"Arrange cooking" as a metaphor for todays information society

If you grew up in an information society where the production of information was the bottleneck, you have a rather different set of values than those which apply on the Internet today. I have been trying hard to figure out what controls todays information society, and how to create value - and monetize that value.
If you read pundit blogs by people trying to understand this, they often talk about "curating" content. A curator is a person who manages exhibitions at museums, art galleries and similar, which means they try to put works of art together in a way which highlights the aspects they want to stress (for instance, the link between Gaugin and van Gogh as seen through their art). While this is important, it is a bad metaphor for the way the information society works today.
The reason is simple: There is no scarcity of information. While there is only one Sunflowers, and while it can be reproduced thousands of times, it does not change the actual work. A copy of Sunflowers is still a copy of that very painting. Of course, there are artists that are creative and draw mustaches and beards on the sunflower prints, but generally the creative step to actually creating a new work of art based on an old one is quite high. Just drawing beards and mustaches may not be enough, you have to draw faces whose expressions tell a story. That actually requires a real artist, not just someone with a paintbrush. And in that case, unless they want to make a point, they will probably choose to draw their own pictures.
But the way information on the net, at least text, is created today is very different from the way a painting, or even a video, is created. When you see a video you can quickly determine if it is a copy; but even if you take the same script and replace the actors, you create a new work.
Text on the other hand is easy to copy, but it is also easy to determine that a copy has been done. Search engines such as Copyscape search for the patterns in the text, the combinations of letters into words and phrases, and makes it possible to determine if someone has copied a text straight off. But it is not foolproof, and it does not understand any of the underlying meaning. A copy where you replace about 50 % of the words and switch sentences around will appear as new (I am not sure about the percentage, it may be even lower). You can do it with most word processing programs, but to make sense, someone has to look at the text and edit it. The issue is of course copyright. If you just copy someone elses texts it may not matter so much, but here the idea is to make money from them. And if you do, you can get sued by the original copyright owner; that breaks the business model pretty quickly. Easier to rewrite things.
There are people for hire in India, Pakistan, the Philippines and other similar places, where the cost of living is low and the level of English is high, who will do it for you. Other languages are to some extent protected from this - there are very few Swedish speakers in India, for instance. But in English, you can get someone to rewrite a piece of content for a dollar, which is a decent wage for the job in India. If you have a blog which has a few thousand visitors a day, it is quite possible that you can make it turn around economically based on the advertisement views.
The crux is that if they are to write completely original content, it takes too much research - and talent - for a dollar to be sufficient. Rewriting a 500-word text takes about 30 to 45 minutes. Sites like eHow have systemized this, and they used to have a system where they looked at questions to search engines (like Ask), and then asked writers to create content based on the questions. Even paying 15 dollars per piece, it was possible for them to almost break even, until Google changed their algorithm to de-prioritize content farms like eHow. Suddenly, the ad clicking public were directed to sites which actually created original content.
EHow had only US writers, you actually had to supply them with a US tax number and address. Others are not as finicky, and that makes it possible to make more of a business with less. The rewriters are still going strong.
And this is where the curating metaphor breaks down. There is an infinite amount of content. It is like all these small people are standing on the shoulders of the few giants who create original content and create new content - sufficiently different to pass through the Copyscape eye of the needle, but hardly works of art. "Curating" means just editing and collecting from the infinite stream of content (and directing it as well, usually).
This is where it is like "arrange cooking". In Japanese it is アレンジ　料理, which translates to arrange cooking. I saw it on a TV show about a potato chip maker, and was flabberghasted at first. These two girls took potato sticks, soaked them in milk, put cheese on top, ran it through the microwave, and then had a new dish. There were several other examples. The idea had never struck me, but of course potato chips are actually cheaper than potatoes some times of the year - so they are an ingredient in themselves. Then, I noticed that a bag of Korean potato crisps I had bought had recipes printed on it.
And that was when I realized that those girls were actually doing the same thing as a webmaster who collects processed versions of the original content into something which is original in itself. The webmaster is creating a new dish out of processed potatoes.
That is what the web has become. It was not what I thought it would be when I read all the websites in the world in 1994. But it means my experiment in publishing online becomes more interesting - I will create the edited versions of the content myself. No issues with copyright then....