Content, and Its Discontents
I’ve been thinking about the growing collective disdain for the term content creator.
In the digital age, we are steered toward perceiving everything as ‘content’. Text and imagery. Music and video. Academic research and misspelt comments left on hobbyist forums. Wristwatch reviews, footage of missile strikes, cooking shows, cancer survivor stories, methods for clearing snow from your driveway, niche sexual fetishes, go fund me pages for animal rescue efforts, home decor ideas, crypto charts, award winning novels, baking contests, knitting tutorials, violin concertos, mummy vlogs, War and Peace written entirely in emoticons…
The description content creator does not specify which of these things we might be presented with… Moreover, it hints at a lack of loyalty, if that is the correct way to put it, on the creator’s part, for one type of content over another. A person who starts out as a Serious Expert in a field that interests us, may seamlessly transition into posting brief and cheerful product reviews for the highest bidder.
But it’s not just the ambiguity of it that troubles us. Reducing everything to ‘content’ - the value of which is measured by how much attention it garners - is a process so hyper-democratic, it strips things of their inherent significance (and in turn, the world as we know it of meaning). Understandably this makes us anxious.
But… not in an altogether unfamiliar way.
Leafing through some of my old art books today (part of the seemingly endless project of emptying our former house), it seemed more glaringly obvious than ever, that the virtual world is not unlike painting.
Paintings - where a cluster of grapes, a swathe of cloth, a naked woman, a chair, and a violent battle scene, are really all just swirls of paint upon a panel or canvas, thereby attaining the same degree of visual importance. It’s a notion that painters have been playing with since the birth of the medium. Because the real issue is not converting everything to zeros and ones specifically. The issue is representation, of any kind. In the act of which we flatten, dissolve, stir, and regurgitate complex and wildly dissimilar things, or even Types of Things, into a homogenous format, ready for consumption (be it visceral or intellectual).
One of my favourite artists of all time is the German painter Gerhard Richter. Still living at the age of 92, he is arguably one of the most important painters of the past two centuries combined.
To understand the origins of content creator and all that it entails, looking at a catalogue of Richter’s work is essential. At first glance, it appears that he as a painter has no particular style. There are photo-realistic paintings, displayed side by side with abstractions. Sentimental portraits beside technical arial landscapes. It makes no sense, until slowly you arrive at a realisation: He is painting in a consistent style. It’s just that the subject matter is content. Content, in that literal, hyper-democratic sense that makes us so anxious. Be it horses, blurry school photos, concentration camp scenes, snapshots of his own children, microscope slides, candles, abstract shapes on window panes... it is all rendered with equal diligence and care in his rather consistent layered painterly style, with a slight brush-drag at the very end. Content.
We like to blame the digital era for The Way Things Have Become. We like to blame ‘content creators.’ But really it is us, our very nature. That desire to understand, to both categorise and homogenise, to assign stimuli to redy-made schemata, to render and to represent.
Earlier today, when I could not find my keys, I dumped the contents of my bag onto the table in rushed frustration. And of course there they were, surrounded by bits of paper, scone crumbs, my daughter’s pencils, broken earphones, tangles of yarn, and a bruised but perfectly edible pear. I grabbed the keys and bit into the fruit. It was time to think about something else.
