by Gus Mitchell
In Henry VI, Shakespeare seems to have coined the expression “heart’s content.” The phrasemaking of King Henry is telling: “Her grace in speech”, he says of his Queen, “makes me from wondering, fall to weeping joys. / Such is the fulness of my heart’s content.”
Juxtaposing “wondering” to the joyous “fullness” of “content”, he describes the process of joy as an escaping of the potentially infinite vagaries of thinking; it is held in the intuitive knowing of the heart. To feel content, then, is to rejoice in a feeling of fulness beyond the need for further words, for further inputs or outputs, a fulness which depends, implicitly, on the felt presence of a pre-inscribed limit –– a container –– beyond which no more wanting or needing is possible.
Content derives from the Latin contentus (contained; satisfied) and continere (to hold together/enclose) – from the root com (with, together) and tenere (to hold). Content is a noun, a verb, an adjective, but common to all of these is the sense of something held, kept together, contained. It is a symptom of our inverted times that content has now means something radically alien. Content as an attainable feeling vanishes as the content of the internet proliferates.
Google “What is Content?” and you will encounter an infinitude of web pages explaining the concept of content marketing; the indispensability of superior content for your brand; how to use content strategically, on and on. The word itself is a blank: “Most businesses already engage in content marketing in some form by creating consumable content that is published on a public platform to generate brand awareness.”
Content marketing, as its own practitioners understand it, involves creating writing or images with the eventual goal of generating revenue. It is not explicitly promotional – and so distinct from mere ‘marketing’ or advertising; instead, it offers information, ‘useful’ or ‘interesting’ information, with the goal of increasing sales. It dates all the way back to Ben Franklin himself. In 1732, Franklin produced the first annual Poor Richard’s Almanack, which ran until 1758, selling over 10,000 copies a year at its peak. It was essentially a miscellany of useful stuff from weather and astronomical data to household tips and puzzles, but its purpose was as a promotional tool for Franklin’s publishing business. Instrumentalising information in this way only grew in popularity, in print, then beyond. In 1895, John Deere began publishing The Furrow, a quarterly magazine which included general interest pieces on agriculture, side by side with marketing for John Deere products to help you get the job done. When radio came, companies were quick to take advantage. Sears-Roebuck started its own radio station, WLS (‘World’s Largest Store’) in 1924, so that they could advertise products from their stores in concert with original music and comedy content – moving beyond the old model of paying other stations for the privilege. The magazine culture of the 1960s led to things like Weight Watchers Magazine, launched in 1968, which updated the John Deere model, running articles about women’s health and lifestyle in between promotions.
Everything we encounter online is essentially information, in the sense of a series of digitised bits, arranged, in formation. The contents of a sequence matter only insofar as it composes and communicates information. Going by this definition, content is information for consumption or at least to facilitate consumption. A song streaming on Spotify is nothing other than an informational sequence, as is a movie digitally shot and streamed via Netflix. Both things are content too, of course –– indeed, by now content-as-entertainment seems to have a semantic primacy for most over the word’s digital origins in the world of online marketing and sales dating back to the mid-90s. Information is the internet’s medium and its currency. And as Mark Zuckerberg said of his ambitions for Facebook: “I just want to facilitate information flow.”
The state of today’s enshittified internet awash in an evermore undifferentiated stream of content, is ample evidence of how utterly, blandly literal was the sense of information Zuckerberg had in mind. In Zuckerberg’s formulation of information flow, it is flow and not information that matters. The Instagrammification of Real Life impelled by the technological turn which put “content creation” into the hands of everyone with a smartphone (and made of it something close to an imperative) has been swiftly led into IRL enshittifications also: public spaces such as cafes lean with increasing ubiquity toward the homogenised cuteness of fairy lights, neon, and nooks; immersive exhibitions, which actively encourage patrons to “share your experience” (“sharing” the experience is often the implicit reason for going); mass non-violent protests organised with the immediate aim, not of effecting concessions, but of making consumable news content that might somehow serve to effect concessions. To misquote Nora Ephron, everything is content.
Commodity fetishism was defined in 1867 by Marx as the alienation of social relations by which the product of labour, the thing made, is assumed to have meaning and reality extraneous to the humans and human labour behind it. Commodities assume “the fantastic form of a [social] relation between things.” A century later, in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord wrote of the paradigm of the commodity as it now existed in “intangible as well as tangible” form – that is, in the culture of modern mass society. The commodity now, Debord wrote, “is dominating all that is lived.” Mass media and other cultural instruments become “mere instrument” for “the autocratic reign of the market economy.” The ultimate role of the “spectacle” thus produced is to reduce reality itself to the content-less content of a system, a system constituted by the relations between commodities as opposed to human beings. Debord updates Marx’s definition of capitalist mode of production (“an immense accumulation of commodities”) to “an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was once directly lived has moved away into representation.” Things, in other words, must become their appearances: any the division must be severed, since “the real” that lies on the other side of that division is incompatible with that alchemical process of abstraction which commodification depends upon.
Content may well be capitalism’s pinnacle commodity – just as Debord calls culture “the star commodity of the spectacular society” – in its encoded and immaterialised digital form. It is abstract in its essence, and inexhaustible. Content, after all, implies, or once implied a container. But the internet’s capacity for containing, sharing, and proliferating its content is virtually limitless. In this sense the internet is something without form –– form being essentially a kind of limit, a containment. Perhaps this is the reason that “content”, as ubiquitous a term as it is, is so slippery in its definition.