From time to time in one of my social media feeds, I’ll see an earnest poster bemoaning the word “content.” “Don’t call it ‘content,’ it’s art!” a painter or a musician might tweet, before dozens or hundreds of followers like the post and respond with approval. Emma Thompson, a writer/director/actor I admire greatly, recently made the same point, insisting the word is rude and creatives shouldn’t tolerate it. And a quick Google search for the phrase “don’t call it content” will bring up plenty of columns on Medium and other sites where different writers expound at length on the soulless nature of the term.
I understand where they’re all coming from: songs, photographs, paintings, stories, movies and novels are often noble works of creative expression that should be treated with appropriate respect. If you’re a graphic designer, and some tech bro starts telling you how much he digs your content, by all means, run far and fast, because that is just a weird way to talk.
But, as a guy who’s had the word “content” in my title multiple times over the past few decades as I’ve worked for companies that make huge catalogs of different kinds of digital art available to fans, I also think the word has a worse reputation than it deserves, and that we should all guard against the Manichean habits social media encourages, in which anything and everything – from politicians to the laws they pass to individual pieces of art, as well as artists themselves and the words we use to describe them – gets judged all good or all bad, instantly.
Because sometimes things that are terrible in one context (the virus that gives you COVID, for instance) are wonderful in another (the version of that same virus that can be used to vaccinate you against COVID, for example). And sometimes “content” is an apt and useful word to describe massive collections of things that may include, but do not consist exclusively of, art. The catalog of wallpapers and live wallpapers inside the Zedge Ringtones and Wallpapers app includes a lot of brilliant illustrations. But it also includes a wealth of titles, tags and descriptions of those same pictures, along with artist avatars, identification numbers, pricing information and other metadata that helps us track who’s owed how much as our users (another helpful word people including me sometimes complain about) browse, buy and share items on our platform. That metadata is critically important, and it needs to be managed carefully, but it’s not exactly art. It’s merely art-adjacent.
So we call that mass of stuff that includes but does not consist entirely of art, “content,” and we call the tools we use to enter, edit and report on it all a “content management system,” and many of the administrators who log into those tools are dubbed “content moderators” or “content managers.” There’s nothing disrespectful about doing so. These words – art, content – are not magical incantations that can add or remove intrinsic qualities from the things they’re describing.
They can signal how we’re thinking about or what we’re doing with them, however, and I understand why the authors of all those articles I linked to above worry that referring to works of art as content might indicate a lack of respect for the art itself. In my experience, though, most people who spend their work week (and, often, a lot of nights and weekends) caring for huge catalogs of content really do care for the individual items in those catalogs.
We might not be museum curators donning white gloves while we carefully unpack crates of physical paintings that must be displayed in temperature-controlled rooms and protected from too much light, but we do want our tools, websites and apps to present those items as cleanly and helpfully as possible, so that potential fans can find them easily, and fall in love with the artists who made them, and, hopefully, then give those artists some money so they can keep making more. We spend hours or weeks debating new tagging policies, or modifications to genre trees, or lobbying for more storage space so we can upgrade the thumbnail images that can lead users to individual pieces in search results. My dreams are regularly filled with spreadsheets of corrupted metadata, or consist of nightmare scenes in which someone hits the wrong command and erases entire databases of…content. (I was tempted to type “art,” there, but the point I’m making is it’s not just art, and I literally lose sleep at the thought of it all getting deleted, because even the stuff that isn’t art is important.)
So, I will keep using the word content, with zero embarrassment, when it’s appropriate to do so. You don’t have to join me if you don’t have a job like mine, but I’m not making this case merely to justify that job or its jargon, and if you still find yourself sneering at the term, I politely suggest you examine why.
Because one of the purposes of art is to shake us out of our comfort zones, to make us see an object or a person or life itself from a different perspective – to make us feel something so powerfully it changes the way we think. And assuming that people who use words such as “content” are soulless philistines, while people who only ever call it “art” are noble and pure beings who always recognize art when they see it and treat it with the proper respect strikes me as the exact type of comforting delusion that good art is designed to explode.
Sometimes even the most thoughtful of us might encounter and relate to a work of art as something less rarified. Raging Bull is a legit masterpiece, but if you were scrolling through your phone the last time it aired on TCM, you were treating it more like content than art. And that’s OK! We can all be crass or mercenary or simply lazy or tired on occasion. None of us stop to contemplate every single picture in a museum for the same amount of time, nor should we want to. Just because we rush past some doesn’t mean none of them have the power to stop us in our tracks, cause a little earthquake in our soul, and make us see ourselves in a new way.
But assuming anyone who uses the word “content” lacks the capacity for such moments of transcendence is a mistake, just as pretending we’re always the good guys and some other people are always the bad guys – as alluring a fantasy as it might be – is a very bad habit. And even if you hate the word content, I’m pretty sure you still need to fight against that particular temptation.
Thus ends this particular piece of content.