The Way We Interact with Media

I almost wrote “consume” instead, and that’s exactly what I want to grapple with.

What is “Content”?

Somewhere in the last decade, a shift occurred. We stopped talking about movies, books, video games, TV shows and other engaging creative arts we enjoy. We started talking about Content. Content, unlike these other media, is Consumed, rather than played, watched, discussed, or read. Content is the filling you dump into the container to raise its otherwise worthless value. Its the way we speak about things that has changed. Content doesn’t exist for its own sake. It is used to prop up the subscriptions or ad clicks on this or that streaming service. It’s traded back and forth like so many baubles for ephemeral thrills. And the insidious part is that we’ve come to accept this and refer to art as content, too.

You’re not a filmmaker, you’re a content creator.
You’re not an author, you’re a content creator.
You aren’t a video essayist, you’re a content creator.

Creating content to fill up the soulless shell of YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Spotify, Twitter (X), and all the rest. Content is when we stop making art for ourselves and for people, but to fuel "the algorithm" instead.

Now, I’m not saying artists shouldn’t make money or take advantage of business opportunities. But these services, with some exceptions, aren’t operating with our best interests in mind. Cancellations, content take downs (there’s that “Content” again), bannings, censorship, a pittance in royalties paid to bands. We can do better.

Consumption is a cultural problem

Spurred on by social media algorithms, we are pushed keep up with the latest gossip and drama in our social spheres. To see all the movies, read all the books, know who said what about whom on what platform and what status their approval currently is among those in the know. We are pushed to experience media in vast quantity and frequency such that the experience is cursory at best: we don’t get to have that complex, nuanced conversation that takes up more than 280 characters in a post.

Instead, we are given new tools of analysis shorthand: Ratings Aggregators, Tier Lists, and social media rants. We don’t stop to consider whether making a tier list of “best characters” is productive. What does “best” even mean in this context? Imagine you’re a writer and you come across a page ranking your characters from S to F tier. The ones you worked hard on, distilled into “cool”, “meh”, and “trash”? This isn’t about having a thick skin to criticism; rather I want to focus on the usefulness of such things in the larger context.

This is anti-discussion, even when it blooms into discussion, because the context for debate is shifted from the role of characters in story and how the author uses them to who’s the most bangable or who’s got cooler lines, who would win in a fight. It’s no longer a place we come to meet. It’s a show and tell of opinion and preference. There’s nothing wrong with these things, but when they replace the former, the richness of the community suffers. “I like this”, “But I like that one” – is not a conversation. Each shares their views and then things circle back to restatement of the selfsame opinions.

We have forgotten how to think for ourselves

We look at Rotten Tomatoes to decide if a movie’s good. Maybe we look at the box office data. Maybe we look if the book’s a best-seller (that’s a rigged game, by the way, but that’s another blog post), or if the video game won any awards. What happened to critical thinking? What happened to personal judgment, and not scrolling “Reaction Videos”. Why do we even watch those, I wonder? What’s the point?

Fundamentally, I feel the way we interact with media needs to change. Down with “Content” we “Consume”, and embrace art we appreciate individually, and in the context of a wider conversation where we each bring our own perspectives to the piece. And this is before we even begin to grapple with the disasterfuck that "AI" has wrought.

Artificial Intelligence is anti-intellectual

It's making us dumber. Experts are sounding the alarm. Neuroscientists, educators, psychologists—we are every day hearing more evidence of the detrimental ways this fool's errand of tech is damaging the critical thinking development of society, eroding self-awareness and the deep understanding of meaning that comes from sourcing one's own effort instead of asking for a (probably mistake-filled) summary from an LLM. LLMs which will very soon charge you a subscription to continue abandoning your brain muscles. I believe author Frank Herbert said it best in his Dune novels:

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

This is before we touch on the deeply unethical means by which this technology is built, on the backs of the creative people whose work is stolen to train it, and on the communities whose electricity, water, and other utilities are siphoned up to power the greedy, useless machine's data centers.

Consequentially, if you made it this far, you'll note there are no social media links or positive references to "AI" on this website. There never will be.

Put the terminology of “Content” and the rest of what came from it where it belongs on the Tier List: at the bottom.