The Problem With “Content”

“Content” is the black hole of the Internet. Incredibly well-produced videos, all sorts of songs, and articulate blog posts — they are all “content.” Are short stories “content”? I hope not, since that is one of the most soul-destroying of words, used to strip a creation of its creative effort.

You can tell a lot about a person and how they think about their work based on whether or not they use “content” to describe what they do. A photographer who says that he is creating “content” for his YouTube channel is nothing more than a marketer churning out fodder to fill the proverbial Internet airwaves with marketing noise.

I really hate the term content creator. It’s such a corporate way of describing artists, writers, intellectuals, and other creatives who ultimately just want to create work they’re proud of.

Part of the problem is that the big social networks are not content platforms supported by advertising. They are better understood as advertising platforms supp... See more