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Fuck the word “content.” Fuck it. I fucking hate that word, it’s a piece of shit word that has no value. As words go, it fucking sucks. What is it good for? Nothing.
Exactly.
It’s good for nothing, and it describes nothing. It provides no value to what it describes, in fact it only de-values the things it is used to describe. “Content” is such a nothing word and I despise that it has become the de-facto descriptor for anything and everything.
A TV show is “content.” A movie is “content.” A TikTok video is “content.” Everything that’s ever been put on the internet is “content.” It’s a word that really just means “stuff,” which isn’t the word you would use to describe half the things that the word “content” gets slapped in front of.
It’s the wrong word, but it’s the word that has somehow instilled itself in the modern media landscape in a way that we’re not getting rid of it anytime soon. Surely a blog post by a maligned writer won’t do the trick.
More and more I feel like this is a sentiment I’m alone in carrying, but I just cannot stand that word.
I can understand its convenience. It’s a lot faster to just call everything on a streaming platform or a digital update for a video game “content.” But the implications of everything being ‘content’ is not worth the convenience, and is one of the biggest issues impacting the ethos of entertainment and creative industries today.
Fuck “Content”
Consider your word choice
Okay, maybe that all read as a little brash. I just can’t help but try and plead with you all, people of the internet, to be considerate of just one thing: your word choice.
I couch my true feelings by asking for consideration because I know I can’t stop you from doing whatever you want. You can keep using the word “content” to describe everything you read, watch, listen to and play the rest of your life.
You’ll always be technically right, that all those works you read, watched, listened to, and played were just a bunch of “stuff.” But technically right is the worst kind of right. It’s barely right. And it’s the annoying kind of right, like you’re Randall Weems rubbing your hands together, jotting down how to get others in trouble just for you to have the pleasure of being the worst kind of right.
Off the couch now, this is one of those scenarios were “technically right” is “actually just wrong.” Think of a podcast, arguably one of the most popular forms of “content” in today’s broad media and entertainment landscape. I listen to podcasts pretty much every day, since they’re usually my companion in the morning when I walk my dog.
I’m not listening to “content” though. I’m listening to a podcast. What’s a podcast? It’s a radio show in episodic form, flavoured by its hosts and guests with its own tone. They’re talk shows that can be enjoyed through video or audio form, and they can be about anything, and done by pretty much anyone with a computer and a microphone, as proven by the fact that everyone with those things has their own podcast.
You can be reductive and call the recordings “stuff” if you want, and that’ll qualify it under the definition of “content.” But it’s a talk show, one that’s edited and organized in a specific way, that’s curated and directed by someone, with the objective to create a show that audiences will want to listen to and/or watch. There’s value in that, and there’s value in calling it by its real name. And of course, podcasts aren’t just talk shows.
They’re sometimes a series of narrative experiences told as audio documentaries, or they’re full-blown audio plays delivered episodically through podcast streaming services. There’s writing, acting, foley, directing, editing, and so much work that goes into the creation of these shows.
And it’s also all just stuff. But that doesn’t make it any less than what it was, so why should it be called by a name that means less than what it is?
Convenience?
It’s your life
I think it’s easy to understand why podcasts, writing, art, film, theatre, TV, video games, books, magazines, etc - shouldn’t be called content. Just consider how the example flowed for podcasting and apply it to your preferred piece of content (sarcasm).
What I find more convoluted and more troubling is the notion that what we post on social media platforms is “content.” I don’t necessarily mean tweeting a fart joke, but I do mean things like vlogging yourself every day.
That’s you. You’re putting yourself out there, and you’re doing it through a video, a written post that tries to communicate something to those within your social media circle, or just something you felt you wanted to speak. These things all come from you, and they are writings, expressions, videos, photos, things that you have shaped that could have only come from you.
I think about this a lot, with the people I’ll commonly see pop up in my Instagram feed. I don’t always follow an account right away after sharing a video, unless they have one seriously good bit that is funny to me every time and/or are sharing things I genuinely want to keep up with. But people who have dancing accounts, cooking accounts, specifically any lifestyle accounts - these people are sharing things that would be part of their life anyways.
Especially the more niche the account gets. Going deep into your hobbyist accounts reveals a bunch of nerds who are already into the things they’re posting about, that would already have a presence in their lives if they didn’t post about it on social media.
They like it! It’s what makes them who they are! The things we like and our personalities and how we express them is not just “content” !
I know there’s more layers to how people feel about it when their accounts grow and become monetized and part of how they make a living, but that’s not the only way posts on social media exist. They also exist as expressions of who you are, perhaps not as a whole but who you are and were at the moment of posting that video or photo or caption or anything else.
That’s the part of all this that I think gets overlooked. It’s assumed in a sense, because the business of becoming an influencer is heavily based on personality - it’s who you are, or perhaps the character you’re playing - that people are connecting with, that make them want to hear what you have to say/post about anything.
Everyone’s got their own flavour, and we all understand that, but I find the humanity of that is often lost or not touched on.
Everything flows into the ocean
Despite all my rantings, there’s a single point I cannot escape, that I’ve already touched on. It’s all “content.” Everything we make is all just “stuff,” and as a friend reminded me recently, there’s something humbling in that. It helps you move forward in the creative process. Without that reminder, you could be paralyzed.
Creators can’t afford to be precious with their work. No one will actually make it big on their first try at something. Chappell Roan, to take a recent example, wrote Pink Pony Club years before it was a smash-hit, and it went through different iterations. What we see as the final product is never what it looked like at the start, there are always parts of what you’re creating that will have to change.
You have to be ready to fail. You can’t let a negative response to your work send you spiraling. There’s a difference between creators that can take the negativity in stride, use it to go back to the drawing board and those that simply can’t take the criticism, and die on the hill that they’ve made the right creative choices.
And yet, I will still die on the hill that we should call something what it is. It might all be “content,” but it’s also all more than that. It’s a film, a book, an article, a comedy skit, a a TV show, a song, a painting, a sculpture. It’s not just “content,” a word I will continue to despise so long as it’s default function continues to be the de-valuing of everything it gets slapped in front of.