A meta-narrative is created each time we interpret reality. The way in which we traverse space, see and evaluate things, choose information, establish our ethics and values, communicate with others and understand what they say, and use all the stimuli coming from the world to continuously mutate and transform ourselves is a narrative that takes the form of a continuous process of remix and mash-up.

This form of emergent, recombinant narrative finds direct application with digital technologies and networks, establishing an interesting parallel running between the the ways in which we think and the ways in which we act on the internet.

From more than one point of view it can be said that the internet is modeled onto the processes which we use when thinking, communicating and producing/exchanging knowledge. Starting from a different approach, the relationship can also be inverted by stating that we are progressively modeling our mental models onto the ones enabled and enacted by the internet.

[macme title='Manuel Castells' id='37']

This bi-directional and emerging relationship between our minds and the internet is creating transformations to multiple domains of human life and activity. As described in Manuel Castells‘s “The Rise of the Network Society”, the wide availability and accessibility of information and interconnection technologies has produced multiple forms of this mutation. The architecture of information on the Internet, its hypertextuality and non-linearity, the concepts of ubiquity and simultaneity, are shaping our ideas of what can be called knowledge, information, attention, relation.

The emergence of the widely accessible mechanisms and interaction metaphors dedicated to sharing, clustering and disseminating information widely known as Web 2.0, has enabled new forms of learning, knowledge, relation and interpretation models.

The transformation of technologies and their dissemination in physical space under forms that are almost invisible, beyond the ideas of screens and common interfaces, and the connection to the concepts of meaning and of semantics, bringing forth the concepts of Web 3.0 and of Ubiquitous Computing, are completely transforming our perception and usage patterns of the world.

Knowledge can be produced, exchanged and interrelated by using tools which can enable us to select, classify, store and communicate the information which constitutes our own perception of the world, and this can be shared, interconnected and remixed with other sources of information and vision, emulating and integrating with the social processes which are at the base of our presence in the world.

Personal Curation Tools explicitly go in this direction. These tools allow users to collect information and to classify it in multiple ways, expressing a sort of externalized mind which is used to manage and express our vision on the digital world.

Personal Curation Tools allow users to collect and organize information in ways which make sense to them. It includes software applications with functionalities such as:

• note taking
• link and multimedia archival and classification
• snippets archival and classification
• information clustering and classification
• information interconnection and relation