CONTENT - KATE EICHHORN

Another quick little summer read. Grabbed this at the Lawrence Public Library and read it by the pool. Eichhorn is a media professor and tried to create a little introduction and float some theories about digital culture and the definition/role of “Content” therein. Going in, I assumed the word was typically used to mean anything available online. From old movies you can stream, to people’s tweets, to photos you up on Instagram to 1,000 page pdf files. Eichhorn, I think rightly, pursues a narrower definition. She sees content as the extra stuff, meant only to generate attention, while actual art and more thoughtful digital expressions would be something else. So if a celebrity is tweeting a lot and going on podcasts and appearing in a lot of youtube videos, that’s content, the movie that might stream on some service later isn’t, since it has a higher artistic purpose. I think Eichhorn is right to be suspicious and think this is really bad for us as a whole. She does a good job tracing the evolution of content on the internet, and explains how the incentives of the internet bend it towards stupid, “optimized” content that everyone hates and, yet, is ubiquitous. I wish she’d gone a little wider and speculated as to why these forces are arranged in this way, but what can you do. Likewise, she interrogated the ways that content, and it’s variant, fake news, twists and distorts politics, especially electoral politics, and especially around Trump. Here’s another place where I could have used a wider view about the historical uses of dis-info and fake news for political ends. This book, through omission, suggests that this sort of weaponized content is a Russian invention and technique, not something the US is quite familiar with. Likewise, I found the suggestions at the end, ex. Increase media literacy, to be a bit bland and below the scale of what were dealing with. Overall, a good excuse to think about content and the implications of all this, but didn’t go deep enough into some key areas.