When the TV show M.A.S.H. ended over three decades ago, millions of people tuned in to see their favorite characters off. It was a bittersweet goodbye as these characters’ never-ending Korean war drew to a close and they were allowed to return totheir families, many eyes grew wet at the final image: a handmade sign by B.J. Hunnicut that spelled out simply “GoodBye”.
As viewers turned away from that, the most watched single episode of television in the history of the medium, they flipped through their memories of the stories told, and the characters lives. I’m sure more than one viewer was heard to remark: “That was some piece of content.”
Content: the bane of any right thinking creator’s vocabulary. It’s a phrase we use as shorthand for videos, photos, blog posts, movies, plays, tv series, novels, paintings, animations, masterpieces and dreck. Content is a mushy, yellowish substance of gruel-like consistency to be slathered liberally across our brains like spackle.
It’s a catch all phrase, used to boil down all that is available in the new media landscape and I’ll grant you it’s useful. It’s handy when describing what you’ll be producing on behalf of a client or an organization. It’s handy when you need a quick handle for all those mediums that have yet to define themselves properly (vlogs? video podcasts? mobisode? webisode? web series? uch).
But in the creation of said “content”, the word must be banished from your vocabulary for your creation to have any meaning. People don’t value content. They value relationships. You must build something that people can connect with….can have a relationship with…and they will value it. They will pass it along. They will interact. In fact, what you must strive to create, be it moving picture, or text on a page, is a little work of art.
This is not to spark some argument over whether projects with a distinctly commercial undertaking can or cannot be art (they can, but let the flamewar begin below). It’s a manifesto for an attitude adjustment. Creators should bristle at the term. Social media mavens should laugh it off. Bloggers, producers, and new media junkies should say it ironically, with finger quotes.
What got me off on this rampage to begin with, comes from Cory Doctorow’s latest book “Makers“. You can read the book for free online (or do what i did and wait for your birthday and make someone buy it for you), but the line is this: “Stories are how we find ourselves. Technology is how we find our stories.” The line reached out and smacked me in the face. Regardless of your use of social media, the goal is the same. A relationship. The notion of “Content” is antithetical to this idea and it’s time to wipe it from the list of Buzzwords.
We live in a world LOUSY with technology. There’s miracles all around us happening in the palm of your hand, and frankly, it’s not a bad thing to take that for granted. It’s how we evolve.
But it also leads to this problem of technology for technology’s sake. I point you to this article written by film critic Roger Ebert about why 3D is mostly bunkum, and how he just flat out hates it. I’m inclined to agree (though, How To Train Your Dragon was mind-blowing), and am on record saying that 3D will be the laser disc of the 21st century.
So play it like a drinking game at your next brainstorming session. Everytime someone uses the word “Content”, take a shot. Replace the word with some long, over-elaborate description: relationship-building-meta-story, or fan-integrated-video competition. The specificity of defining your creation will pull it from the grey goo that is “Content” and into something that might actually be worth talking about.