There are so many voices out there.

The ubiquity of cloud computing, publishing software, and mobile devices have made it incredibly easy to make ourselves heard — and that’s great thing, whether it’s pro-democracy tweets from Chile or cat videos on YouTube. Creative collaboration, political dissent, freedom of speech, and organizational innovation have all benefited from a massive uptick in opinions and knowledge sharing. While the number of worldwide creators has skyrocketed through unique platforms — Behance, Etsy, Kickstarter, this also seems to have birthed a dark side.

We’ve also seen the rise of a type of uber-commentator, a specific strain of creative hater. Setting up hate sites or leaving head-scratching blog comments, these users pop up in all sorts of dark corners of the Net, their subject matter and opinions running the gamut. But they share a common bond in a posture of criticism, because now that it’s so easy to thoughtlessly comment, expound or “like” something, our previous barriers of usefulness or thoughtfulness are evaporating.

Haters might always be haters, because it’s much easier to offer opinions, critique, and play the role of Monday Morning Quarterback than it is to roll up your sleeves and actually create something. Building, designing, thoughtful creation — these take a lot of energy, thought, and sweat. It’s clear that not everyone has that within them. This makes it all the more important that we support the builders and creators, respect what they do, and provide constructive criticism.

But we also need to realize that it’s much easier to criticize than it is to actually roll up your sleeves and put money where your mouth is. Knowing how a thing is made – whether it’s a design, a product, or an idea – is worlds apart from actually making the thing yourself.

While our world needs critics, it needs creation even more. So, in no particular order, here are six reasons why you should get busy in the work of creation, instead of  just heckling from the sidelines:

Makers tend to be problem-solvers, instead of problem-finders.
Being in the creative trenches often leads to a mindset of forward-movement, of being able to tackle obstacles. Critics can showcase every flaw, but are often found missing when it’s time to fix those cracks. It’s one thing to identify the issues, it’s another thing to connect the dots towards a solution.

To create is to stand naked before the world.
Creators have to show what they can do, and once they’ve put something out there, there’s nowhere to hide. This might also be called the put-up-or-shut-up syndrome — meaning that creators tend to have more self-respect and the respect of their communities, because they can back up their own critiques with a body of work, a set of products, or a track record of building and success.

Creators understand how hard the making is, and judge accordingly.
When we swap places with a creator, it’s easier to get a sense of what it takes to put something of value out into the world. We were much harder on the creators of design inspiration books until we began to design our own. Clients have told us that designing identities seems easier from the outside. Knowing first-hand the challenges of any given initiative allows us to sympathize and see other people’s projects in context, and I daresay, let’s us all give them more latitude than we would otherwise.

Creating changes you.
This seems to be a basic, fundamental truth, and those who find this out tend to grow and be stretched personally and professionally because of it. Creating things leaves few people unchanged.

Talking is easy. Doing is hard.
Is there any other way to put it?

Creators practice finishing.
Much like a marathon is more difficult than a 10K run, actually completing that screenplay, novel, or series of poster designs takes patience, intestinal fortitude, and a force of will that is difficult to teach. The side of the road is littered with dozens of false starts, abandoned projects, and optimistic beginnings.

Finally, we want to make it very clear that these thoughts aren’t a tirade against the general idea of criticism – criticism is at the heart of great design and art, enabling us to push forward into uncharted territories of better and better results. The best creators hungrily and discerningly accept criticism as the rocket fuel of greatness. But the tipping point of criticism occurs when it hinders or replaces true creation. Criticism has a symbiotic relationship with creation – the first can’t exist without the second, and we’d be wise to remember that hierarchy.

It used to be that in the old media landscape, the only way to ascend to the top of the pyramid was to be a creator. Inventor. Writer. Painter. Photographer. You had to create something to add value. But with the tools of creation and production becoming cheaper, simpler and more accessible, we’re flooded with the fruits of easy creation: Etsy stores, 3D printing, GarageBand songs, YouTube films, print-on-demand novels, and an ocean of blogs via online publishing software. Tens of thousands of people are now creators, and they’re churning out all kinds of stuff.

Sure, some of it is exceptional, and a few amazing talents have crawled out of these New Creation communities, but the vast majority of these works will probably never rise above the level of Internet meme or flash in the pan. However, this sea change has had an unusual side effect: this gigantic swell of content has given rise to a new, necessary role: The Content Curator. Because we are inundated with so much content and information at this present moment, we need help sifting through everything our culture has to offer. The biggest challenge of our era seems to be navigating this flood of info and creation to find the valuable bits amidst the constant waves. Why, of course, have technologies like DVR and MP3 downloads inserted themselves so quickly into our daily lives? Their popularity is most likely a side-effect of our crucial need to filter, to curate – whether it’s screening out commercials or avoiding album-filler tracks. Modern life almost requires us to winnow all that we process, in order to make sense of the bombardment of data, and carve out our own niches.

And this brings us to the soon-to-be indispensable service role of the 21st century: the content curator. No longer just the province of museum collections or advanced knowledge topics, the role of curation is quickly becoming nearly as important as the content itself. In order to assist in our cultural navigation, many are now seeking out like-minded others to help sort and process this unending flow. It might be a celebrity Twitter stream, a friend’s book reading list or an industry-specific blog. The job descriptions are potentially as varied as the subject matters. And as this content flow increases, so does the popularity of the curators. Oprah has built a media empire on the strength of her role as a gatekeeper, giving out recommendations to an audience hungry for the O-perspective. There are many others.

But can these curators be successful in the long term, without ever creating anything themselves? What kind of value (perceived or otherwise) do they bring? Will this fire hose of content, ripe for the cultivating, dry up some day? Or will content curation become a distributed role, the task for every woman, man and child? Here are a handful of reasons why content curators will continue to thrive, helping us sort and digest far into the future:

Curators help cultivate a shared sensibility.
Connections are made person-to-person, and these bonds come on the heels of some shared interests or insights. Whether it’s a writer whose recommendations you value because you love her writing, or a friend with parallel movie taste, we are all looking for this sort of personal overlap. A sense of common bond, of understanding (real or imagined) drives us to connect ourselves to the thoughts and ideas of others. There’s community in like-mindedness, and when you find someone whose playlists overlap yours, or whose reading list is similar, a bond is formed. These bonds might seem weak, but in an increasingly-fragmented culture, these are important ways we connect and build community.

Curation helps us tell our own exclusion narratives.
It’s much easier to define ourselves by what we are not. “I’m not into that” or “That’s not my type of crowd”. Once we’ve found those we consider to be in our tribe (whether it’s Mad Men viewers or classic gaming aficionados), it’s much easier to appreciate, enjoy and respect their thoughts, patterns and beliefs. They’ve been pre-selected in our head for deeper consideration, which helps us tell our own stories to the world. We see ourselves in the choices of other people, which in turn, colors our perception of the universe around us.

Quantity.
As mentioned above, there is a vast sea of things to choose from – video games, artwork, bands to listen to, articles to read. Our collective rate of creation is far outstripping our ability to consume, so the people and tools that help filter and curate only the things we deem worthy will continue to be popular, important, influential. Simply, our brains either need to be rewired to better filter all that we take in, or we need tools to do the work for us. The tide of info shows no signs of slowing.

Only “the best” will do.
Whether it’s true or not, this is for those of us who Barry Schwartz calls “maximizers”. Many of us want to have the absolute best, the most specific, or the “perfect for me”, whether it’s in Google News, RSS feeds, specific blog selections, Amazon recommendations, or otherwise. There is an underlying unwillingness, in a sea of plenty, to settle for less than the optimum. In a world where we have more and more choices, the desire for the best becomes greater, and the cost for settling grows higher.