The Age of Content

The last 5 years I've seen a sharp uptick in people from different professions call themselves "content creators", or "content developers", myself included! I've also seen companies look for people who create content specifically for different depts at their org: marketing, product, etc. However, I've never once seen a concise answer for the question:

What is content?

So...what exactly is content?

Since any definition of a word has to make the rounds and get consensus, I can only possibly give my understanding of what is meant by "content" in the sense of a product.

To me, content is any digital output of labor.

Wikipedia calls content

the information and experiences that are directed toward an audience

where the medium used to produce the content contributes to how the content is experienced.

This is a more complete definition, but I think reframing content in terms of a product vs. a communication method helps contextualize the environment in which content is produced.

Social media as a platform for content

Social media is interesting, because it's a place that contains, in large amounts, both primary content (in the sense that content can originate there) as well as derivative content. The latter happens all the time: people on Twitter share screenshots of a post from Tumblr, people on Instagram post Tweets to their stories, etc.

Part of this is intentional: it's a way for creators to build a following across platforms and brand themselves across the social media landscape, and they withold some of their content from the audience depending on platform.

But the other part happens organically because of virality: a post makes it big somewhere, becomes iconic, and then gets shared somewhere else as a meme. A good example of this is the Tumblr post about loving locking doors:

Content limitations

This is probably the most widely discussed topic regarding social media and content proliferation more generally because of it's misuse and abuse. Governments around the world are trying to figure out how best to moderate content to prevent misinformation that can effect elections and other aspects of public life.

I've been reading Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet by David Kaye, and he makes a lot of good points with the main takeaway being that the pressure on companies like Facebook, Twitter, etc. to better moderate content has led to an outsourcing of public roles to private actors, which amounts to an expansion of corporate power instead of constraints on it.

Particularly when governments say "hey, you need to adopt national laws to content including those about privacy protection and curbing hate speech", they are abdicating judicial responsibilities to (American) corporations.

It's a really interesting discussion, and I've been trying to draw connections between it and how technology transforms space.

My main thought is that if space is an active constitutive element in the production of social relations, communal formations, etc. then social media platforms are social actors and their influence in public life is inevitable...which makes me wonder why, after over a decade, governments have still not come up with good solutions to misinformation and propoganda that get spread thru these platforms (as a feature, btw!)

I've talked about this really briefly on Twitter (lol) but I try not to post big opinions there because I don't want to enable the mechanics that I criticize with those platforms:

I mean, sometimes I do anyway, because I am a person with internal contradictions, but I really do feel quite strongly about living up to what I desire.

And what I desire, is a more just internet that is free of emotional bombardment and attention-sucking mechanics.