Content (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
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Logically, then, content can refer to socks in a drawer, books in a box, or sand in an hourglass.
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The second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Internet defines content as "The information found in a Web site and the way in which it is structured."
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First, digital content is no longer, strictly speaking, found only on websites.
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After all, mobile apps such as Snapchat and Instagram also generate and circulate content.
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Second, eliding content with information is misleading. Information is generally equated with imparting knowledge, but as anyone who has ever spent time online appreciates, a lot of content in circulation doesn't impart any knowledge at all.
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Content may circulate solely for the purpose of circulating.
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Bharat Anand, author of The Content Trap, argues that in an age of content, the most successful companies aren't those that produce or sell great content but rather those that simply facilitate its management or circulation.
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Instagram egg as a sort of quintessential example of content—something that circulates for the sake of circulation.
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In 2004, Google launched a new vertical product that would transform advertising by enabling anyone who owned a domain.
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With AdSense, the more content one had on a website, the more money one could make. Hence, at least for web entrepreneurs, the need for content, especially original search-engine-optimized content, soared.
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Free content became essential to creating a perceived need for everything from smartphones to tablets to portable computers. Simply put, content created needs that might never have existed otherwise.
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So, what is the content industry? In essence, it is an industry that generates revenue from the production and/or circulation of content alone. The content in question sometimes conveys information, tells a story, or entertains, but it doesn't need to do any of these things to circulate effectively as content.
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Adorno and Horkheimer foresaw the growing entanglement between the culture and advertising industries and the negative consequences of this convergence.
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States have become one user among others.
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To begin, content isn't necessarily data, even if the two terms are frequently used interchangeably. Some argue that this is because content is contextualized information and data is not.
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Others argue that while content conveys a message (in words, images, or sound), data does not.
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The content industry may be best understood as an industry that exists only in a parasitical relationship to other industries, from marketing and publishing to education and entertainment.
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While content marketing may directly pitch a product or service, it generally aims to build an audience.
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At the center of content marketing is the concept of organic growth—a marketing strategy that compels customers to seek out businesses rather than the other way around.
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Branded content doesn't take the form of a traditional advertisement; instead, it strives to offer information, usually in the form of a short article or video, that at least appears to be valuable and relevant.
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Build brand loyalty.
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Although the content industry and publishing industry were once two different entities, the line between them continues to blur.
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In the publishing industry, content can refer to printed books or ebooks but also to other products, such as curricular modules, online archives, and even videos.
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A high percentage of the entertainment content that one encounters on platforms such as Amazon or Netflix, for example, was created first and foremost to secure subscribers.
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In the world of content, genre, medium, and format are secondary concerns and, in some instances, they seem to disappear entirely. We're left with a series of classifications that emphasize where or how content circulates in different sectors and markets.
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Cultural production matters, but only to the extent that it helps drive profits in a specific market sector. What is being said, how it is being said, and via what medium are secondary to the market itself.
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The rise of the content industry is the ultimate expression of neoliberalism. Under the logic of neoliberalism, everything—politics, desire, sociality, art, culture, and so on—is reduced to mere nodes in the market economy.
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Specific attention is paid to how the content industry continues to disrupt the field of cultural production, transforming it into a place where one's ability to engage in work as an artist or a writer is increasingly contingent on one's content capital; that is, on one's ability to produce content not about one's work but about one's status as an artist, writer, or performer. The book concludes by offering a preliminary look at the future of content and the content industry and the potential impact of automation, which threatens to turn content production into something increasingly divorced from human producers altogether.
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Citizen journalism has expanded around the globe. Platforms for user-generated content like Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have created a massive audience for all sorts of rising stars, whether or not they exhibit any notable talents.
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What most people didn't realize in the 1990s or even early 2000s is how, where, and to what ends the content they were now freely sharing online would help generate revenue for private companies.
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In her seminal work on the history of the printing press, Elizabeth Eisenstein describes the culture of the early print world as one where editors and publishers "did not merely store data passively in compendia" but also "created vast networks of correspondents" by soliciting criticism of each edition and "sometimes publicly promising to mention the names of readers who sent in new information or who spotted the errors which would be weeded out."
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Eisenstein was engaged in endeavors that resonate with the crowd-sourced and user-generated projects that have come to define contemporary communications.
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Yet, as early as the late nineteenth century, travel guides were already being developed with the help of travelers.
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From encyclopedias to dictionaries to travel guides, there is a long history of readers contributing to the research and development of texts. But since the 1990s, three things have radically transformed how regular folks contribute to the production of texts and images of all kinds: an expanded capacity to engage in the production of audio and visual content; an expanded capacity to broadcast these creations; and most importantly, an expanded capacity for private companies to turn such creations into assets.
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In the past, users could submit content—
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but in a print culture, such users were still entirely dependent on the editors of these volumes to put their ideas into print.
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In the twenty-first century, user-generated content can be easily captured, managed, and transformed into an asset.
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Because we now have the capacity to capture, collect, and mine increasingly large sets of data, we can deploy user-generated content to achieve entirely different ends. Facebook's users may upload photographs in order to share memories with friends and family, but these photographs are valuable to Facebook for an entirely different reason.
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Brought to scale, user-generated content exceeds its original purpose and, in the process, becomes increasingly valuable as an asset.
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While user-generated content has always been the favored term in a corporate context, alternative terms such as convergence culture, participatory culture, and peer production have often been favored by scholars, cultural workers, and digital activists.
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The WELL understood user-generated content as raw material laying the foundation for new forms of community.
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The shift from old-world approaches to profit (i.e., subscriptions) to new-world approaches (i.e., turning user-generated content into an asset that can be collected, mined, and sold) wouldn't be simple.
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In the 1990s and even well into the early 2000s, while business analysts and businesses were actively exploring how to turn users' comments and, eventually, users' digital photographs, videos, and sound files into assets, most online users remained largely in the dark about the ways in which their digital output might be monetized.
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As Christian Fuchs argued in his 2013 essay "Class and Exploitation on the Internet," user-generated data is best understood as a commodity that is partially produced by users and partially produced by the corporations that build and maintain the platforms adopted by users.
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Players—"users are unpaid and therefore infinitely exploited."
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As data is posted, collected, combined, mined, and traded, both its original medium and message cease to matter. As such, any attempt to classify user-generated content based on medium or message is bound to run into problems.
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Ultimately, what distinguishes digital user-generated content from early forms of user-generated content and other types of digital content (e.g., content produced by the owners of platforms) is its capacity to morph over time—to transform from a communicative act originating from a single user to one small bit of data in a larger database, and then to a form of investment knowledge that exists to optimize services, products, and schemes that the original user may have never imagined possible.
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Not unlike the overlap between scribal and print cultures in the late fifteenth century, for a brief period—perhaps only a decade—efforts to experiment with new and emerging digital technologies remained profoundly shaped by our print-centric expectations.
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For most of the 1990s, this apparently chaotic, uncontainable, and even frightening space was almost exclusively composed of texts, so reading and writing rather than listening or viewing were the default. As a result, concerns about the web's impact on writing were never far from the surface. What few people predicted in the 1990s was that the worst was still to come.
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To be clear, the web was never entirely free of advertisements, but until the early 2000s, the ability to sell advertising space was mostly limited to people running legitimate businesses.
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With AdSense, anyone who owned a domain and had a website with a bit of content could now sign up and start automatically running advertisements on their site.
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What continues to deceive many readers is that clickbait—and this includes all of those articles readers stumble across on familiar sites like eHow, Tripsavvy, Investopedia, and many others—is really just a frame for advertisements, even if it appears to be the main show.
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For a website to hold readers long enough to generate a reasonable number of impressions and clicks, it needs to be search-engine-optimized—that is, written with the sole purpose of ranking first in any search. As a rule of thumb, each page should contain at least 300 words, though longer (600 to 1,000 words) is generally considered better. A 300-page site, then, generally requires at least 100,000 words, which is about three times the length of the book you're currently reading.
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Daniel Roth
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When Roth carried out his investigation in 2009, he found an emerging industry where white-collar labor—the sort of work done by writers and editors—was already grossly undervalued. "It's the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot," explained Roth. "Writers can typically select 10 articles at a time; videographers can hoard 40.
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Because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work.
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Despite Google's efforts to clamp down on content farms over the years, not much has changed since Roth exposed the dismal labor conditions at Demand Media in 2009.
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Upwork
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The day I logged on to the platform, someone had just posted a writing job that didn't pay at all. In this case, the job poster was looking for a 1,000-word article on firearms. Any writer who produced an article that met the job poster's guidelines (which would be provided only after the so-called hire was approved) was being promised a five-star rating on Upwork (notably, employers rate freelancers on Upwork, but freelancers are never permitted to rate employers) and the potential of long-term work. The potential long-term work was also poorly compensated.
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Since the articles needed to range from 1,000 to 2,500 words each, the ultimate reward was an opportunity to turn out 2,000 to 5,000 words per week for anywhere from $40 to $100.
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Don't assume that everyone turning out clickbait is necessarily someone who knows nothing about writing or just doesn't care.
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The Gig Economy and Work Platforms
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Gig economy optimists—people like economist Richard Florida—argue that with the rise of the gig economy, we are finally all free to work wherever and whenever we like.
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Entering the gig economy, we give up many of the things that educated, middle-class people once took for granted.
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This includes the reasonable expectation of access to steady employment, benefits, and the prospect of eventually retiring with at least some financial peace of mind
Page 74 - Whatever your political position on online work platforms and the gig economy, these connected technological and economic shifts appear to have played a role in the rise of the content farm industry.
Page 75 - As platforms like Elance and eventually Upwork appeared, something else happened—the number of highly literate but underemployed and undercompensated university graduates increased.
Page 75 - But anecdotally, humanities graduates, including those who fall into the underemployed or undercompensated category, appear to be well represented in the content farm sector.
Page 75 - The second factor supporting the rise of the content farm industry over the past two decades is the expansion of the global workforce.
Page 77 - Most crappy writing found online is produced by remote workers connected to content farms or online work platforms. But you can't assume that none of these workers care about writing. In fact, as argued, a series of recent economic shifts has created a surplus of writers, editors, researchers, and designers who are either underemployed or simply undercompensated and searching for side gigs. Content farms and online work platforms have conveniently exploited this demographic.
Page 78 - But content farms and work platforms are responsible for even more than the millions of pages of branded content and content that exists only to generate revenue from AdSense placements. As discussed in chapter 5, since 2010 content farms and work platforms have also been implicated in the spread of "fake news," which continues to do a lot more harm than any sloppily composed sentence ever will.
Page 81 - Ulman's decision to produce content about herself (not herself as an artist but simply as a young, sexualized woman) ultimately proved wildly successful—more successful than her previous artwork. What Ulman's online performance revealed is that in an age of content, content isn't just something that is needed to promote your art. Increasingly, content is art or, at least, what has come to stand in for art.
Page 83 - Bourdieu's work on the field of cultural production highlights that writers and artists, like literature and art, are the result of a series of "position-takings" that effectively determine what counts as literature, what counts as art, and who can claim those venerated but not necessarily lucrative positions known as "author" or "artist."
Page 84 - According to Bourdieu, one's cultural capital—that is, one's competencies, skills, and qualifications (this includes one's knowledge of and firsthand experiences of literature, art, philosophy and so on)—enables one to more easily engage in the position-takings that structure the field of cultural production.
Page 85 - Countless young artists, writers, and musicians also increasingly rely on tactics not unlike Ulman's to secure success in a cultural field. In this respect, while the field of cultural production still exists, position-takings increasingly pivot around a writer's or an artist's ability to successfully acquire and deploy an entirely new form of capital—content capital.
Page 86 - It is a type of largely intangible asset that influences one's social mobility.
Page 86 - Content capital is more easily acquired.
Page 86 - One builds up one's content capital simply by hanging out online and, more precisely, by posting content that garners a response and, in turn, leads to more followers and more content.
Page 86 - But in the case of content capital, lack of economic capital isn't a barrier.
Page 87 - Some twenty-first-century teen influencers hail from small towns and modest backgrounds and yet have thousands of online followers.
Page 88 - While most teens use their content capital to simply gain a following as a YouTube celebrity or an Instagram influencer, some use their content capital to make inroads into established cultural fields. Perhaps the most successful example of a teen who has managed to segue her content into a cultural field is the world's most popular "Instapoet," Rupi Kaur.
Page 92 - Now, some bookstores have created a special subsection for a new type of poetry—poetry produced by Instapoets.
Page 93 - Not unlike Ulman and other visual artists whose content (selfies) has become art, for Instapoets, content (pithy little poems posted on Instagram) has become literature.
Page 94 - Instapoets, unlike traditional poets, don't really need literary critics or reviewers to engage in successful position-taking in the field of cultural production. In the world of Instapoetry, the poetry doesn't need to be good or have any literary merit or be recognized by any traditional literary gatekeepers. It just needs to be copious and easily viewable on a mobile device.
Page 95 - In the 1990s, if you wanted to hire a writer, you hired a writer. Likewise, if you wanted to hire a filmmaker or videographer, you hired a filmmaker or videographer. Sometime in the early 2000s, the line between people who write articles versus those who make films versus those who produce videos started to blur. Now, in many contexts, all of these cultural workers are simply known as content producers.
Page 96 - As the distinctions between writer, filmmaker, photographer, and so on have become subsumed by the overarching category of content producer, something else has happened—a deskilling of the arts.
Page 97 - In the past, to be an artist or a writer, you needed to be recognized and supported by the artistic or literary apparatus. Artists needed gallerists and museum curators to recognize and showcase their work. Writers needed literary agents and publishers to get their work into print.
Page 97 - This is no longer the case.
Page 97 - One can now successfully position oneself as a poet while bypassing all traditional forms of gatekeeping, including academics, editors at literary journals, publishers, and award juries.
Page 99 - For all of these reasons, in an age of content, the identities, output, and working conditions of cultural producers are vastly different than they were in the past.
Page 100 - The monopoly of power is no longer concentrated with critics, reviewers, academics, publishers, curators, and collectors.
Page 100 - In the field of cultural production described by Bourdieu, much weight is given to acts of consecration—the preface, the favorable review, the prize, and so on. In an age of content, though, the preface, the favorable review, and even the prize now offer diminishing returns. Cultural capital has given way to content capital. In this new field of cultural production, established forms of gatekeeping have finally crumbled and, in the process, have produced an entirely new spectrum of practices that hinge on the effectiveness of one's content strategies.
Page 104 - Internet Research Agency's real kryptonite wasn't its content but rather its ability to create the illusion that its content was popular.
Page 104 - The Internet Research Agency's computers were programmed to forward the posts to fake accounts that would, in turn, open and close the posts, generating thousands of fake page views.
Page 105 - Troll factories cranking out fake news (i.e., disinformation) are arguably just a symptom of a much broader problem—one that can be fully understood only by examining the restructuring of both journalism and politics in the age of content.
Page 106 - A lot of readers, even those who are reasonably educated, often assume the articles they read on Forbes are at least somewhat newsworthy. After all, many of the articles present themselves as news and Google's algorithm classifies them as news. In fact, much of the content that appears on Forbes is written by Forbes "members." Members belong to a "Forbes Council" such as its "Finance Council," "Coaching Council," or "Technology Council." For a fee, just over $1,000 annually, one not only gets to become a member of a Forbes Council but also to post articles on the Forbes platform once or twice a month.
Page 107 - Their "thought leadership" on the platform still helps raise their profile and legitimize their services and products.
Page 107 - Cleverly masked examples of branded content.
Page 107 - Relatively innocuous content like a Forbes article blurs the line between opinion and reputable journalism and, in the process, it creates an opportunity for more damaging forms of content production to take root.
Page 107 - "Pay-to-play" opinion pieces.
Page 108 - Democracy without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society, media studies scholar Victor Pickard outlines the three fundamental "media failures" that upended the 2016 presidential election in the United States.
Page 108 - emphasized entertainment over information.
Page 108 - misinformation circulating on social media platforms,
Page 108 - witness the consequences of the structural collapse of professional journalism
Page 109 - In the United States and around the world, journalism hasn't just come to be viewed as content. Content with no journalistic integrity at all has increasingly come to be viewed as journalism.
Page 109 - the United States lost over 1,800 daily and weekly newspapers between 2004 and 2018. However, this doesn't mean people aren't accessing the news.
Page 116 - Given the growing reliance on social media feeds as a news source and the preponderance of fake news and opinion-driven news, the need for media literacy is pressing. Yet media literacy—the general reader's ability to read, evaluate, and critically engage with the news—has lagged behind the current era of media change.
Page 116 - sadly, a large majority of adult readers in the United States also struggle to separate opinion from fact. A 2018 Pew Research Study found that only about a quarter of adult Americans were capable of doing so.
Page 116 - In an era when access to information is increasingly determined by one's consumer status, more buying power means more access to relevant news.
Page 119 - to make a lot of money from a website, the content needs to appeal to a large swath of readers.
Page 119 - What may be good for business, however, is very bad for democracy.
Page 120 - In an age of content, localized tactics for securing votes have given way to a new set of tactics that largely pivot around the production, search engine optimization, and circulation of content across multiple digital platforms.
Page 120 - What she lacked in campaign funding, she made up for with an enviable content strategy. BuzzFeed writer Charlie Warzel suggests that Ocasio-Cortez's success ultimately rested on her ability to control her own narrative, connect with voters, and ensure she stayed on everyone's radar, even her opponent's. "Constant content creation," Warzel observes, "forces your opponent to respond to you."
Page 121 - Ocasio-Cortez continues to focus on producing a constant stream of new content.
Page 122 - In Ocasio-Cortez's case, the ability to speak the language of many her supporters—for example, her effective use of emojis and memes—has proven as essential as her ability to take complicated political concepts and break them down into social-media-size bites.
Page 122 - In Trump's case, provocative tweets about political rivals proved especially effective. While Ocasio-Cortez's and Trump's content is marked by stark political contrast (and a different level of tolerance for fake news), their content strategies—lots of content, rolled out 24/7, that is accessible to a range of audiences—are surprisingly similar.
Page 123 - To suggest that the content industry produced the problem of fake news would be misleading. Disinformation and misinformation existed long before content farms and troll factories. However, disinformation and misinformation have become more prevalent in the age of content, because for these problems to flourish, certain conditions needed to be in place—and the content industry provided these conditions.
Page 123 - But the ability to turn out a lot of content at little cost is just one reason fake news has been able to flourish since the early 2000s.
Page 124 - Many people now access news (or what they perceive to be news) via aggregates or the newsfeeds on one or more social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram).
Page 124 - Propaganda has long existed, but in the past, one generally had to pay to circulate it or recruit people to one's cause so they would circulate it for free. Today, some people still pay to have propaganda produced and put into circulation. Propaganda that takes the form of fake news, however, also tends to generate a high number of clicks and views.
Page 129 - Content automation may be the future of content, but it is by no means an entirely new concept;
Page 131 - With content automation now entering a new phase, it is no longer something of interest only to computer programmers, experimental poets, and avant-garde composers. As algorithms become increasingly capable of turning out readable texts, even if they are far from perfect, and as more content circulates simply for the sake of circulation, all sorts of content—from news to television and film scripts to genre fiction—are about to be transformed. Understandably, this may sound sinister.
Page 133 - PA Media Group's RADAR experiment is certainly not the only example of content automation's growing presence in journalism. Since 2017, major newspapers and digital content platforms around the world have brought bots on board to help scale their content production. The Washington Post introduced readers to Heliograf in 2017, initially to help the newspaper provide coverage of all DC-area high school football games. In 2018, Reuters introduced Lynx Insight, which not only combs through massive amounts of data to compile relevant insights but also writes sentences that reporters can drag and drop into stories. Not surprisingly, digital content producers like Forbes have also turned to bots—Forbes's staff writers rely on a bot named Bertie.
Page 134 - What seems nearly certain is that over time another contemporary journalistic problem—fake news—is likely to get a huge boost from content automation.
Page 135 - Netflix continues to increase its content at this rate, it is on track to offer 365 full days of new content annually by 2022. Whether Netflix is responding to an actual consumer demand or a perceived consumer demand, or is just keeping its shareholders happy, is debatable. What is clear is that Netflix's executives aren't spending much time agonizing over the types of programs in which to invest. The company has a long history of relying on AI to make decisions about what types of content to produce. Given the company's success, one might conclude that letting AI dictate their content has already proven to be an incredibly successful strategy.
Page 137 - But if bots can potentially write scripts for television or film, could a bot also produce literature? Could the Booker Prize shortlist eventually find Zadie Smith pitted against IBM's Watson? Or what about genre fiction?
Page 139 - The livelihood of people working across sectors from journalism to education, the integrity of cultural production, and even the future of democratic elections may all be on the line.
Page 139 - Above all, it is urgent that people of all ages and across all sectors better understand content—what it is, how it is produced, by whom, and for what ends. If more people understood how and why content is produced and how it touches nearly every aspect of their lives, they would presumably be able to start making smarter decisions about how they engage with it.
Page 140 - Ironically, content producers and providers will likely need to be part of any widespread effort to help the general public understand the effects of their industry.
Page 140 - To mitigate at least some of the negative impacts of the content industry, regulation will need to increase.
Page 142 - Alongside content literacy and content regulation, the future world of content might be structured by a small but persistent resistance movement—a movement of people who actively reject the idea that all communication and cultural production is now mere content. These people won't be neo-Luddites; they will appreciate and support media that can't be easily monetized by the content industry.