Curatorship is arguably the big new job of our times: it is the task of reevaluating, filtering, digesting, and connecting together. In an age saturated with new artifacts and information, it is perhaps the curator, the connection maker, who is the new storyteller, the meta-author.

- Brian Eno, in his book review of Writing Space in ARTFORUM, November 1991

Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we are awash in information without even a broom to help us get rid of it. Information comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume, at high speeds, severed from import and meaning. And there is no loom to weave it all into fabric. No transcendent narratives to provide us with moral guidance, social purpose, intellectual economy. No stories to tell us what we need to know, and what we do not need to know.

...We will have to stop consulting our engineers, our computer gurus, and our corporate visionaries, who, though they claim to speak for the future, are strangely occupied in solving a 19th-century problem that has already been solved. Instead, we will need to consult our poets, playwrights, artists, humorists, theologians, and philosophers, who alone are capable of creating or restoring those metaphors and stories that give point to our labors, give meaning to our history, elucidate the present, and give direction to our future. They are our weavers, and I have no doubt that there are men and women among us who have the looms to weave us a pattern for our lives. The prospect of their doing so is, for me, the gleam of light on the horizon.

- Neil Postman, responding to the questions "Where is the darkness? Where is the light?" at the Utne Reader's public salon, reported in Utne Reader, July-August, 1995

There is no central keeper of knowledge in a network, only curators of particular views.

- Kevin Kelley, Out Of Control , A William Patrick Book, 1994

At a time when professionals and symbolic analysts move every day a little closer to a kind of permanent "conditon red" of information overload, those who can design and manage systems that control and self-select the flow of information that's really needed will become highly valued members of the corporate staff and the new gurus of the information age.

- Thomas Valovic, Corporate Networks: The Strategic Use of Telecommunications, Artec House, 1992

"All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints - limitations on space, time, and materials."

- Marvin Minsky, quoted in Blasts from the Past, 10 Years Ago in Byte, Byte magazine, April 1995

The size of the pile of information in which we must dig is growing exponentially, and its quality is very likely diminishing. That is why the information flood is dangerous. We must work harder at acquiring meta-information, that is, information about information. Just having some idea about what is "out there" there is a real challenge. Having a marketable uniqueness associated with our own array of layered knowledge will be one of our goals in the information age.

- Robert Lucky Silicon Dreams: Information, Man, and Machine, "A Thomas Dunne book" 1989

What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be "boiled down" and "simplified"? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information. Often the less complex and less subtle the line, the more ambiguous and less interesting is the reading. Stripping the detail out of data is a style based on personal preference and fashion, considerations utterly indifferent to substantive comment.

- Edward R. Tufte, quoted by Kevin Kelly in his book review of Envisioning Information, 1990, in the Whole Earth Review No. 70, Spring 1994

Negative information is that which, immediately upon acquiring, causes the recipient to know less than he did before.

NR - Last updated: June 22nd, 1995