Curation as a communicative act: conceptualizing personal curation within curated flows on social media

Abstract Individuals increasingly express thoughts by clicking “likes,” following groups, and leaving comments. These communicative acts not only express individual preferences but also convey signals to important curators such as algorithms, advertisers, friends, and journalists, which jointly shape social media feeds. In a word, people consume what they curate. Despite its significance, current theories lack clarity on the concept explication of personal curation. This paper addresses this gap by examining the types, motivations, and impacts of personal curation on users’ information intake. Importantly, as individuals engage in curation not from a single reason or convey a single message, this study theorizes personal curation into five dimensions based on platform features (expansiveness), content (heterogeneity), subjects (news attentiveness), sources (belongingness), and the number of platforms involved (multiplatform connectedness). This theorization provides a conceptual framework for understanding how seemingly mundane social media behaviors convey communicative meaning and exert significant influence in daily life.