Mastodawn

Peter Merholz Sep 30, 2023

@clive This video may be of interest. A deep dive into "content." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAtbFwzZp6Y&ab_channel=Patrick(H)Willems

Everything Is Content Now

YouTube

@peterme

I’ll check it out — thanks!

Boris Sep 30, 2023

@clive @peterme 100% second this! Patrick put a ton of work into it.

@clive I totally disagree! I think we need to change the contexts where we use the word “content” and yes, specificity when possible is better. But it’s a one hundred percent useful word in the proper context (usually when contrasting with the equally capacious “form” or “design”) and often the only word that will do!

I think if we need one word, call it “culture” — that’s what it is!

Like I said at the end of the piece, though, the best thing is to be specific about the specific forms of culture we’re talking about

Now you’ve got me pondering an essay about whether “design” is used too loosely as well 😂

argonaut Sep 30, 2023

@clive @tim try UX, and how it hides all value under an acronym that is not even precise (user experience is a labor of many more specialities than design). That should make for a similarly enlightening essay.

Nick Appleyard Sep 30, 2023

@clive @tim

Oh “design” is a huge, flabby, inchoate word which has the extraordinary property of having quite precisely defined sub-categories (called “design” and “design”) which are entirely separate from each other.
It’s a brilliant word for constructive ambiguity!

See also “sustainability”.

I am Jack's Lost 404 Sep 30, 2023

@nick_appleyard @clive @tim

Lol I once met a pompous person with a ridiculous definitely fake name at a gathering fancier than I'm normally used to. He asked what I do, I asked what he did, he said "I sell design".

I was like oh cool art and stuff?

Then he motioned at the furniture and said, "No... Design..." and all but rolled his eyes at me.

Like literally wouldn't even use the word 'furniture' himself to explain to a peasant like me, lest any potential clients hear and question his markups...

@float13 @nick_appleyard @tim

lololol

@nick_appleyard @tim

Yep yep

Those are both terms that in danger of being drained of any serious meaning

@clive no! Content isn’t culture! Content is the stuff inside the boxes! The interplay of form and content is what all art, design, architecture, creation of any kind is all about!

Sure! But in talking about the interplay of form and content — when we’re talking about design, say — we’re interested somewhat equally in both things

The way “content” is used quite often these days is, to my mind, rather specifically to swish its value away away; to situate the value of <waves hands at human expression> mostly/purely in the networks in which the content resides

One cannot use the word “culture” in *all* cases where we currently use “content”; but we can certainly use it in quite a *lot* of them

We can call the moving image the moving image; online essays, online essays; comments, comments

@clive but you’re confusing a part for the whole. Most of what gets published is not essays or movies or comments, or even text, images, audio, and video. (I can imagine someone objecting “I don’t make VIDEOS, I make CINEMA.”)

It’s user manuals, recipes, bank statements, hospital bills, games and puzzles, personal messages of various kinds and genres, FAQs, pricing information, technical details, a shocking amount of metadata, and I could go on and on

@clive Designers and publishers and content strategists and information architects and UX writers need a word to describe all of that stuff, and that word is CONTENT

I dunno — I can see the utility of the word in a few of those limited cases; perhaps with UX designers, though even they can be led astray by divorcing the structure of what they’re building from the *specifics* of what human expression will inhabit that structure

Content strategy strikes me as a symptom of the problem I’m describing — a corporate denuding of human expression from being human expression

But more importantly, the real problem has become that …

… the word “content” - to stand in for poems, speeches, family reunion photos, etc — has escaped the bounds of these comparatively-numerically-narrow technical fields, and become a way that the people authoring the stuff describe their own work

It is a database-eye’s view of the moving image, of a short utterance online, of a joke, etc

@clive so @karenmcgrane tells me she often compares the word “content” with the word “food.” There are lots of other words for “food.” If it’s at a fancy restaurant, you might call it cuisine. In a store, you might call it groceries. There are fruits and drinks and meats, entrees and side dishes, French and Indian food. But nothing is demeaned and so much is gained by calling them all “food.”

@tim @karenmcgrane

Hmmmm interesting!

Let me think about that one. I’m not immediately persuaded the parallel is a good one, but I need to think more about why

(Apart from the obvious one, which is that there are fewer corporate forces intentionally using the word “food” to reduce the specific value of “Italian food”, the way that streaming execs use “content” to (rather specifically, I think) devalue the nature of scriptwriting, acting, production, etc)

argonaut Sep 30, 2023

@clive @tim I try to call it “information”, to make emphasis on its intrinsic value, and the fact that it’s in it where the objective of design is, as an offering and not as fodder.

@argonaut @tim

Ah, that's interesting! I can see that

@clive so we don’t call it a “table of contents,” we call it a “table of culture”?

@clive if you begged me to come up with an even broader and vaguer term than content, I could not have thought up anything less specific than “culture”

Culture is everything: not just media. It’s your practices, your beliefs, your food, your language, your rituals, your ways of interacting with each other. Culture is the air we breathe, the water we swim in, the ground we stand on. It does not only do what you want that word to do.

Sure, I take your point

One could avoid saying “culture” if it seems too thusly broad

But so is calling a film, a song, a book, a tweet, or a TV show “content”

Unless we’re specifically discussing the network in which these pieces of human expression reside — ie the ground and the figure, the database and the data within, in which case “content” *can* be a useful term — “content” is maddeningly vague

@clive @tim So literally no one asked but I have strong opinions about this, which I’ll sum up as: “Content” is the correct term and in fact the *only* useful one for describing many structures of design and delivery. (I think you two agree there.)

The problem is that as software ate the world, venal people got control of the money, heard that usage, and learned that they could go a long way by treating all art, editorial, everything, as a fungible space-filler.

@clive @tim The second problem was that instead of crushing that second group of people, whole swathes of the culture industry jumped in with them because of the vulnerabilities and opportunities produced by…software eating the world. So I get why people are mad as hell about “content,” but it’s an artifact of the real trouble, which I think comes down to “massive sociotechnical shifts suck.”

@clive @tim (Also I think I’ve given myself the brain fever this week so this may be less lucid than I think it is, and I will let you get back to the argument.)

@kissane @clive I thank you for this nuanced take! Also, it’s after 1am for me and Clive, so I think you will have to let us go to bed and argue more in the morning

@tim @kissane

lol yes!!

grantimatter Sep 30, 2023

@kissane @clive @tim

In the magazine world, I also have noticed that the rise of "content" has correlated with a lack of differentiation between pretty different skillsets. Nowadays, I have freelance clients who expect me to be both a photographer and photo editor as well as a reporter, copy editor, and writer.

I think what I'm saying is that the fungibility went way beyond software and into the corporate side of publishing.

@grantimatter @clive @tim Oh yeah, it went everywhere. The film industry getting moneyballed into hell is just the biggest part outside of tech, I think.

@grantimatter @kissane @tim

Aha, that's a really insightful point!

Part of the corporate flattening of different forms of expression into one flavor of goo ...

... is that they stopped wanting to pay for expertise in each domain

Philip Nelson Sep 30, 2023

@kissane @clive @tim

How to say product without saying product?

@kissane @tim

Yeah, this is basically the nut of the problem

Though I would still suggest that even within the comparatively narrow confines of design architecture etc, “content” might be doing some subtle harm

I realize it’s enormously more efficient for designers info architects to talk about content as a discrete category, but they are also designing things that aren’t going to contain amorphous content

They’re going to contain specific forms of expression …

@kissane @tim

I am less firm on this latter view, though

I realize designers gotta design

@clive @tim “Content” is mostly for a layer of information, which is a thing that actually needs a lot of talking about, or a fallback generic for truly unknown/not yet known stuff. The best digital and print designers and system architects I’ve worked with all come in knowing that in their brainstems.

This is also why I called what I used to do “editorial strategy” because I was usually working at a less removed layer of abstraction, but I lost that fight.

@clive @tim 💤

Tim Bray Sep 30, 2023

@kissane @clive @tim I have always loathed That Word. They are stories and pictures and rants and songs. "Content" is MBA for "shit I don't care about that I want you to click on".

@timbray @kissane @tim

Quite frequently, yeah, I think this is exactly how it's used in corporate life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQvrap19Eng

Ben Ramsey Sep 30, 2023

@clive @timbray @kissane @tim This is all I can think about when I hear the word “content,” now.

Bo Burnham’s “Content” from his Netflix show “Inside.”

“But look, I made you some content
Daddy made you your favorite, open wide
Here comes the content
It's a beautiful day to stay inside”

"Content" - Bo Burnham Song Video, from "Inside," New Special on Netflix

YouTube

@ramsey @timbray @kissane @tim

Yes yes -- he brilliantly lands that moment!!

@kissane @tim

Yeah, the excellent designers I know all have a nuanced sense of what's going on

And like I said, my brief wasn't really with the comparatively narrow usage of content in design industries ...

... it's in the much larger world of business and mainstream how-we-talk-about-things, which is like 100,000X the size of the population of designers and UX folken etc 😅

Negative12DollarBill Sep 30, 2023

@kissane @clive @tim
My only contribution is to remember this old thing:

@negative12dollarbill @kissane @tim

lolol

Ruby Jones Sep 30, 2023

@kissane @clive @tim THANK you. I get so sick of this dismissal of content, which is actually a useful (and often artistic!) thing that people like me produce. Being a Content Producer/Designer/Specialist never stopped me being an artist or a writer, but it did involve me doing a bunch of stuff that wasn't simply writing or making art. And in many ways USING my writing and art in web content saw it get much more recognition than it would have otherwise.

This discourse just dismisses our work.

argonaut Sep 30, 2023

@tim @clive saying that information is content is like saying that water or juice or sauce are content. It’s useful for those who care mostly about the glass, but neither for the drinker, nor for the juicemaker, nor the waterer, nor the chef, because it hides its value by describing it by its shape, which is not intrinsic, and not its substance.

allrite Sep 30, 2023

@clive Discontent?

@allrite

That was the original tagline for my blog in 2002

“content | discontent”

Jake in the desert Sep 30, 2023

@clive GREAT piece and hard agree. Hated it since the 90s too. It's so gross.

@jake4480

Man, we’ve been enduring it for a long while, eh?

Jake in the desert Sep 30, 2023

@clive ugh. And it gets more and more nauseating and exhausting every year, right? And all the companies pushing it - SUCH a solid writeup, man. I've seen blurbs about it but never a full cohesive piece- the Emma Thompson part was wild, too. We should definitely take it back. Making art, writing, recording music or making a video. Not too tough. Corporate capitalism is so damn unpleasant and dorky about everything, and mix it with 'content'.. sigh. 😂

@jake4480

Yep — with my band, I write songs and perform songs. I don’t write content and perform content

I mean one can *call* it content but that is to take a database’s view of what I’m doing

Jake in the desert Sep 30, 2023

@clive right. And I find it ironic that so many of the young "influencers" (another term I dislike) have gotten used to calling it content, when we find it so "cringe" and that's *their* recent term 🤣 - it's just such a shame the capitalists want to cheapen art like that. I get WHY they do, but it's always a slippery slope to something even DUMBER and cheaper although I can't imagine what that would be. I suppose we're all going to find out 😕

@jake4480

Yeah, this is what is the most depressing part of it all -- when people doing very cool and specific forms of cultural expression just call it "content"

Derek Bruff Sep 30, 2023

@clive Yes, please. “Content creator” is the worst. That’s what you call someone when you don’t know how to be more specific about what they make.

@derekbruff

Or don’t care!