The more time that I spend on the internet, the more I hate the word “content”.
Definitely a bold new opinion, to be sure. It’s such a broad, all-encompassing term, that means so much but increasingly feels like it means so little. I don’t feel I can tell anyone that content creation is what I do. What does that even mean? If I tell the average person in my life that I “create content”, I still have to keep going to say “I make videos about gaming to post them on YouTube.” “I stream video games online.” “I write for a blog.” Whatever it may be, I still have to take the extra steps to actually at least roughly explain what it is that I do. I dabble with audio software and audio mixing to record and process voice-over with a microphone. I’ve learned a bit of Adobe Premiere Pro to intake and whittle around hours and hours of gameplay video footage. I (pretend to) know a little about search engine optimization. It goes on and on.
Even in the “creator space”, as it were, extra steps need to be taken. I make video game content but telling a self-made model online that I make “content” doesn’t get the idea across. We are both “content creators” but what we actually do is so different. I remember feeling this when “being a YouTuber” was the shorthand. Travel vlogs? Cooking videos? Political coverage? Comedy skits? I illustrate the differences under this umbrella simply because “content” feels like a void, sucking up anything and everything anyone does online these days. I make content, you make content, even your dad posting a funny video of his dog has a chance to go viral and become “content”, if it’s not arguably already “content” at the point of inception. It’s like telling someone I like “food”. I’m a “food eater”. Pasta? Steak? Vegan? Eggs? Paper or plastic? It just strikes me as devaluing what people do.
As shorthand to try to quickly get across what one does, I kind of get it. Again, telling the average person “I help produce essay videos about video games online” is hard. Whether “content creator” is effective in that instance or not, seeing people bill themselves as one in their space, to their audience…seeing that has contributed to all of this bumming me out over time. To their own viewers, they don’t tend to bill themselves as an entertainer, as a writer, as a personality, what have you. “I am a content creator.” Part of it is that many are so damn humble, but part of it is just that this is the accepted vernacular. We fall into it.
I’ve dabbled on the YouTube and Twitch end of things in the gaming sphere for over a decade. Over time I’ve been very fortunate to acquaint with a wide array of people who I get to share this space with. For some it’s a hobby, for others it’s the cornerstone of a multifaceted business strategy. Some regularly stream to a handful of viewers, hoping to break through while others routinely entertain millions of people a year. Everyone has their own talents, skills they learn they have in this process, good days and bad days, pros and cons…not to be dramatic, but sometimes it feels dehumanizing to pop open the “content creation” umbrella and let all the pieces fall underneath it.
Beyond it all, and this speaks more to my own current mental space than anything, it’s hard to avoid my thoughts drifting to whether any of this has a point. The whims and will of the broader internet collective demand content, without a word. Terabytes upon terabytes upon terabytes of video content is uploaded and shared daily, sequences of words like this are strung together to flail in the digital winds, photograph after photograph of people, their lives, their ambitions, their losses, all posted to get a double tap before a thumb scrolls on to the next piece. And I’m getting stuck on this as a guy who mostly puts videos up that amount to “Yeah I liked the video game!” I look at the recent Warner Bros / Discovery merger, and how creative television shows and movies are being tossed aside for nakedly transparent business purposes. Hearts and souls poured into creating entertainment from hundreds of people just to be treated as if they’re nothing. If I’m having these struggles over the piddly things, I post online, I couldn’t fathom the headspace they must find themselves in. I simply couldn’t.
I started playing Horizon: Forbidden West on my PlayStation 5 this week, putting a couple hours into it by now. I say this with respect, it feels like some demented TV show floor salesman’s wet dream. Even at 1080P resolution each frame bursts with an almost overwhelming color pallet, environments and characters animating so smoothly at sixty frames per second. It’s a spectacle, and I keep finding myself saying “Wow” at the things that are front and center. However, it’s the things that meld into the background and do the heavy work that have given me some pause. The time that must go into crafting each asset, tweaking it further and further. There’s a stunningly red mountainous vista surrounding the village of Chainscrape I’m currently in. Inspired vendor stalls lined with axes, spears, and bows I did not give a single moment to. Footsteps in the dirt left behind by the player character that I did not notice until the prior sentence. Foot-high patches of grass convincingly sway to and fro from the wind. There are hundreds, if not thousands of individual things about this small town I’m about to leave behind that I will never notice, that hundreds of thousands of the game’s players collectively may all entirely miss. I wonder if the people behind those details ever hit similar walls in their own ways. To work and work and work on details that take on the unenviable, colossal task of making up the tapestry as a whole. To be so good for what they are that they become unnoticeable on their own. If these things weren’t on my mind, I’d probably not have looked at the weapons at the vendor stall for a single moment. I hope statements like that don’t demoralize them. At the least, artists get to be artists, and aren’t simply “content creators”. I hope a term like it never reaches their shores and takes root.
There’s no happy ending to this post, just a desire that those of us doing this break down what we do a little more. Romanticize aspects of it just a tad. It’s not an easy hobby or career to romanticize, but I can’t shake that we’re all losing a bit of what we can identify ourselves with. Emphasize our strengths, describe ourselves more grandly, and wrest back a bit of our individuality by moving to…still pretty broad terms for what we do, but at least more illustrative than “content creator”. Videographer. Voice over artist. Musician. Photographer. Model. Whatever it may be. In the meantime, I plan to put my head back down and grip with my perspective on the futility of this overall. Once I hit “Update” to this post, it becomes “content”, after all.
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