Yesterday I retweeted (the user-generated way, which allowed me to editorialize "Nightmarish") the rww Sunday Editorial "Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried" (http://bit.ly/68LAmv ). The fact that I follow Richard MacManus (author of the editorial) and Co. on Twitter demonstrates that I take them to be authorities of sorts, such that, if they are worried, perhaps I should be as well (though the last thing I need is more anxiety in my life).
So I did a bit of homework on this pending threat to my relative tranquility as a blogger, and read a cluster of recent posts around the question of "content farming": Michael Arrington's "The End of Hand Crafted Content" (http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/13/the-end-of-hand-crafted-content/ ); "Why Social Beats Search" by A VC (http://www.avc.com/a-vc/2009/12/why-social-beats-search.html.); "The Revolution Will Not Be Intermediated" on Doc Searls' Weblog (http://blog.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/12/13/the-revolution-will-not-be-intermediated/ ) - all of these posted on December 13, 2009.
Along the way, I realized a couple of things. First, my anxious response to the notion of "content farms" was based in part on some unconscious association with cruelty to animals, and especially to horses (e.g. the invidious "PMU farms" where mares are relentlessly exploited to produce estrogen-based products for women). But more importantly, my trouble has been with the word "content" in this context, and the slippery imprecision of its usage with reference to the Web. In rww's editorial, for example, Richard MacManus writes that "companies like Demand Media and Answers.com...create thousands of pieces of content per day." I get what he's talking about, but I also get the beginnings of a headache.
And what "really scares" Michael Arrington? "It's the use of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that handcraft their content today. It's the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, fed to us by the portals and search engines." I guess I resist the image of me (or any blogger I respect) with jaws wired open, ingesting whatever is coming down the pipeline.
Doc Searls' post of 12/13 came closest to making sense on this matter. "...I've been hand-crafting (actually just typing) my "content" for about twenty years now, and I haven't been destroyed by a damn thing. I kinda don't think FFC is going to shut down serious writers (no matter where and how they write) any more than McDonalds killed the market for serious chefs.... Nothing with real value is dead, so long as it can be found on the Web and there are links to it. Humans are the ones with hands. Not intermediaries. Not AOL, or TechCrunch, or HuffPo, or Google or the New York Freaking Times. The Net is the means to our ends, not The Media.... The Net and the Web liberate individuals. They welcome intermediators, but do not require them.... what matters most is what each of us as individuals bring to the Net's table. Not the freight system that helps us bring it there, no matter how established or disruptive that system is.... We seem to think that progress on the Net is the work of "brands" creating and disrupting and doing other cool stuff. Those may help, but what matters most is what each of us does better than anybody or anything else. The term "content" insults the nature of that work. And of its sources." [emphasis added]
Finally, a kindred view on the debased usage of "content" in this discussion, and more broadly in relation to the Web. I underscored above the instance where the word marks a link to a much earlier post on Searls' blog, entitled "The personal platform" and dated January 31, 2008 (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/01/31/the-personal-platform/ ) It seems that the figure or model of "content" has been troubling Searls for some time: "Until I read this piece by Adriana Lukas this morning I hadn't fully realized how the ubiquitous use of the word content, which I've griped about for years (and which Adriana quotes), frames our understanding of markets, and media, in ways that place presumed control in the hands of "providers" other than ourselves. Even UGC - "User Generated Content" - is not seen as ours, but as freight for media companies to forward for their own purposes. As John Perry Barlow put it a few years back, "I didn't start hearing about 'content' until the container business felt threatened.'"
He provides a link to a post by Adriana Lukas for mediainfluencer under the title "Content is for container cargo business" (http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2008/01/content-is-for-container-cargo=business/ ), which in turn begins with two citations from Doc Searls on "content."
Doc Searls on Content in 2005: "The word content connotes substance. It's a material that can be made, shaped, bought, sold, shipped, stored and combined with other material. "Content" is less human than "information" and less technical than "data," and more handy than either. Like "solution" or the blank tiles in Scrabble, you can use it anywhere, though it adds no other value.
And again in 2007: "Stop calling everything "content." It's a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the '90s as a wrapper for everthing that could be digitized and put online. It's handy, but it masks and insults the true natures of writing, journalism, photography, and the rest of what we still, blessedly (if adjectivally) call "editorial." Your job is journalism, not container cargo."
As Searls belatedly notes on his own post of 2008, "But rather than gripe some more, Adriana offers a useful way of framing the full worth of individuals, the creative goods they produce, and what they bring to both social and business relationships: the concept of the person as the platform:
Content is media industry term. The number of people talking about content grows every day as they assume roles that before only media could perform. With more tools and ways of distributing, photos, videos, writings, cartoons etc. are being 'liberated' from the channel world. Alas, often sliding into the platform and silo world. As far as I am concerned there are only two platforms - the individual user and the web.
Years later, in light of the purported menace of "content farms" coming soon to a search engine near you, this might ring a bit naive, or utopian. But at least Searls and Lukas reflect upon and resist the ways in which "content" has become radically debased coinage. With its value so diminished before the fact, it's harder to worry about what little is left.
I didn't catch this post until now (July 2011). Thanks so much for digging so deeply into archived stuff. All well-put and much appreciated.
One small correction. There is a typo in a link in the second paragraph. It should be http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/12/13/the-revolution-will-not-be-intermediated/ . (An s got left off the word blog.)
Posted by: Dsearls | 07/22/2011 at 09:13 AM