Taking Back ‘Content’

Around this time fifteen years ago, I was scribbling terrible poetry in a notebook. Not much has changed, except now I have to make sure my poems are broken into semantically tagged chunks that can be queried by an API depending on what device they’re being viewed on and what social platforms they’re being shared to. I have to make sure I have a set of different headlines, descriptions and cover images optimized for all the screens and networks on which they’re likely to emerge. I have to enlist robots to keep track of how many people are reading them, where they’re coming from, where they’re being shared and what people are saying about them.

Anything I write is no longer a world in itself, but a sub-world within larger sub-worlds. I’m no longer creating compositions, but series of micro-compositions that can be snapped together, taken apart and rearranged like littleBits. The internet has changed the molecular structure of writing. It has forced us to completely rethink our role as writers and ask tough questions about where our work exists, in what form and how it’s distributed. It’s more important than ever to rethink why we’re doing what we’re doing and pick up new skills that’ll help us adapt to this new environment.

I’ve spent the last few years hating the word ‘content’. The reasons are neither unique nor new. Writers have been railing against this word for years, and for good reasons. More than seven years ago, Astra Taylor wrote:

“…we have our conversation about the enormous cultural restructuring that is going on, but we are having it in a senseless vocabulary where “content” takes the place of “art” and “information” substitutes for “culture,” “knowledge,” “literature,” “music,” “cinema” and “meaning.” All the mysteries of the creative process are flattened: the fickle nature of the muse, the idiosyncrasies of scholarship, and the tenacity required to compose a novel. All are reduced to nothing by analogies derived from the logic of computer code, data processing and high-tech business models.”

Even earlier, Richard M. Stallman added the word to his list of ‘Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing’. He wrote:

If you want to describe a feeling of comfort and satisfaction, by all means say you are “content,” but using the word as a noun to describe publications and works of authorship adopts an attitude you might rather avoid: it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages the works themselves. If you don’t agree with that attitude, you can call them “works” or “publications.”

Those who use the term “content” are often the publishers that push for increased copyright power in the name of the authors (“creators,” as they say) of the works. The term “content” reveals their real attitude towards these works and their authors. (See Courtney Love’s open letter to Steve Case and search for “content provider” in that page. Alas, Ms. Love is unaware that the term “intellectual property” is also biased and confusing.)

My interest in the origin of this word emerged after finding out that even though I considered myself a music journalist, processes outside my control had turned me into a ‘content writer’. In order to figure out what these processes were, I infiltrated the marketing department. On a fundamental level, I was still stringing sentences together, hoping they’d make a difference in someone’s life. But the way marketing approached the whole process couldn’t have been further removed from editorial. Instead of writing something, putting it out and hoping someone would notice, we were working our way back from the audience, reading every sentence through their eyes and reordering every word to elicit the greatest emotional response. We’d scrutinze our audiences’ online behavioral patterns and use our findings to plan where we’ll launch these posts, at what time and in what form. We’d meticulously track the impact of each post so we knew exactly what not to do the next time.

It wasn’t long before I realized every writer who’s in it for the long haul should be thinking about these things. I’ve seen too many great stories get buried because the social widgets didn’t give anyone reason to click in. I’ve seen too many talented writers wither away pumping out branded content because they couldn’t quantify the value of their work. We can’t afford to be precious about our writing and complain about the world not seeing it as a perfect work of art. We need to ask questions like: How can we use data to justify doing the work we’re passionate about? How can we use the understanding of our readers to make sure our work doesn’t get lost in the cavalcade of their social streams? How can we be more active participants in conversations about the CMSes responsible for giving our work form so it isn’t relinquished to some dark, untrafficked corner?

This is a long and arduous task, but we can start small. We can start by taking back the word ‘content’ and reshaping its meaning to fit our needs. The word annoys us because it means ‘that which fills a box’. But we can fall back on an earlier definition, ‘substance independent of style’. This allows us to see through the stacks of paragraph we’ve hammered out, into the heart of the story we’re trying to tell. It enables us to embrace the fact that our words are just receptacles, and aren’t half as important as the story itself. We’re too worried about the form that our words take, when we should be more focused on transmitting meaning in the most impactful way. We should stop thinking about our words as static entities and embrace the fact that they need to travel great distances and morph along the way.