using the curation processes he describes or my intense curiosity about how, in the span of a few years,one  change led to the next one  in the world of broadcasting, film and radio right under my nose, yet more or less outside of my awareness.

For instance, everyone knows about the Morse Code and I remember that in the seventies my husband was studying the Code and got a licence.  He tried to interest me in getting one too and I played at it a few times, but my passion was Early Childhood Education and I was very busy with young children!

Rosenbaum relates in chapter 14. Facebooking the Future:

“If you can imagine somebody who’s nine years old today spending three-and-a-half years studying Morse code, and the rules and regulations of the amateur radio operator, that’s dedication,” says Pulver, who now chairs the fast-growing and influential 140 Conference for Twitter users.  And so, at 12 years old,he had the federal approval to broadcast to the world, to connect,to communicate.

“I grew up with a license to communicate and the ability to, and I started to connect to people randomly around the world but there was always this underlying theme of connecting people with people and to be able to just have a conversation,” Pulver says. “And this continued until … my early twenties and there were times,not every week,but there were times when I used to be on the radio 40 or 60 hours a week and go to school.”

“And that’s what my life was, it it was just part of who I was. And I think I learned a lot about maybe everything I ever needed to know about social media by the time I was 14 or 16 based on my own experiences as a ham operator just connecting and communicating with people.”

My comment about Pulver’s adolescent years is that he wasn’t spending enough time playing outside! Kids are still not spending enough time playing outside … who knows what changes some of them are destined to bring us?

Skipping some parts of Rosenbaum’s description of Pulver’s evolution from ham radio to Twitter via VoIP (Skype) and Vonage, he says: “So when Pulver saw Twitter,he knew there was a need for a community, a conference, and a brand name:the 140 Conference (since 140 characters is the maximum you can use in a Twitter message).”

He further explains:“In amateur radio lingo it’s about being a repeater. A repeater is a piece of equipment that takes someone’s voice and retransmits it so that it can be heard by other people outside of the person’s local listening audience. In many ways,a retweet is a human repeater.”

This section of Chapter 14 ends with Rosenbaum saying:

“So,to recap,ham radio led to Voice over IP,which led to Twitter. In each case,communication innovation was driven by the power of human connections.

As the technology became less complex and more widely distributed,the number of repeaters continued to grow. Which is why the power of the NOW Web–the real-time Web–is so critically important.

We’ve arrived at a moment where large sections of a community are connected and transmitting almost all the time.”

As an older person being more or less dragged into using social media  in the course of publishing information, I have often been impatient or even resentful of some of its aspects! But more and more, because of events across our world I’ve been aware of how people have been  helped thanks to Facebook and Twitter.

After reading CURATION NATION I’m thankful to the visionairies that brought it all about! It’s not all about crass commercialism, is it?

More of my thoughts on this fascinating look into our media world soon! Get the book at your favorite book store or click here: