What is “content”? It’s been a question that the press and wider media have been asking in ever more shrill voices since the early 2000s. What we used to call television, radio, and newspapers / magazines are now all in a chum bucket of writhing, still-living, fish heads marked “content”. It diminishes the value of the product and the skill of those who produce it. The feeling as a writer is that you do not create work but merely pass it, a slurry of content hitting the cold enamel of the “content ecosystem” to be sliced, diced and repriced at will.
You might be reading this “content” on the by-products of a dead tree or blasted straight into your brain via Twitter or Facebook. I have to write for both. I cannot assume you will be reading this in the contemplative mode of someone with a magazine on their lap; if I allow my most prurient thoughts to take over, there’s every chance you stumbled on this piece while scrolling social media on the loo. My work count is up and your pants are down.
We are two generations into a world of people who document every part of their lives
The drive to produce “content” – snackable, shareable, remixable, forgettable, and not – is powerful. On TikTok, people filming solo put a microphone on their arm in the shot and act like a guest on a podcast. Some even cut in footage of well-known hosts such as Spotify’s big-money signing of a few years ago, the ubiquitous Joe Rogan, or the British equivalent: the frustrating, earnest, Diary of a CEO host, Steven Bartlett. Actual credibility is not needed, just the impression of it.
The desire to document everything – which went into hyperdrive when the MySpace and Friendster era began and then sped up with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok – means that truth is even less relevant. The sheen of something believable is enough and any real pain is just grist to the content schedule. It’s why people who relentlessly filmed “Day in the Life” videos at their high-profile tech jobs continued to post them on the days their redundancies came. One wrote for Insider that she “was trying to shoot a day-in-the-life TikTok and accidentally filmed [herself] getting fired”.
Meanwhile, the Musk era on Twitter has led to the most viral “content” on that site being meta-commentary about the social network’s death. On Tumblr, a site once beloved of teenagers and amateur pornographers alike, the meme-rich, fandom-heavy world is also full of self-referential posts about the social network itself and how people use it.
We are two generations into a world of people who document every part of their lives online. There are children now who can and will be able to review the social media reaction to their own births, an embarrassment that trumps any grandparent dragging out a photo album. I am as guilty as anyone of writing about my life and turning events in it into “content”. I’m a reporter and Twitter has often been a public notepad.
In a capitalist world, everything can be capitalised: that’s just a reality. But we don’t have to allow everything to be content. Deaths, births, marriages, renewals, divorces and despairs can be lightened or enhanced by sharing them with others, but we don’t have to play to the largest possible audience. Our posts are stories to our friends and family; as content they can be memed and mocked by strangers.
The grim truth of this “content” world is that we all have to have some kind of strategy for it, even if that is to reject all social media and every entreaty to share pictures or details online. But there are upsides; with “content” comes communities and opportunities to connect with people who you might never have met in an earlier age of linear communications and limited travel (both real and virtual). If we put nothing of ourselves out there, we are safe in one way but exposed in another: vulnerable to disconnection, and to living a life that doesn’t fully engage with the world we live in.
“Content” does not have to be positive or accurate to drive attention; in fact, some of the evilest lies of corporations and major media organisations have been grotesque, but they still become content and fodder for memes. In a “content” culture, opting out takes a particular kind of bravery and also comes with a large set of downsides and trade-offs. To be young but have no online presence is hard. Your friends talk without you; they interact in a town square in which you cannot be seen.
The “content” era is not going to abate any time soon; the thirst for “content” – at the expense of investigative journalism, comedies that are well produced, and dramas that hit you in the heart and head simultaneously – is unstoppable. The “content” brain of executives is why so many Netflix commissions don’t go past season two; the “content” brain is what leads many British people to believe that they’ll never be affected by climate change or arrested without charge. All those police dramas and documentaries have won the “content” battle so far, but look to protest groups and you’ll see that’s changing.
Am I content about “content”? No. Far from it. But I live in the world as it is and not as I hope it will be. (While producing “content” that agitates for a change.)
Mic Wright is a journalist based in London. He writes about technology, culture and politics
