When “content is king,” what kinds of power are afforded to creators and the work they produce?
Bill Gates famously declared that “content is king” in 1996. Per Gates and others advocating a positivist perspective of the Internet, the world wide web ushers in a new world of opportunities in which civic engagement is widespread and information access is democratized. However, technologists don’t always speak to the fact that available information is dependent on who creates and shares this content.
Research on Internet usage from various demographics has been developed by and for data analysts working in business intelligence, and focuses more on engagement on specific platforms rather than content creation across services. Even in the social sciences, quantitative analysis of gaps in digital use, especially on the subject of content creation, is largely nonexistent. Grant Blank reviews existing literature and challenges the concept of content as a monolith — along with the idea of the Internet as universal facilitator of personal publishing — in Who Creates Content? Stratification and content creation on the Internet (2013).
Blank posits that inequalities in digital participation are strongly correlated to the kinds of of personal publishing produced by users. Using the eight variables in the Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS) that measure non-institutionally created Internet media, Blank creates a typology of digital content creation to illustrate that content is shaped by its producers. The first component of this typology, skilled content, consists of activities that require personal investment and technical skill: writing a blog, posting material the respondent considers creative, and maintaining a personal website.
The second component, social and entertainment content, covers activities commonly associated with using social media: having a profile on a social network site and uploading pictures, video, or music files. The last component, political content, is distinct in its description of content rather than type of interaction; it consists of sending messages in support of, and commenting on, a political or social issue in blogs or social networking sites. Blank uses the 2011 dataset of OxIS, which randomly samples both users and non-Internet users in the UK ages 14 and above.
Results of this analysis indicate distinctions in the creators of each type of content. Regardless of social status, young people with technical skills and comfort with sharing personal information are the primary producers of skilled content.
In contrast, unmarried, young people with lower incomes and technical skills are likely to produce social and entertainment content. As can be expected, creators of political content skew towards the highly educated. For example, the image below was developed for a presentation at the Codesign Sprint 2014 Studio, a project based at MIT that works with community partners to develop potential responses grounded in practical civic needs.
Blank notes in the results if each type of content enhances capital, either economic or social, and thus whether its publication contributes to democratization; he concludes that personal publishing reinforces social stratification due to the likelihood of elites participating in capital-enhancing activity.
As racial and cultural identity is constructed differently in the UK than in the US, it is highly unlikely that findings would be reproducible here in full. In this particular study, critical analysis of race is absent, though race is an included demographic variable. Yet Blank’s typology would be strengthened by examining definitions of both social and political content, and identifying whose content is considered to be contributing to public discourse and capable of generating financial capital. W. Carson Byrd, Keon L. Gilbert & Joseph B. Richardson Jr approach this issue in The vitality of social media for establishing a research agenda on black lives and the movement (2017) as they explore how data on social media usage can be used to measure efficacy of online activism to mobilize for racial justice. And the category of social/entertainment content has proved to be a medium through which feminine and racialized performance are subject to account monetization, as discussed in the “Woke Up Like This” panel in Theorizing the Web 2017. This is further illustrated by the work of (often gendered labor of) social media account management as public relations.
The concept of content categorization and their relationship to social status, and the ease of conversion from social to financial capital, may be consistent with the political, historical, and discursive elements of a racial project. While Blank considers the production of skilled content to be irrelevant to the question of replicating stratification, the difficulty through which producers of skilled and social and entertainment content translate their creations into financial capital deserves further examination.
