Curation: Collecting Media in the Digital Age, Recommendations, and Music Playlists
How we collect is what makes us fans
Hello Rmrk*st readers! We hope you’re excited that the summer is upon us, bringing with it the World Cup, Love Island US and UK, blockbuster movies, and outdoor concert season. It’s a great time to be a fan!
As we settle into July and look forward to what’s in store, let’s take a look back at what you might have missed in June. Our theme was Imagination, and we wanted to take a look at how creative impulses inform our imaginations when we produce or consume content. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a creative person per se (which, we heavily disagree with), your imagination works overtime when you enjoy any content. Whether it’s reading a book and imagining the story with your mind’s eye, or filling in blanks when you don’t have all the information from the narrative, our imaginations help to create a story.
We examined how the Mandela Effect impacts our perceptions of what is real, and how our brains sometimes create a mental mirage. In a deep dive on bootleg fandom merch, we examined what moves fans to make the kind of paraphernalia they actually want to wear, own, and display when it comes to their specific fandom communities. And, we took a look at why we love thrillers and mysteries so much–and how our imaginations do a lot of the mental work.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll be dedicating at least a few days of your summer to decluttering. In my case, that means taking a hard look at my bookshelves and media collections. My home library is important to me, and displays who I think I am as a fan, but sometimes the realities of having enough space take over. So, we hone our collections, purging some items and finding permanent homes for the content we really love. This July, that archival spirit is how we’ll be approaching pieces here. Our theme is Curation.
If you’re someone who loves to collect things, especially related to your fandom, you’ll appreciate what we’ve got in store. Collectors decide on what their compilations will include, and all collectors are different. They might curate according to completion (like needing to keep, forever, all the original box sets of Gilmore Girls DVDs in the wake of it leaving Netflix as of this month, the end of an era). Or they might curate according to season, or medium, like all the Harry Potter books versus the DVDs of the films. Whatever your collector style, the way you bring your own fandom into it is through personal curation. So this month, we’ll get into what it means to collect physical media in the digital age, dig into recommendation lists and how they help us build community with other fans, and examine how assembling music playlists is a curator’s dream.
So take a look at our table of contents below! And be prepared for some surprises. Make sure to follow John Cabrera on Instagram for special announcements, and follow us on Instagram too. And finally, find more information at our website and on our Discord, where we post regular updates about the Remarkist ecosystem as a whole!
Collecting Media in the Digital Age
By Diana Franco
Recommendation Lists and Community Building
By: Diana Franco
Playlist: The Ultimate Curation of Music
By: Steph
