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We Need to Ban the Word “Content”
By democratizing creativity, we’ve devalued it — and forever changed how we talk, think, and feel about the arts.
I used to love lists. The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 1,000 Places To See Before You Die. David Letterman’s Top Tens. And if you could count ’em down backward to №1, even better.
As a kid, I had a Sports Illustrated Special Edition issue that dropped on January 1, 1991, called “Baseball’s 20 Greatest Teams of All Time.” It’s a collector’s item now. At age 8, though? It felt so definitive. That’s what I loved as I pored over the pages. I wanted to read canon. Nothing less would do. If I consume a slice of media, it should feel definitive and informed and evoke something. (Shout-out to the 10 Commandments — the O.G. listicle.)
Fast-forward to the 21st Century, when the internet gave everyone a platform to share their thoughts, feelings, tips, tricks, and intel. Now we consume more data in a day than a 16th-century human did in a lifetime.
Podcasts. Blogs. New media. Old media trying to new media. The 24/7 news cycle. Instagram. YouTube. TikTok. Wikipedia. “5 Ways to” this and “9 Rules for” that. Fan fiction about fan fiction. In the fence-free expanse of the medias social, everybody made a land grab.
