I decided against posting last week because I wanted to devote my writing energies to getting the next chapter of the script for ID completed. I’m making good progress and having some of those fun breakthroughs that only happen when you’re clacking away.
Even though I spent most of the past few days in a bubble of scriptwriting, I still managed to get peeved by a discourse that seems to pop up every few months from different places.
It’s always centered on the same idea, the idea that people who post online are posting content for the pleasure of the great unknown audience. This is often posted by some twenty-something who wasn’t alive for the birth of internet fandom and niche spaces and doesn’t understand the decades of shit creators went through just to have a stable place to share their work.
Going into the history of all of that would be going into the history of the internet itself, which isn’t what this blog is about. What this blog is about however is art. Writing. Maybe some comics and zines.
Not Content. I’ll never be convinced that I’m creating content.
What is Content?
We’re working with the secondary definition today, not the one where content equates to a state of satisfaction. Now that that’s all cleared up, let’s talk about what content means online.
Modern social media platforms all host and generate content. In the eyes of the programmers and profiteers, there are three sectors of the website all designed with one purpose: profit
- Infrastructure
- Content
- Ads
Infrastructure is what differentiates TikTok from Instagram, Facebook from Twitter. Untold amounts of money is sunk into designing platforms that keep you there for longer, whether on the creator side or the consumer side.
Content is what keeps these platforms running. Without creator videos, YouTube is just another channel and TikTok wouldn’t exist. Content is what draws users in so that they will view the most important part of this trifecta (to the platform owners) ads.
Ads are the end-all-be-all purpose of social media platforms. Ads are why content is content .
A Term for the Profiteers not the Proles
Aside from some pretty clear no-go’s, ads don’t give a damn what video they appear on/between/beside, as long as they are seen. The same psychiatric help blurb being mentioned by a girl about to talk about her eating disorder and a guy about to do a Mario speedrun? Sure. An ad for high performance sportswear midroll of a historical masonry video? Why not? And don’t forget to buy RV insurance between looking at kawaii tattoos.
Ads don’t care, and aren’t tied in the slightest to what you’re viewing. They’re predominantly based on your personal search history and some other (potentially unethical) data collections from your internet history. You could be watching videos about rocket science, a high school production of Hamlet, or just colors and shapes and noise. After all, that’s all content is. Meaningless colors-shapes-noise that seamlessly feed you into ads.
Content Generation
It’s completely understandable how people raised on a post-niche internet end up believing the all-is content lie. For one, it’s a really sexy lie. It says that the internet is a walled garden made just for you, Bezos-Zucker-Oogle’s specialist little viewer. Here there are hand-crafted and hand picked niceties just for your viewing pleasure, and the only reason anyone posts anything ever is to get 0.001 seconds of your time through the like button.
Therefore everything posted should attend to your sensibilities, and if it doesn’t you’re fully justified in making a fuss. You can see this in the comment section of even the most bland of paint mixing videos. Why is this on my feed? This is crap. You’re mixing in the wrong direction.
There is no assessment of why this person has decided to post themselves arduously mixing paint to match a CD, what they get out of it, or if they’re trying to spread the color matching hobby to others. No, it’s just content. And perhaps even worse, there’s no internal assessment of whether they might like to do it themselves, or support the hobby.
No, content only exists in the now, and has no purpose beyond the viewer’s pleasure for the few moments it is on the screen. And that’s just the way ads want it to be.
A Tenuous Situation
There are some creators that just create content. All three of the short-form video hosts are inundated with robot voiceovers narrating viral reddit posts over stolen baking clips. These require no thought, no energy, no investment. These could be automated if the creator is tech-savvy enough. There are also those who just steal other’s creations to generate content faster because it’s algorithmically better to post more than to post in good faith. And ads run on them just the same.
For the rest of creatordom, I’d say the vast majority of creatordom, they are not creating content. They are writing, drawing, painting, horse-training, sharing and just want to share that love with the world. It also happens that the most efficient way to share that love with the most people is through these platforms. How else do two horse-trainers across the ocean meet?
Every creator on these platforms has made the choice to deal with the possibility that their work can be sent to the shadows for falling out of trend, can lose their community due to a freak accident, and will very likely have all of their unique ideas stolen without credit by a much more popular aggregator that posts 6 times a day. It’s -unfortunately- the price for the possibility of fame.
But some creators -by choice- revert to the pre-content days of internet and choose to post on niche sites. Sites without algorithmic ads, or sites without ads entirely.
Like Archive Of Our Own. (henceforth referred to as A03)
The Original Discourse (This Time)
This time the discourse arose out of a viral tweet over what is-and-isn’t allowed as a fanfiction commenter. Commenter etiquette as a social common is something of the distant past, which has to do with internet history, which I won’t go into. Suffice to say that many authors left their very justified reasoning: they post to share with fellow fans of the same specific thing they wrote about. Not for improving writing, not for soliciting critique, but for the sole reason A03 exists.
Of course those who believe they’re the internet’s specialist-little-viewer took umbrage to this and thus the discourse began. They were understandably piled on and tweeted (twote? tweeten?) into submission. But this highlights a bigger issue. An issue that wasn’t on the side of the viewer, but on the side of the authors.
Everyone -even while defending their writing- continued to refer to their work as content, just like the original poster did. Content to refer to writing specifically made to celebrate fandom. Writing that would not exist except for someone having enough love for a creation to transform it. Writing that would not be the same if it were about a different series, or had different motivations.
That’s not content, and we shouldn’t fall into the trap of agreeing with what ad sponsors want.
You’re a writer if you write, a painter if you paint, a gamer if you play games, and a fashion critic if you sit around talking about fashion week. It’s not content. You’ll never convince me it is.
fatcr0w is a hobbyist artist with a passion for comics and illustration. They take on too many projects and don’t know when to shut up. It is with great optimism that they believe one day this blurb will be more interesting.
fatcr0w 