@tim

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

@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.

@tim

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.

@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 …

@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.

@timbray @kissane @tim

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

@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”

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