Image courtesy of Rose Rodionova/ Shutterstock Over the past two decades, a number of internet terms have jumped the barrier from the digital realm into real life, changing the way we use certain words. When I was a young boy, “hash” described a rarely used button on the telephone. A “troll” lived under bridges in fairytales. “Spam” came in a can, or in “Monty Python” sketches. And “catfish” was an animal that lived in the far-flung lakes of North America. Now we have “hashtag” (for cross-referencing topics of conversation), “trolls” (bigoted bullies), “spam” (junk), and “catfishing” (faking one’s identity to deceive somebody). The language has mutated, as language inevitably does, but none of these redefined words bother me as much as “content”.
Not too long ago, “content” was largely associated with social media. Content creators made pimple popper videos and cat memes for YouTube or TikTok, or streamed themselves playing video games on Twitch. As Kate Eichhorn put it in her 2022 book, “Content”, this kind of content was — and still is — digital stuff that “may circulate solely for the purpose of circulating”. But the term has taken on a life of its own, and content is increasingly used to refer to far more than just that viral short of a young woman honk-laughing like a hyperventilating goose. Now “content” also means the things we binge-watch on Netflix and Apple TV. Disney likes to boast that its streaming platform offers more than 8,000 hours of “content” from more than eight decades. Marketing executives talk of “dropping content”, as though it were some kind of stealth bomb.
“To hear people talk about ‘content’ makes me feel like the stuffing inside a sofa cushion,” the actress Emma Thompson said at a conference in 2023. “It’s just a rude word for creative people.” Turning to address students in the audience, she added: “You don’t want to hear your stories described as ‘content’ or your acting or your producing described as ‘content’. That’s just like coffee grounds in the sink or something.”
Emma Thompson is correct. “Content” is derogatory — a term that diminishes works of imagination. Martin Scorsese has made movies for both Netflix and Apple, which technically, I suppose, makes him a “content creator” in the newly capacious definition of the word. But to call him that feels almost blasphemous; it would be like labelling Don DeLillo a typist. Can we really refer to “Killers of the Flower Moon” as “content”?
It seems to me that there is a fundamental difference between art and content. Art — a notoriously difficult concept to pin down — is the confluence of self-expression and craftsmanship. It is intended to evoke emotion, convey an idea or conjure up
a mental state. It can be illuminating or challenging — or both. Content, however, is primarily concerned with comfort. When I think of online “content”, I think of an animal with an insatiable appetite, clamouring to be fed. The writer Thomas Bevan put it well on Substack (another medium infamous for its “content”) when he wrote: “It’s all so much ballast used to fill the holes in our souls and in our schedules and to help kill time in our extremely online present while real life — whatever that means — goes on some place else. This content keeps us just above water, existentially speaking. Or it certainly seems that that is its true purpose.”
If art is meant to nourish us, “content” sounds, to my ears, like junk food: enjoyable yet disposable, and ultimately not all that good for us.
This gets at the question of value: how much something is inherently worth. Art and commerce have always had a symbiotic relationship. Even Michelangelo worked on commission for patrons such as the Medici family. But Michelangelo was paid to create works that would invariably transcend the original financial transaction.
The money that swapped hands was never really the point. With “content” — or at least the way it is often discussed these days — the economics remain front and centre in the definition. Content is meant to be consumed; it is produced for consumers. By labelling something “content”, we choose to emphasise above everything else its status as a product. We are choosing to define it according to its value on the market, rather than its aesthetic or emotional worth. It seems to me that a great deal of the contemporary art scene is doing something similar, reducing artworks to “content” by treating them more as investment opportunities than examples of human ingenuity.
That capitalism has infiltrated all corners of our lives and language is hardly a new observation. But when it comes to “content”, at least, this is not something we need to accept without resistance. Just because marketers want to package Oscar-winning features as “content” doesn’t mean we have to follow their lead. Here is one internet term we can actively reject. Like Emma Thompson, we can shrug off the word as an unnecessary insult against creative people. (Although “creatives” is another fraught term, lifted from advertising agencies and applied, with increasing meaninglessness, to artists and writers and just about anybody else who happens to use imagination in their work.)
It seems to me that many of us also wish we could shrug off the unsatisfying diet of “content” served up by Hollywood. In 2023, an extraordinary thing happened at the box office. One of the films of the year — a movie that drew millions upon millions of viewers — was a fiendishly complicated biopic about the father of the atomic bomb. Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” was defiantly artistic, released in a season more generally known for mindless popcorn fare. Making the success of Nolan’s film even more amazing, it opened the exact same day as “Barbie”, directed by the arthouse darling Greta Gerwig. “Barbie” reversed the trend we’re talking about here: it took what is arguably content (a child’s toy, the literal product of Mattel marketing) and reframed it as something rich and complicated. That both “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” were runaway hits speaks to a desire people have for more meaningful material.
In other words, while executives may be trying to feed us a steady stream of content, what many of us actually want to eat is art.
