The winter of our (dis)content

In my last post, I mentioned how I dislike the word ‘content’. I may even have said it makes me want to lick a wall socket.

I’m hardly the first person to express this sentiment, but I still braced myself for a kick in the shins. It never came. Just a single, respectful comment asking what, exactly, was wrong with it.

Well, there’s a couple of reasons why I’d happily arrange to have it struck from our collective vocabulary.

Firstly, there’s a waft of indifference emanating from its underarms.

Even its homonym, meaning ‘satisfied’, sits just barely north of ‘nothing in particular’. With synonyms such as appeased, pacified, placated and mollified, it hints more at an absence of a negative something, rather than an abundance of “yay”.

Our current colloquial use of ‘content’ serves, of course, as a catchall phrase, applied in several ways:

a)     anything and everything that is created, published, curated and shared by anyone with access to a device and an internet connection

b)    the words and pictures portion of a project – the stuff that fills the thing you’re making.

c)     all marketing assets (both online and offline)  

I understand the temptation to assign a word to quickly refer to the things we make, but I can’t help but feel that the first two definitions have handed professional creatives a demotion.

What makes me stabbiest is the way the word ‘content’ positions what writers do as stuffing. You can use anything you like to stuff something – polyester, feathers, sawdust or even small rocks. No one’s going to look too closely at it anyway, right? It reeks of the ‘colouring in department’ tag that still gets slapped on marketing teams.

There’s no sense of value in the word. It doesn’t account for strategy, talent or craft. It doesn’t demand insight or wisdom. It’s just what you put in a box – a CMS or design template that calls for x number of characters. Usually too few to write anything persuasive or engaging.

And now almost everyone is a content creator, it becomes increasingly difficult to convince business owners they should pay anyone to perform that function. Even if they do it well. Social posts, blogs, emails and even web copy are often viewed as “something I’d do myself, if only I had the time”.

For me, the word ‘content’ lowers the bar down to “that’ll do”. It implies that the work doesn’t have to be good, just there.

Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not suggesting that anyone who claims the title content creator is approaching their work with that intention or attitude. Far from it. I know how hard most of my peers work at their craft. Writers tend to invest a lot of time and energy in self-education and are secretly dying to be less constrained by the boxes they are called to fill.

Anyone who has read George Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, understands how words inform our thinking. For me, losing the word ‘content’ opens up the opportunity for writers (and all creatives, actually) to do better, more creative work.

Which is, of course, a win for our clients, their brands and their customers. So everyone's happy.

After all, who on earth wants to settle for being simply 'content’?

P.S. For anyone who bothers to check: Yes. The word makes several appearances on my own website. I nurse mild shame about this and have imminent plans to re-write my copy. In the meantime, like all hypocrites, I try not to think about it too much.

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