The uncanny valley of content reuse

Deane Barker takes content management to a level I’d been previously oblivious to in his piece, “Content Reuse and the Problem of Narrative Flow.” As a human writer, I suppose it’s useful for me to gain a rounded sense of what my future competition might be.

I didn’t, however, expect something quite like this. Barker’s article begins with a question that came to him regarding content management from a company who “generated content as a business model” and created “content products,” which I’m sure is innocuous in reality but, stripped of context, sounds like a possible fate for the arts in a dystopian novel.

This assuredly-not-actually-sinister company raised the interesting question of whether it would ever be possible to create “new” content from a collection of previously-written material whose components had been broken down into the smallest possible cognitive chunks. (Not so small as individual words, but sentences and paragraphs.)

The resulting essay is an interesting reflection on content creation and reuse, and says a lot about the modern relationship between writers and their readers. It could almost be called the psychology of writing for readers. (Because who else do you write for?)

In short, treating content as a product risks turning its creators into machines. And while on one hand it seems all too economical to automate content creation, it’s not a realistic way to interact with a human audience.

Sometimes, yes, people will truly just be searching for an easily-generated fact: “Will it snow in this zip code today?” But other times, it’s a story that’s being sought out, even if the questioner might not think to phrase it that way: “What does your company do?”

These are the instances where narrative flow becomes so crucial. Barker brings up the possibility of “the editorial equivalent of the Uncanny Valley,” and explains its risks:

…slightly odd text that sort of seems right, but the reader notices that there’s something weird about it, and so doesn’t mentally engage with it. As they read, they keep stumbling over a growing… weirdness, as reused content keeps upsetting the narrative flow. Shortly thereafter, credibility goes out the window.

To be honest, it’s not clear to me if there’s genuine interest in “content-generating” companies to mass-produce fresh content in this manner, or if this was just a question that came up for the sake of discussion. It seems like an outdated initiative to me, like something along the lines of the Semantic Web.

It’s not a question, in short, that I’d have thought to ask. But it’s an answer that I found really interesting.