A massive and heinous crime has been committed by the internet against writers and artists. And it isn’t piracy, electronic distribution or increased competition for attention. If you really want to offend a creative person, just watch their response to the prose, film and art they create and love being referred to as ‘content’.
First it was businesspeople talking about content as something to fill the empty space between adverts. Then those SEO types came along and messed around to game the search engines and fool users. And now there’s a growing army of marketing people talking about using artistic methods to power ‘content marketing’ and prostitute noble work even more.
Don’t they understand?
Writers, artists – it’s OK when people say ‘content’
I consider writing a massive part of both who I am, and also of my occupation. I’ve held editorial roles, and received payment both for writing, and using all forms of media as an integral part of marketing. And I have absolutely no problem with anyone using the term ‘content’, as long as they’re not assuming it magically appears and doesn’t deserve time, resource, effort and reward.
After all, words only have the meanings we infer on them, which is why I might apologise to a section of you still reading who may have been offended by the Lego imagery above. At the same time a section of you might have found it amusing, or just not cared. It all depends on the signification you get from the use of that particular word.
And yes, in a business and web development context, ‘content’ is often almost a dirty word, as if in retaliation against all the people who declared ‘content is king’ for so long in the past.
But it doesn’t have to meant that. All it means to me is a shorthand way to avoid repeating ‘text,images and video’, everytime I want to describe what I do, or what is meant to go on a page. And that’s all I hope it will mean to you in the future…
How your work can avoid being just ‘content’
Here’s the thing to remember – ‘Content’ refers to what’s contained in a box as defined by a dictionary. It isn’t how the people reading or viewing your work are going to refer to it, especially if you achieve something remarkable. Noone in the history of the world, even in business, marketing or SEO, has come home from a day at work and told their partner or family about the ‘amazing piece of content’ they saw. Instead they’ll share an amazing story, a stunning picture or a moving film.
Content as an adjective is about being mentally or emotionally satisfied with the current state of things (the Swedish have one of my favourite related words, ‘lagom’, which is translated as being ‘just right’ ‘not too much, not too little’ etc, and to some extent it continues to permeate Swedish culture). If you’re doing just enough to satisfy the search engines, or the need for some promo text, then why do you deserve to be refered to as more than ‘content’ anyway?
Writing, photography and film-making are not inherently more noble than serving fast food or working in a factory. There will be people who are far more passionate about serving the perfect burger up with good service than some writers are about churning through the latest press release to just get something up which might get a bit of traffic.
So instead of spending time and effort bemoaning how people could dare refer to artistic output as if it was just the result of someone working, just do three things:
- Create stuff that tears through any box it could be put in.
- Share and reward the brilliance of others. Comment, tweet,like,donate,flattr,recommend to publishers/studios
- Don’t settle for crap. Don’t be lazy and settle for something which is filling space for a brand or media company.
Personally, it doesn’t matter to me what my work is called: copy, content or even ‘waffle that gets in the way of the pictures’ as one magazine designer once described it. I’m a hack and I feel very grateful that I’m paid for working with words in a shrinking sector in tough times.
My bugbear is the sheer amount of poorly written stuff out there from press releases, to CVs and covering letters from some graduates and , yes, even some blogs. Connection and respect is what I want as a reader/consumer, whatever subjects I’m exploring.
A relentless focus on content and how much perceived value it offers can’t always be measured by the finest analytics or the response it gets. I think you could go further with this subject, just as you wrote about how we’re all curators now, are we not all content machines/commodities now creating our own edited versions of ourselves on Facebook, Linked In and internet dating profiles to be harvested/exploited? It’s just that some of us are better editors than others…perhaps.
How about we rework William Morris’s golden rule for the digital age? “Have nothing in your content that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Beautility not futility.