omewhere, an artistic youngster is dreaming of growing up to be a "content producer."
In the terminology brought on by the Internet, few words have been repeated more often than "content." It's a magically general word that has come to stand in for film, music, video, photography, journalism, fiction, animation, graphics — anything that can draw "eyeballs" to a site and create large numbers of "clicks," and therefore advertising dollars.
It can be defeating to anyone who loves movies, falls deeply into novels or relishes gazing at great art work to find all of these things blandly described as content. The creators, too, might find themselves wondering, for example: "Wait, I thought I made movies, not content."
Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane"? Content. The New York Times' latest in-depth series? Content. Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov"? For a heady Web site, it's simply content.
In the wide-open space of the Web, content is the catch-all term for anything that might make a Web destination a place anyone wants to go. It can, of course, be user-generated (YouTube) or professionally created (Hulu) but it's gotta have some kind of content.
Even the sites built on networking like Facebook and MySpace would be nothing if users didn't set up their pages with photos, bios, music or little notes on what they think of Gov. Sarah Palin.
This has made some declare the grand supremacy of content. The oft-cited argument goes that "content is king." This holds that the Internet is all about information and that your Web site isn't anything without it.
This, in the parlance of the news business, does not seem like breaking news. So people like their Web sites with ... stuff? Amazing that something would be preferable to an empty void.
But there is a counterpoint that says content is well and good, but that connectivity is where the real bucks are. Mathematician Andrew Odlyzko, who's head of the University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Center, made precisely this argument in a 2001 paper titled "Content is Not King."
Odlyzko says that the greater potential of the Internet is not in sharing content, but in its network and pipelines. For example, he cites that the telephone industry dwarfs Hollywood. You can read the full paper here: www.firstmonday.org.
We won't try to settle this debate here and now, but only moan and wail about the homogenization of so many art forms and crafts. Sure, the Internet is a great force of democratization, leveling the playing field between professionals and amateurs. But that doesn't mean all forms of creation need to be rolled into a ball and flippantly summarized as "content."
Which, naturally, is all this article is.
9/4/2008 8:54 PM
By JAKE COYLE
AP Entertainment Writer
omewhere, an artistic youngster is dreaming of growing up to be a "content producer."
