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From the time we roll out of bed to check overnight updates to our last posts, likes, and views of the previous day, we're consuming and producing content. But what does the term “content” even mean? When did it become ubiquitous? And at what cost? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kate Eichhorn offers a concise introduction to content and the content industry, examining the far-reaching effects content has on culture, politics, and labor in a digital age.
Eichhorn traces the evolution of our current understanding of content from the early internet to the current social mediaverse. The quintessential example of content, she says, is the Instagram egg—an image that imparted no information or knowledge and circulated simply for the sake of circulation. Eichhorn explores what differentiates user-generated content from content produced by compensated (although often undercompensated) workers; examines how fields from art and literature to journalism and politics have weathered the rise of the content industry; and investigates the increasing importance of artists’ “content capital”—the ability of artists, writers, and performers to produce content not about their work but about their status as artists.
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Creators
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Series
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Publisher
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Release date
May 10, 2022 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780262368209
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780262368209
- File size: 458 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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February 14, 2022
Media historian Eichhorn (The End of Forgetting) lays out what content is, what it’s used for, and where it’s headed in this concise survey. “Like it or not, content has become an integral part of our lives,” she writes, defining the content industry as one that “exists only in parasitical relationship to other industries, from marketing and publishing to education and entertainment.” She considers the industries that have been bolstered by the rise of digital content, notably through content farms that pay paltry wages for vast quantities of poorly written articles that only exist to generate revenue “from AdSense placements.” She also digs into the culture of fake news and clickbait (best explained as a result of the content business’s appetite for quantity over quality) and makes the unsurprising declaration that the content industry has had negative effects on journalism and the publishing industry (“Content with no journalistic integrity at all has increasingly come to be viewed as journalism”). Eichhorn keeps things tight and accessible as she spotlights the dark and damaging aspects of content: even given all the negative effects and the rise of “content resisters” who favor old mediums, she writes, the industry will only continue to thrive. This is a fine introduction for readers curious about how much of what’s online came to be there.
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