What do we mean by content now versus ten years ago, prior to social media? (A quick throwback to the good old art theory concept of form and content.)

In this day and age, practically everything can be considered as content. Not just blog posts, social media posts or YouTube videos, but literally everything — even movies and music (which is strange but ok). Thus the very meaning of the word has changed, but not too long time ago, you could actually talk about content without having an immediate connotation to blog posts or video clips. Instead you could have been talking about the content of something, rather than referring the media itself as being the content.

We don’t talk so much about the content of the something any more. The something itself seems to be the content nowadays. As a word, it almost seems to be replacing the word media or medium (as in means of communication) altogether. Not the end of the world, but for the sake of curiosity, let’s talk about further meaning of this so called content.

I’m interested in photography and other visual arts, so let us use images as an example. (You can easily apply the same thinking to text, music or almost anything.)

When analysing an image, it can be divided into it’s form and content. Basic stuff, but since this kind of discourse seems to be lost these days, it’d like to take at least this opportunity to discuss  it.

What is form? Form is how the image has been made. What kind of aesthetic it delivers — image making techniques and such. It is almost entirely a separate thing from the content of the image. If the image doesn’t have any depth or message, you can say it has poor content. So in other words, you can have an impressive looking image, that is skilfully done, but otherwise completely hollow and meaningless. An image like that has no content.

You can also have something completely opposite, for example an image that is technically questionable or even badly made, but it can hold so much emotional, documentational or historical value, or some other significance, that it’s importance cannot be denied. The content of an image such as this is abundant. It is not hollow or meaningless, but rich in suggestion. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the most dramatic conflict photo of the century by some famous photo journalist, but to have some amount substance, charges the image with actual value, that is to say: content.

This is how Wikipedia describes the matter. “The term form refers to the work's composition, techniques and media used, and how the elements of design are implemented. It mainly focuses on the physical aspects of the artwork, such as medium, color, value, space, etc., rather than on what it communicates. Content, on the other hand, refers to a work's subject matter, i.e., its meaning.”

Can you think about books as content? The content is something that is rather in the book, not the book itself, wouldn’t you say? In a similar fashion, I have somewhat hard time accepting movies or music as content, but I suppose that our languages are heading into that direction.