Empty content
Plain content is meaningless. It is generic, easily manufactured and easily replicated, hollow and something you have already seen one million times before.
Sure, content can be aesthetically pleasing and technically good, but it typically it doesn’t resonate or have any kind of depth. It doesn’t convey or suggest much. In other words, it suffers from profound emptiness. It’s primary purpose often seems to be something superficial to be posted on social media without any higher aspirations. Too bad stuff like that is already everywhere and completely normalised. Almost like a new standard. (The rise of AI will probably make the matter worse as organic human made content is getting a rarer treat. An alarming amount of YouTube content is already clearly scripted by AI, in case you haven’t noticed.)
Content seems to get confused with artwork (in lack of a better term) and self expression very often and I have the feeling most people cannot tell them apart. There probably even isn’t a clear definition because the topic is subject to much interpretation and discussion, but what the heck… let’s talk about it anyways.
For the longest time, I’ve had this indescribable sense while scrolling through my social media feeds. There always seems to be something missing. Most of the stuff (that I’m now referring to as content) appears to be fabricated rather than born. Soulless if you will. Content is usually something that has no content (meaning or message) of itself, that’s why it literally feels empty.
I always get the feeling that content is something that would have not been made, if the author wouldn’t be able to post it. It has been made for the sake of it. Content is completely dependent of the container, whether it’s Instagram, TikTok, a blog or YouTube. These containers are hungry for the content and they cannot exist without it. Content is something that has the sole purpose of fulfilling this endless hunger and not much else. Actual artwork is perhaps a bit too demanding and time consuming to be used as proper content, thus the content we are now so accustomed to, tends to lean towards quickly made executions of worn out ideas. In many ways content is seemingly almost like any other art form, with the exception of having no other meaning than to just briefly exist on our feeds.
Honest self expression is independent from this toxic demand, but it can be treated as heathy content, if the artist has the desire to display it. The value system is just different: expression and the need to create are priorities, displaying and publishing are secondary or completely irrelevant altogether.
Artwork and honest self expression do not give a crap about reach, engagement or performance. Their value is measured in personal meaning and how much effort it took from the artist personally. They still hold value whether they are published or not, because they are relying on much healthier value system, as opposed to the attention seeking and neediness of plain content production.
I could have chosen to generate this article, or something similar, with Chat GPT and it would have saved me an hour or two, but it would have rendered the text into just content. Now that I wrote this myself, in addition to being content, this article is also an outlet to express my own thoughts and a channel to share an opinion. (I have actually explored AI for writing, but I didn’t get shit out of it and the output was just a bunch of words.)
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