I l l u s t r a t i o n S e r i e s . 5 . 2 0 1 7
I’ve found the word ‘content’ pervading my vocabulary more and more and I dislike it. Content, in my contemporary usage just means ‘thought stuff’. It turns thinking, criticism, art, emotions and general human expression into a kind of intellectual slurry. Turn on the faucet and content flows out for us to passively consume. What does this content contain? Not much a lot of the time. It’s the thought equivalent of junk food, empty mental calories. It’s also a way to be ambiguous about what it even is. Is it a critique? Are we teaching something? Are we expressing ourselves? It’s unclear. Human thought should not be a commodity. It’s anti-individual and demeaning. When we package our work as content it is the mental equivalent of elevator muzak. If we tune in and out in the middle of it, it doesn’t matter at all. We didn’t miss anything. It filled a silence in our day and then disappeared into the void.
Because so much content is delivered through algorithmically mediated platforms, content is shaped by the needs of robots. Robots devour clicks and human-attention-minutes and are never full. When we create our work as part of a content pipeline, the sole motivation is not that it makes our soul sing or we had a burning desire to shout this from the rooftops. Instead, we needed a packet of content to feed to the robots and in turn they will package, deliver and distribute it to our increasingly robot like audiences. What does it mean to have an audience who’s attention span and appetite for content is so shaped by click seeking attention maximizing algorithms? Will we ever see a Mona Lisa of content? Content in it’s purest form is a baroque dance between human creators, distribution robots and the audiences they control. We can see the results when it is divorced from shame or any sense of animating sanity when we explore the dark parts of the purely, atavistically algorithmic and randomly generated hells of kids YouTube. Don’t read this article before bedtime if you’re a parent.
As people who make things, I think we need a more critical perspective toward content and the role being thrust upon as ‘content creators’. We also need to consider the fact that the number one job among all the 8 year olds I know is to be a ‘YouTuber’. Not to be a ‘streamer’ or ‘documentary video creator’ or ‘video comedian’ but to be a job named after an algorithmic platform, to be a person most directly at the mercy of the algorithms, to eat or not eat at their whims. I am not wholly pessimistic about this. The internet is big and weird and new things will happen, and the fact that a new generation sees video making as a two way conversation, rather than slavishly watching cartoons between commercials like my generation is a good thing. Kids want to be creators, and I love that. Hopefully we can give them some choices of what to create though besides ‘content’.
