Curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade | Cory Doctorow

Bespoke computing experiences promise a pipe dream of safety and beauty – but the real delight lies in making your own choices The launch of the iPad and the general success of mobile device app stores has created a buzzword frenzy for "curated" computing – computing experiences where software and wallpaper and attendant foofaraw for your device are hand-picked for your pleasure. In theory, this creates an aesthetically uniform, and above all safe and easy, computing environment, as the curators see to it that only the very prettiest, easiest-to-use and most virus-free apps show up in the store. I'm all for it. After all, I've spent the past 10 years co-curating Boing Boing , a place where my business-partners and I pick the websites that interest us the most and assemble them into a kind of deep, wide, searchable catalogue of things that you should know, do, and marvel at. We've recently launched a store, the Boing Boing Bazaar, consisting of the most interesting inventions, clothing, gadgets, decor, and assorted gubbins that our readers have created, as picked by us. My Twitter account mostly consists of retweets from other twitterers – my collection of the best tweets I've seen today. I am a born curator, and have spent my life amassing collections and showing them off. But there's something important to note about all these curatorial roles I enjoy: none of them are coercive. No one forces you to read Boing Boing, and if you do, there's nothing that prevents you from reading another weblog (or a couple hundred other weblogs). Order as many gizmos as you'd like from the Boing Boing Bazaar, we'll never tell you that you can't fill your knick-knack shelves from anyone else's curated wunderkammer . Follow me on Twitter if it pleases you, and feel free to follow anyone else you find interesting. The beauty of noncoercive curation is that there are so many reasons we value things, it's really impossible to imagine that any one place will serve as a one-stop shop for our needs. Two categories in particular won't ever be fulfilled by a curator: first, the personal. No curator is likely to post pictures of my family, videos of my daughter, notes from my wife, stories I wrote in my adolescence that my mum's recovered from a carton in the basement. My own mediascape includes lots of this stuff, and it is every bit as compelling and fulfilling as the slickest, most artistic works that show up in the professional streams.

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Curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade | Cory Doctorow