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In defense of content
Content is a dirty word.
The chief problem with this word, "content," is that, in our usage, we drop an adjective. Content is simply that which is contained. The medium is the message, to quote the gospel. Information is a liquid given shape (i.e., meaning) by its container. Containers are a shortcut to meaning in the same way that “a picture is worth 1,000 words.”
Consider water. Can you imagine water sans container? No, we know glasses, lakes, and sweat; oceans, tears, and raindrops. Content is that which is subsumed by its container, whose meaning is sacrificed for the value of its container.
When we on the internet say “content,” we’re typically talking about the content of Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and so on — these proper nouns are the adjectives we drop.
We can chase further definitions, but in common internet usage, especially in the context of “content creators,” this is what we mean: information contained within apps built to facilitate information exchange between creators and consumers. Phones contains apps contain posts contain information; media matryoshka.
This is why content is a dirty word. A people fond of art — films, poems, songs —wince at an art stripped of individuality by the violent scale of app content.
Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, the inbox. Movies are the content of a movie theater, and “We come to this place for magic,” as Nicole Kidman says in that pre-roll AMC ad. Apps — we come to these places to scroll. For information ad infinitum. Time sans horizon.
Why is a movie experienced in a theater “magic”? One reason, key to our understanding of content, is scarcity. Most moviegoers are not watching one movie after another; in isolation, the movie is made all the more magic.
Any one TikTok or Reel viewed in isolation has a different meaning than it does when viewed deep in a one-hour brainrot session. The meaning of any one piece withers under volume. Content is art stripped of individuality in the violence of a crowd.
Creators whose output is exclusively app content, in this way, work for the apps. Instagram content exists to generate ad revenue for Meta. For the user — for the X user, say — content exists to burn the minutes and hours of your day.
In producing media — writing, filming, editing, recording — we have a choice between producing content or chasing the singular. Frustration with the idea of content is a failure to understand, with open eyes and clear mind, which one you are producing.
To borrow from the great media analyst Julia Alexander posting on X this week: “we have GOT TO start differentiating between a YouTuber making a movie, and filmmaker who used YouTube to distribute films making a studio film.”
She follows up: “Mr. Beast is a YouTuber. Fine! Great! Good! Dylan Clark uploads to YouTube. Also fine! Great! Good!” The first is producing content, YouTube videos shaped by platform-algorithm logic; the second is producing movies defined by traditional film industry logic.
There’s no innate shame or glory in either; if you see such qualities, these are your values. But the difference is crucial if you’re looking to make a living here.
The most successful creators of content (see: MrBeast) either understand the container game and exploit it to the best of their ability, or operate outside it, producing not content but art that, by breaking the rules of the container, appeals to the audience more intensely. A rulebreaker of the latter style would be the Resier brothers’ Listers, a DIY film published to YouTube earlier this year for ease of distribution. It’s still not a YouTube video. It’s a documentary movie; they considered more traditional distribution systems, but none made as much sense for their financial and audience goals.
Artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl, in her 2009 essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” describes the titular poor image as “perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.” This is content.
“In the class society of images, cinema takes on the role of a flagship store. In flagship stores high-end products are marketed in an upscale environment. More affordable derivatives of the same images circulate as DVDs, on broadcast television or online, as poor images.”
Listers was made within a traditional documentary-film logic; MrBeast’s work is native to this new YouTube-container content paradigm.
Content is a dirty word, but we cleanse it through understanding. Content appears as an “affordable derivative” of a greater whole, but there is no greater whole. It was created for the bootleg DVD marketplace, so to speak, not for the cinema.
To excel as a content creator — like MrBeast — is to have a high systems literacy. To understand the marketplace and how to serve it. To touch the walls of the container and fill them — to create content is to submit to the rules of a platform. And like in any game, the winners are those with such an innate understanding of the rules as to push them near breaking.
Nobody hates content; they hate containers. Don’t hate the player; hate the game. But if you wish to succeed as a content creator, learn the rules.
Do you agree with this definition of content?
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