“Content” is just the cutthroat word for what it’s always been
A riff and/or rant
Hey, this is Josh Spilker with your weekly newsletter on writing, culture, creativity, and productivity. This one is a critique about a critique. Let’s go…
There’s a coworking space in my new apartment complex.
I go there to do my work most days.
It’s pretty quiet, the tables are big, and oddly enough, it has rows and rows of books.
Because I’m a book person, I actually look at the books.
I don’t know most of them. Some of them I do, though.
They all had a particular timeframe around them — they seemed to be from the mid-90s to early 2000s.
Books like Theodore Rex, that huge Theodore Roosevelt biography. (Now $1.24 on Amazon).
Or a minor Bob Costas book about the importance of baseball (written in 2001, and baseball is still trying to find its mojo).
And another: “Big City Eyes” by Delia Ephron, published in 2000 and available for 96 cents on Amazon.
Here’s a quick snapshot of one of the walls from my desk area:
I bring these books up not to make fun of the authors, but to illustrate an uncomfortable truth: Content has always been content, even for the mid-list authors.
Books like these were just part of the gristmill of publishing and the “arts.”
I lived in Wilmington, NC for a while. It’s a town with a substantial film industry for its size — think Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, and more recently The Summer I Turned Pretty.
The local bookstore had a pretty lucrative side business.
They possessed a lot of rare and old books and made a substantial amount of money renting out books by foot to these productions.
The film productions just wanted books in the background, not to be read.
They didn’t care. They made content built upon the shoulders of previous content.
That’s the same vibe I get from my co-working space.
Books add a level of gravitas that no one can quite put their finger on, without having to do the hard work of actually reading it.
Okay, now here’s the inspo for this rant
All of this is pre-text for discussing this recent article by Clive Thompson—quite a formidable media figure in that he is/was heavily involved with Wired magazine, a writer for the NY Times magazine, and an author as well.
In the article, Thompson offers these main points:
Content is too all-encompassing
Quote:
“Sure, I could understand why all the tech and business folks used it. “Content”, as a phrase, is usefully efficient. It gives you a blanket term to discuss a huge variety of forms of expression — prose, photography, TV, drama, music, illustration and more.
The problem, of course, is that “content” — the way these folks were slinging it around — more or less posits that there is no distinction between any of these extremely different cultural forms. Text, pictures, animation, comedy, drama, reporting, marketing: Whatevs, folks, it’s all content, right?”
Content degrades the work put into “art”
Quote:
“The thing is, in my experience, too many tech folks regard the actual substance of culture — i.e. the stuff that people publish, using the techies’ tools — as uninteresting and unvaluable. For them, the hard work is in making the content-management system. It’s in coding the social network. The actual pieces of culture — the footage, the prose, the jokes and party pix — that people create and post, using these tools? Eh. That stuff’s easy to create.”
Content removes the “value”
Quote:
“Flattening these complex, diverse, soul-spanning magisteria into “content” completely strips them of what makes them unique; and this removes what makes them valuable.”
But here’s the truth — certain types of content have been overvalued, and then other types have always been significantly undervalued. The market eventually decides.
Let’s Talk Basquiat
I’ve been reading a book about the recent history of NYC and one of the fascinating bits is how small players like Jean-Michel Basquiat are significantly undervalued at first, and then may become overvalued quite a bit later on.
His “content” was free, meaningful, and beautiful and no one cared.
His work was sold for mere dollars in a park.
Many of the books now taking up space in my coworking office probably received more money in advances than Basquiat did at the beginning of his career, but as works of art, they haven’t had the same impact.
To call it all “content” lifts up these mid-list literary writers, but degrades Basquiat.1
A casual observer at the beginning would think the mid-list author publishing with a big house would have a better career than Basquiat selling postcards at Washington Square Park.
Call it content first, and then make it earn “art”
I propose that content is actually a fine name, until it breaks out and can distinguish itself.
It’s actually more honest to call it all content because no one is sure what’s going to hit and what’s not going to hit.
Furthermore, I’ve been a casual about reading Don DeLillo, — a “famous” postmodern literary writer as much as one can be. I’ve read a few of his books and then noticed he has a bunch more that no one talks about, and I can’t even find in the library really.
Books like: Players, The Names, Point Omega.
All of his books aren’t great, but a few — White Noise or Libra — are certifiable classics that will be taught for years.
Or let’s take a more popular example, idk, Stephen King? I’m not going to try and list them all, but here are all of his written works.
Are some better than others? Of course. He may have admitted to it, I don’t know, the man is prodigious at spinning out CONTENT.
He made more than enough to pay the bills, and then gave the people what they wanted in the 80s or whatever, and then those books faded away, only to come back again.
What do you think the purpose of all this content is?
It’s entertainment, it’s how-to guides, it gets us from point A to point B, it is content. Some succeed at it, some more than others, some don’t, some are okay grinding away never succeeding at it (finger-pointing at self).
Some movies, books, music, are great, some aren’t, but many of them get us through the day and sometimes they transcend beyond it.
I think it’s fair to call it all content because no one is sure of the outcome. And it takes some of the bad content to get to the good content. Every writer or artist knows that.
It’s soul-less, but true. And I’m okay with it.
Let’s return to those forgotten books on my co-working shelves. It’s morphed into content — they may have had hopes and dreams for it being something greater and grander, but most of them aren’t.
They were content then, and content now, with a slightly different purpose.
It’s a delusion and lie to think that all art is great art, all movies will be great movies, all books will be great books, and all newsletters sent on a Saturday morning will be great newsletters.
No one likes to think they’re just reading or consuming content, they like to think of themselves as doing the hard, meaningful work of criticism and critique and wrestling with deep thoughts — you know actually reading all of the books on the shelf.
To make the public think of content as something other than content is probably another word Mr. Thompson wouldn’t like: ….marketing
More Things
“Emma Thompson is Right: “Content” is Rude” at NY Times
I can take it.
“Who Killed The Fudge King?” at The Atavist
Honestly, I haven’t read this one yet, but it’s on my list and looks good
“When the Mac ‘Ruined’ Writing” at
“Why The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore” by Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker
“100 Greatest Film Books of All Time” at The Hollywood Reporter
Fun content!
Last Thing
“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” — Andy Warhol
Keep going,
-Josh Spilker
Maybe I’m giving Basquiat too much credit and he’s perhaps he’s not that well-known
In re/ over-valuing and under valuing. When the art scene exploded in the mid-1800s in Europe, a painting by Meissonnier might sell for as much as a Rembrandt. I just read this tidbit in Orland Figes' The Europeans about Pauline Viardot, her husband, and Turgenev.