The Content Culture Crisis
What is the value of content to a society? What do we even mean by content culture, and at what point did we allow information to become a mass-produced commodity? Since the initial boom in accessibility of shared information via the internet, our digital media industries and, in turn, us as a collective audience, have slowly fallen victim to a capitalistic content culture.
This culture is one which has evolved so rapidly and to such a degree that we now see our mainstream press, once regarded as the cornerstone of an informed and democratic society, broken down into cheap soundbites, internet memes and disingenuous click-baiting headlines. In an attempt to assimilate itself into modern content culture, we must now endure a free press whose value is placed not on the ability to educate its audience, but on its ability to incite reaction.
User-created content, at its conception, was constructed through social media as a communicative tool to be used for education, entertainment and community-building. Professor of computer science and author of “The Language of New Media,” Len Manovich, describes this emerging cultural space as a “new media universe” and attributes its success to “free web platforms and inexpensive software tools” that were used to create content with raw and unpolished aesthetics which, at the time, were rarely seen outside of home VHS tapes. Unfortunately, it was the early 2000’s meaning that this “new universe” of content was quickly infiltrated by bedazzled bebo skins and lofi camcorder footage - think golden-era You’ve Been Framed when they used to pay Paul-from-up-the-road £250 for some grainy footage of someone dropping a wedding cake and you’d be on the right track.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Pushing firmly through this stage of home-made content were equally awful developments in interactive art and communications: To put it simply, connecting with others was made possible through instant messaging platforms such as MSN and let you send a GIF of a pig dancing on a stripper pole. The quicker that technology developed around this brand new concept of user-connection and user-generated content, the quicker we developed alongside it. Within the space of a couple of decades we have not only professionalised content creation, but we now have a completely different relationship to what content is and what role it now plays.
As with literally any single thing that exists under capitalism, there had to be a way for it to be sold or purchased and so, content creation became content marketing. The infiltration of brand advertisers producing content formed a digital environment wherein the face of digital media became a high quality, pre-planned, company/state-funded, self referencing and highly structured machine, intended to churn out the brightest, shiniest and loudest content for maximum engagement. This culture surrounds content in the context of being a product so heavily that it began to change the nature of content itself, how it is made, what it is about and what its purpose is, producing what I call content².
Content² is a phenomenon in which a piece of content is so self-referencing that it becomes baseless, topicless, meaningless. The only topic is content culture itself. The structure it forms is cannibalistic; you may watch a video which is actually three videos in a grid format playing at the same time. Two of them will be something visually appealing or ‘satisfying,’ the third will be something that gives a feeling of progression, such as watching a minecraft character jumping through a virtual landscape. Just as you're able to keep up with watching someone cutting up soap and watching someone else burst balloons covered in nail polish at the same time, the audio element begins and it's yet another person, this time telling a story of how they caught their husband cheating on them on a skydiving trip to Cancun.
It is, of course, the most dramatic episode of storytelling you've ever heard. At first it feels like a chaotic jumbled mess that has been hastily thrown together in the hopes that at least one element of it will grab your attention, but its disordered nature is not only intentional, it's essential. The intention is to not only hook you in, but to disassociate you entirely. The audio component allows you to focus on something non-visible, allowing you to disconnect from what you are watching, while still providing enough visual stimulation to keep you entertained. If you are focussed enough to watch you are rewarded with the ability to watch progression incentive content and if you visually disassociate enough to focus on the audio you are rewarded with bright lights and colours flashing through the blurred distortion of unfocussed eyes. It offers you multiple sensory environments and preys on your most human of impulses to keep you consuming for as long as possible. As content² is mass produced and promoted across most social media platforms, we are beginning to live through the developmental era of content sludge. What was once rich and fertile mud, homing the possibility of development, growth and life, is now reduced to a mere by-product of itself. A slurried amalgamation of unintelligible information, a meaningless sludge of content.
Using content² for advertising is a golden opportunity for businesses - not only does it supplement paying for the creation of your own marketing materials, but it also exists in an inherent state of mass appeal, regardless of personal taste or algorithm. Even when the perceived quality, perceived sharing value and likelihood of making a sale from these efforts are low, it is still immensely valuable as advertisement because of the way it infiltrates algorithms. Pop music is sometimes used as a promotional tool by musicians in this same way. Music producer and pop star, SOPHIE Xeon, shared that she utilised this technique by producing a pop album in-between each experimental album. In doing so, she put her work into a mainstream context, marketing herself as a brand and audience building for her other works. When asked to describe this genre of music she labelled it as “advertising.” Even the most abrasive content, when mass-produced for a mainstream audience, finishes the job it was created for - advertising.
What does this mean for us as a collective audience? The majority of us don't seem to enjoy this type of content or marketing and yet, it has already begun changing the way we consume digital media. The more our media focuses on producing sensory stimulating content, the more we search it out and begin to require it to avoid boredom. We are so overwhelmed by sensory input and wading through content sludge that we are trained into craving it when doing something simple such as reading the news.
“When content culture has been led by businesses to prey on us as consumers and by the press to act without integrity, the only remaining option is to self-produce.”
In response, our news outlets attempt to integrate traditional models of journalism with the need of the modern audience to be sensory stimulated. The emerging importance of growing a digital audience means that the press also have a duty to attract attention, the result of these pressures is a press who seek to use shock value and baiting headlines to reach an audience through manufactured outrage. They are then able to bury the evidence behind a paywall, not allowing the public to accurately fact check details or to read retraction notices apologising for misleading information. This is a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and culture wars; the level of deception and manipulation involved means that the views expressed in these broken down headlines are then actualised in society as fact, and are never corrected without payment.
When content culture has been led by businesses to prey on us as consumers and by the press to act without integrity, the only remaining option is to self-produce. The failures of the digital media industry as content creators has forced people to make the content they wanted to see. The generation that have grown up throughout this period are now becoming teenagers and young adults with a massive creative skillset that they are using to take art back from the corporations.
Content culture no longer serves its audience or the corporations who led it to its downfall and this. Combined with a mass distrust for the media, this is resulting in the general public focussing on taking their creative efforts away from the digital realm. In promising a ‘free marketplace of ideas’ corporations, such as Twitter, are degrading content regulation services regarding hate speech towards its users. Inevitably this leads to minorities being silenced or bullied off of platforms and in response, they take their work offline. We have been focussed on creating within a failing digital environment with no respite for so long that we are now beginning to see the pushback of creators who do not want their work to be lost in between advertisements. I have often found that one of the most wonderful features of human beings is that we are in a constant choreography of returning to art through development. Our clawing need for advancement sees us tear through any subject and reveal to one another the worst parts of our human nature. Returning to art, it seems, is always our final evolution.
Words: Kaycia Ainsworth
