In that it likens the Internet to a museum, the term “content curation” is both apt and inappropriate. The Internet — a seemingly infinite repository of knowledge — is, in a sense, a virtual museum. At the same time, however, actual museums are devoted to real things, the material traces of significant human activity and natural phenomena. Museums store objects that are rare and often irreplaceable, precious, fragile, tangible, and inherently beautiful. The word “curator” comes from the Latin curare and means “to care for,” implying an intimate relationship to things, not to ephemeral bits of information.

You sometimes hear people say that instantaneous online access to images and information has rendered museums obsolete. But quite the opposite seems to be the case. The more we find ourselves engulfed in a relentless 24/7 media world, the more we treasure the uniqueness and authenticity of meaningful things. And the more we value the peaceful space apart of real museums. This year the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City broke a 50-year attendance record; museums have never been more popular or relevant.

“Curating” online resources constitutes a genuine twenty–first century challenge. But curating our real museums, archives, and historic sites is perhaps more important now than it has ever been.

If the Internet is the “information superhighway,” then digitization is how we travel on that cyber super–slab. Information now flows faster and to vastly more and more distant points. News about Greek debt liabilities or government policy is communicated instantaneously to investors and traders around the world. How quickly new developments are reflected in market values is potentially good news.

However, as recent events suggest, increased speed can increase volatility as prices react — and maybe overreact — to every little bit of information. Volatility increases uncertainty, which makes it difficult for households, businesses, and governments to plan ahead. A related danger is that the amount of data flowing is now so vast that few are able to sort out what’s valid. People tend to grab onto those bits of evidence that agree with their basic views. The result can be a fractionalized array of views, perhaps none of which is correct.

Networks are one response. Network members can rely on one another to provide information and to judge its accuracy. Questions such as what brand to buy, who to work for, or who to hire will be addressed increasingly via networks, one feature of which is that the more people who use a network the more important that network becomes. This positive feedback creates interesting problems for competition. The digital revolution brings these challenges to the fore.

NOT SO MUCH THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT IDENTITY; MORE THE WAY WE STUDY IT.

Social psychologists look at how situations involving real or imagined “other people” influence our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.  Keith Maddox likes this. Take racial bias and prejudice as an example. The illusions of interpersonal distance and anonymity make people more willing to say and do things online that they might not in person. So social psychologists have used Facebook, Twitter, OkCupid, even Second Life to explore intergroup bias in interpersonal attraction, political attitudes, and consumer behavior.

Because people have become more comfortable with modes of interaction such as virtual reality and chat rooms (the same people who might have asked themselves why I was “SHOUTING” at the start of my answer), we can use these technologies to study behavior. In lab settings, we can manipulate variables such as race, gender, age, and other aspects of physical appearance to see how these factors influence our judgments of others.

See, we’re never going to make progress in these areas unless we can get people to be more open and honest about their feelings. Social media allows us to tap into those attitudes more than ever before. We can even learn about how prejudice rears its ugly head among people who don’t believe themselves to be prejudiced. The more we know when, how, and why race matters in the lab, the more we can do to reduce the expression of prejudice in both the online and real worlds. #fingerscrossed

To begin, the human brain was never meant to read. Not text, not papyrus, not computer screens. Our ability to read represents our brain’s capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way. Every time we learn a new skill – whether playing the cello or using Facebook – that is what we are doing.

After we become literate, we literally “think differently.” Different writing systems produce different reading brains. The characteristics of the medium also influence what parts of the reading circuit are employed and to what extent. The Web invites the reader to move from one stimulus to the next in rapid fashion. The book invites more focused attention.

My research group and I are most concerned with how the acquisition of new capacities changes human development. In the case of reading, we know that the “expert reading brain” includes a beautifully complex circuit that integrates simpler decoding skills with what I call “deep reading” processes: critical analysis, analogical thought, inference, and insight. Will the time-consuming development of the deep reading processes be diminished or atrophied in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed and multitasking? Will an immersion in digitally dominated forms of reading change the capacity of young readers to form and develop their deep reading processes? No one at this moment possesses the evidence to answer these questions, but our children’s development and our species’ intellectual evolution require that we confront them.

I built my scholarly career working in freezing cold archives in Portugal with ridiculous bureaucratic rules about using only so many documents in a specific time period and taking notes using only a pencil. I then moved to Mozambique where I worked in the stinking hot, filthy attic of the municipal “native affairs” building, taking care not to leave bundles of documents under broken roof tiles, and thus subject to seasonal rainfall. Day after day for months, I worked nine hours each day in the attic reading an uncatalogued cache of paper.

Worse than the archive conditions is that fact that for the first several decades of my research life, I took notes by hand on the 5” x 8” bond paper note cards that were the era’s standard mode of research organization. I still have to work from those thousands of note cards. Sometimes I look at them and despair that I was clearly born at the WRONG time. However, I was lucky to have the right kind of children at the right time. Our youngest made sure we were a card-carrying Apple family by the time he was eight. The hardware and software are perfectly magical, but the point is that they support amazing possibilities for research and access — from GPS/GIS to digital archives, online journals, and audio-video clips. My students and I can even search microfilm digitally. Now if some super-geek could find a way to transfer my 5” x 8” notes into digital files, life would be perfect.