awesome video, if i may give you some criticism, i felt that you spent a lot of time, especially in the beginning. Pre-emptively defending your ideas from potential criticism, i think it dilutes your message and kind of messes with the pacing of your script. It's not like these criticisms are worth addressing in the first place in my opinion. if they claim a 50 minute video is "just pedanticism" they probably aren't capable of thinking through what you are trying to say anyway.
Calling everything on the internet "content" is like purposely referring to any living thing as "flesh." Arguably accurate, but horrific when thinking about the industries that sell them.
eh, skin and bone is alive too. As are trees, fungi, etc, so it's not even correct. Calling "content" accurate is imprecise, accurate means more than "not technically wrong", it's closer to "I couldn't have said it better myself".
@@LibertyMonkFlesh in this sense is referring to "living creatures" not just their muscles, organs, and skin. It's a metonym that's been around since Old English. Fun fact, it shares a root with the Old Norse word for pork and bacon (flesk) lol
@@st.friendship I am "inspired" to call meat foodstuff "flesh" now. Me at a diner: "Hello, yes, I'd like to have a flesh, leaf, and fruit sandwich, please. Mineral and seed only, no emulsion. Extra crispy on the flesh." 😆
@@ianrosenbalm6555 My vegetarian friends do exactly that! "A chicken sandwich? Ah, no thanks, I don't like eating flesh." When you put it that way, sounds pretty reasonable.
I’m not saying you should like the word, but the fact that you took it far enough to *hate* it says more about than it could ever say about the word or it’s usage.
I've often felt the same way, the brief montage in the beginning sometimes plays out in my head in a parody of TH-camrs. 'like content, sub, patreon, content' blah blah goddamn
I think it can be boiled down to: Using the word "content" in place of "media" or "art" makes it sound clinical and divorced from humanity, creativity, and emotion, and implies monetary value that art doesn't necessarily prioritize, at least not as exclusively as "content" does.
Yep, content is consumed, whereas art is created and engaged with. At least for me this is how I see it. It's the difference between Marvel films and auteur led films etc Edit : oh lol I commented this earlier in the vid, but he talks on this exact thing at min 25
I don't watch a lot of tv or movies, but I was recently laid up in bed due to surgery so I spent several weeks basically consuming whatever 'cool new shows' Netflix recommended. It was mind numbing and I hated it. Then my film buff sister came over and we decided to watch one movie from each decade starting in the 1920s. It was incredible the difference. Even the movies I didnt like, I still felt engaged. I still had something to say about them when they ended. I understand there is the bias of choosing some of the best movies from the past 100 years, but it still really underscored the difference between "content" and "art". Like I said, I didnt enjoy all of the films but they still made me FEEL something. You could really feel how much thought and effort was put into them. It may sound pretentious or a little "old man yells at cloud" but it's just true that 'content' refers to disposable, scrollable, 'second screen' crap that trains audiences not to care about what they're watching. I would be offended to have my art lumped in with that too.
There's a video from Leather Apron Club where he talks about how ugly modern art is ruining society, as it too is largely "content" and based on temporary shock value about some then-current typically political whatever. Same thing applies to movies, photography, games, etc. It's all getting more and more vapid and trying to push an agenda instead of interesting or pleasurable ideas. Big part of the reason why I abhor streaming and I don't even go to the theater to see "good" movies.
Yeah this thing happened to me just last week. I watched some movie on Netflix, and about a week later I remembered I wanted to rate it on IMDB. So when I was thinking of a score, I realized I don't remember the plot or the characters. I avoided reading the plot summary because I wanted to recall the movie myself, but I honestly couldn't do it.
The host of a German TV show (R.I.P. Peter Lustig) used to say "okay, enough television, turn it off now" at the end of each episode. You cannot imagine something similar happening in todays climate.
if i ever get serious about making videos that aren't just TF2 clip compilations, i 100% wanna steal that to use myself obv not word for word, but y'know
Whelp, didn't expect that. Great episode, by the way, Patrick and team. We see this in the book world with Kindle Unlimited and other monthly subscription services, particularly the "all you can consume" variety. The problem is that once people lock into a subscription to a single platform, we lose them as customers. They stop buying books or films or shows, and start buying the service. PLATFORM becomes king, not CREATOR. So the economic incentive is not to bond people to character, theme, narrative or other artistic ideals--but to a service. I see a short-sightedness to this that most industry suits don't seem to comprehend. I can't help but see analogy in the silver age churn of disposable comics, for example, leading to contemporary issues in new reader acquisition for the entire American comics industry. Is there any hope for an advertisement-dependent service like youtube to head this off? If this is not too long for a Patrick replies question (sorry about that) what three immediate changes would you make to youtube to counteract all of this if you were put in charge?
I thought the problem with comtemporary comic book sales is that they are largely only appear in specialized stores these days. Sure, Silver Age Comics were more disposable, but at least you could find them anywhere.
@@IkeOkerekeNews That's a valid point, as those shops are a little isolating--but you could argue book shops are also a specialized store. I've heard people in the industry lament they don't have more "watchmen." Meaning consistent, reliable sellers that reach a new audience. Traditional books have a ton of those--but comics have very few. I think it's this idea of constant churn, even in the modern comics industry, leading people to never feel they have a good entry point. Comics FEEL relentless, like a TH-cam feed--that batman needs a new story every month (or seven new stories) even if they aren't good stories that need to be told. But that might be my assumptions speaking.
@@BrandSanderson I agree with all of these points. I would say that comic publishers tend to advertise to a largely insular market, with extremely high cost per value of the product provided. The channel Comic Drake recently did a great deep dive on this exact subject, but the reason why manga has become so popular in the US is that there have been very effective marketing campaigns (especially digital), while the industry tend to focus on anthology books rather than single-story or series books, meaning that you tend to get more bang for your buck. I would also say that despite the vast interest on them, the Big Two's focus on their superhero shared universes has been stifling to readers who might be interested in other genres.
Dystopian is the right word when talking about “content”, it reminds me of the novel 1984 when they try to reduce the number of words in the dictionary to better control the way people think.
I think the point is not the word "content" but the hyperconsumerism that surrounds it, as you noted as soon as you finish a movie you get a trailer for something else, shows are produced as second screen fodder that can be on while you doom scroll on your phone, as soon as a game gets released the hype cycle for the next one begins, and so on. we're being force fed with media and entertainment we more and more have no time to spend with and no money to pay for. great content btw!
I think it's def our problem too. Like, how much time do we(Me) spend absorbing content? Screen time's up to hours and hours and hours, and that's just passive consumption too. Can any of us even go to the bathroom without using our phone? Nah, because then we'd have to think. And we don't want to do that. Because thinking makes us anxious, thinking makes us go crazy.
Content is just a Container, but not the food. no wonder you're hungry all the time, you''re too busy with Tupperware but not the food itself. it's the same like Modern content, they too busy creating the container, but it's empty inside. churned out fast, but it had no meaning in it and completely thoughtless. most series aren't created by someone who was obsessed and passionate to make their dream Movie or series happen. instead, they're copying hundreds of movies, and just cut and paste it into their Frankenstein Movie/Series.
My issue with "content" is that it now can be used to refer to both a film that a director pours his whole heart into, and the AI voice reads you a reddit post while family guy clips play on the bottom of the screen slop that is served up on tiktok and Instagram.
Dude, you don't have to say "I know this is not important" all the time. It's a good video and language matters. If this wasn't important and meaningful I wouldn't have watched it for 40 mins.
As one of your 10% of women viewers I really appreciate your Taylor Swift video. I like that you were able to speak about her without demeaning her or her listeners.
More- it treats everything the same, from a 10 minute chicken scratch to year-long continuation of an idea; all just cogs to be swapped and refitted depending, some of it good, some of it bad, but all of it disposable.
It is only if you're the one producing art. If you deal with someone else's work, then making it repleaceable is the smart business. This is perfect for youtube, but not as much for disney and other traditional corporations getting into streaming, since it cannibalizes their old business model.
The sad truth is that currently "art" changes nothing. The system is rigged, people watch a movie about how the powerful oppress them agree and the next day go back to work for minimal paid. They perfected the art of giving people enough for them to not revolt, but nothing more.
The one good thing about this ocean of content is that someone can watch TH-cam for 10+ years, seemingly has explored everything that is to their liking and then something like this pops up and you find find quality work that you really enjoy because it speaks to you and gives you some reassurance that your weird gut feeling isn't just you getting out of touch, but you're a part of a collective that has the same overall thoughts and feelings. Well done.
You undermine your own point. You have to wade through hours and hours and hours of "content" to find that one thing that speaks to you. You just confirmed that the vast majority of "content" is basically garbage that is easily forgotten five seconds after you watch it
Thanks for making this video. I used to be an independent musical artist, I was doing alright...I got to the stage where I was about to sign a deal with Universal/Decca, but something in me started to die when I realised that more and more platforms like Spotify, along with record labels, were pushing some kind of background wallpaper version of music. Labels were interested in my "angle" or my "content production" or "social media presence". The streaming platforms started encouraging artists to post singles every four weeks in exchange for algorithmic support. Doing the opposite, taking a year to craft a whole album and releasing it as an album for example, would lead to a lack of support from the algorithm. I noticed that more and more, it wasn't about art, it was about content and making yourself some kind of "meme". It wasn't about the music, it was about the platforms having more content to populate their playlists which reward conformity to a certain unchanging mono-aesthetic, and therefore earn more money and listeners for them...not for you as an artist. Then I looked all around me, and more and more I realised that everything was being de-valued, and branded as "content". I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees this as a very worrying sign for the future. Keep up the good...um...content.
👏👏 Well stated. This realization has also pulled the rug out from under my creative endeavors. While I enjoyed taking hours an days to create a song or video, it was disheartening to experience firsthand that I could get more clicks by just spewing words to create "content."
👏👏 Well stated. This realization has also pulled the rug out from under my creative endeavors. While I enjoyed taking hours an days to create a song or video, it was disheartening to experience firsthand that I could get more clicks by just spewing words to create "content."
There's a really good video of a talk between Rick Beato and Ted Gioia, which is largely about the relationship between tech/money and arts/music. There are really specific causes for all this stuff, and I think you might enjoy the video. I'm also a musician and it was a good watch.
How depressing! Keep making your art regardless. I have had five books of poetry published. Last book took me 10 years to write. Not everyone values "fast".
This so perfectly encapsulates a feeling I've had but have never been able to accurately put into words. It's that feeling you get when you watch a fantastic film on netflix, and it just ends, and it's no more than 'that thing you spent your afternoon doing'. It instantly gets buried under whatever is recommended next, which might be another episode of love is blind. It always left me feeling sad, but I never knew why. Thank you for putting this into words patrick!
Actually, the solution is deliberate watching. As in, you get a series or a movie you like, or you curate yourself a watchlist, and you make it a point of logging on just to watch this specific thing, and you watch only a single episode, or a single movie, and then you log off - give yourself time to stew over what you saw. @@4rumani
As an aspiring animator/ director that has been heavily considering the idea of creating/ publishing independently online, this touched on so many topics I’ve been thinking about. Thank you.
As someone with a background in analytics, "content" is very clearly a logistical concept that has escaped containment. When you're trying to navigate massive moving parts, you're gonna have some buckets you have to put stuff in. It's like when companies look at workforce in terms of headcount. And it's kind of necessary. When trying to look at the overall health and direction of a large organization, this is just the only feasible way to express the data. But I've even seen this kind of language create these effects internally. Having to remind people in meetings that these numbers I'm talking about represent the LIVED experience of real people and whether they are going to have a good day or an awful one, both customer and employee. That bottom line thinking can and will just break EVERYTHING if we don't allow room for nuance and outliers. And this was in a fucking CALL CENTER environment. Even in these little things, it can really show how corporate suits don't make the intellectual connection between "line on graph" and "1,000s of living, breathing people".
I've once been referred to as a resource not an employee whose paid to offer my time and skills...are they only worth extra energy to get a job done without thinking about how we treat those people.
And you read business journals and the people who have successful businesses keep saying "You have to treat your people like people" and then they forget and then the business falls off again. I don't fully understand why they keep forgetting this important lesson, but I heard the other day some auto industry commentator talk of "market competitiveness" not as "industry making good cars for people to buy" as a regular human Jo would, but as "Company posting attractive results on the stock markets for investors to invest in".
I feel you Patrick, I've been discussing this withsome friends that are hooked on watching content nonstop on the mayor platforms. They always feel bored, empty or anxious for more content. And it was difficult to explain them the reason was treat art as just content itself. Thank you!
Marty is my sheperd. His essay really touched me at the time not only because he was right, but because it showed the frustration of a master watching his passion being burned to the ground. Art is supposed to move, surprise and challenge the audience. As "content consumers", we are being used to be indulged, pleased (maybe tamed). Great discussion, thanks.
I’m glad you said, almost verbatim, that this comes down to the difference between art and product. We have artists creating art and honing their crafts, but all the distributors want is simple product. Thanks Patrick, you are a truly great video essayist/ TH-cam filmmaker.
I think people using the word content is actually a pretty reasonable thing to get pissed off about. I write songs and i put a lot of love and care into them, my hope's, dreams and insecurities are all in there and to have it be thrown into the content box with everything else makes me feel really hopeless.
Content is like the new buzz word for artist. When you throw everything into one box without any form of standard. It depreciates the value of almost all work produced.
Corporations want this so that Art will be "Just another TH-cam video". A vlogger will earn just as much if not more than the artist. It's sickening!! Those greedy psychopaths won't spare corpses for profits.
I think the “problem of content” was best expressed by Tim Minchin in his song “The TH-cam Lament”: All my carefully-worded metaphors All my flat-nine-dominant-seven chords All of my schtick, my lyrical trickery All those bows, all that applause All my intertextuality All my self-aware hypocrisy All of those rhymes, those irregular times All my softly-spoken sophistry All my make-up, all my lights All my photoshoots in tights All my pretensions, all my intentions All my glitzy opening nights All my crowd-dependant jokes All my mirror-balls and smoke All my tilts at wit and whimsy All my poetry, my swear words and my smut… …will never get as many hits as “Kitten Waking Up”.
This video is a really good summary on why this year has particularly been not fun to discuss movies or shows with and why my viewing habits with streaming services are so scattered. It’s really sad to see companies treat all these movies and shows as products and just completely stop there. Honestly putting monetary motives into a product isn’t a bad thing by default, but in a lot of cases, it feels like that’s all they are doing.
Totally agree, calling all visual work “content” completely delegitimizes it. It also flattens the landscape for creative work and makes it all equal. A 10 hour video of Patrick from SpongeBob guzzling mayonnaise is now the same as an Oscar winning film. The only difference is the amount of eyes you can get on it because that will tell you how much money it can make. If everything is content, then great art, bad art and non-art all become part of the same white noise whose only value comes from how long they can keep eyeballs. I’ve seen incredible videos on TH-cam, expertly shot, written, performed, videos that say something meaningful and valuable, but because of this mindset of everything as content, they just become another meaningless way to take up time until the next piece of content. I wish we had a better word for great art made on TH-cam. It deserves better.
I was just thinking that we need a word to call "things that aren't mere content". I do admit that I do consume some easy content, but they are different than video essays that require hours of research or actual piece of art. To deflatten everything, we need a word to describe it.
Just call great art on TH-cam art and the banal stuff content. Obviously subjective but I see no reason to make up a new word for it especially since the current one was made up by corporate vampires.
I call things what they are. An hour long video essay on pop culture history, a 20 minute episode of a cooking show, and a 5 minute comedy short may all be hosted on TH-cam, but they're all different kinds of things.
@@SuperPal-tr3go I get what you're saying but I have a counter argument. Not all valuable things on the internet are art, for example I don't consider video essays as art although some people may disagree. And as a response to Stinkoman below who says they call things what they are, I also get the sentiment but what would still put the Lindsay Ellis-es and the Maulers into one bucket and that feels wrong. Lastly, the cynic in me thinks that a new "catchy" word would be easier to accepted by the public instead of re-teaching them something that feels pedantic.
I had to come back to this video after an experience I just had with a friend of mine. One thing don't think is spoken enough about is how much this change to "content" affects the way people enjoy the actual "content". I recommended an anime (Tengoku Daimakyo) to a younger friend of mine and his first question was "When does it get good", implying he would find an episode or moment in the middle of the show to watch instead of watching it from front to back. After convincing him to watch the whole thing his response is "Oh it's only 13 episodes I can finish this by tonight. He then invites me to the Discord to play Madden as he "watches" it on his second monitor in dub (he doesn't know Japanese). This incredible piece of media that I anticipated, theorized about, and was blown away by was boiled down to background noise. The most maddening part was after about 10 minutes I hear "This shit boring" and we never spoke about the show again. While this is obviously an extreme example it is honestly pretty sad that whenever I speak about art to someone it's possible that this is their method of consumption. I hope there's a turnaround at some point.
Okay sorry man but thats not a societal thing, thats just what other people do, they have different tastes, not everyone thinks anime is high-brow material. There’s plenty of times when you recommenf something to a friend, they dont like it, and when they recommend to you, they dont like it either. Its called difference of opinion
@@GuineaPigEveryday I think you missed the point of my comment. My issue wasn't with his opinion on the show, you're right everyone is going to have different tastes and be into different things. My issue was with the way he consumed it. You don't have to see anime as "high-brow material" to sit in front of a TV and actually give your full attention. The societal issue I was pointing towards is a generation of consumers who consume art as "content" and don't consume it in the way it was intended to be consumed.
@@GuineaPigEverydaythis is a dumb comment, it wouldn’t matter if they were mentioning the friend doing this with a movie, show, or video on TH-cam. The point is the fact that their friend cannot honestly engage with art when it’s recommended they just simply consume it as content. Try re-reading a comment before angrily replying and making yourself look kinda clownish and illiterate.
15 years ago, I used to work in a small IT firm and one day the Chief Strategy Officer unveiled "the content delivery project". "People want content, we will deliver content" he said. To this day, I still don't know what this project actually produced. But Management applauded him after his talk, I guess that's the only thing that mattered.
Thank you for putting to words what has been bothering me for a long time now. This word content makes it sound like I'm making cattle feed or something. Our viewers aren't cattle, and I'm trying to make videos that will actually be worth their time.
If you are part of Gen z or millenialls, Let me explain something to you; People who put their sh* on Instagram, youtube, fakebook etc. ARE NOT ARTISTS! And definitely "inflluencers" ARE NOT ARTISTS. Now you know. You're welcome.
No real artist was the creator of any "content". "Content" is an expression of the commodification of life in a market economy. True art is the artist's expression, the form in which he expresses and shares the essence of life. The fulfillment of an artist is the opportunity to express yourself artistically, not to express yourself in order to sell.
I have a real problem with many people in TV/cinema/streaming claiming to be artists. Mediocre actors in rehashed story lines who are phoning it in aren't artists, they are just doing a job to earn money. I would reserve the word artist for someone who is actually using their imagination to create something original.
Reminds me of the push among artists to replace the term "motion capture" with the more appreciative "performance capture," and I would say that there is a big difference between the two.
I had to teach zoom classes to middle schoolers during the Cov lockdown… and even though it was never explicitly stated, I felt like my teaching was “content” in the minds of my students.. (and very often it was second screen content) and it still sort of fills me with dread to remember it…
And it’s even worse than that, I just realized.. one kid put a ton of guac on a chip and announced (in person, not online) something like “when you put too much guac on your chip” - he “captioned” a moment of his actual life as if it were a piece of content.
@@radioforthebirdsHah, our 13-year-old daughter does this sometimes. My wife and I actively disallow it in our house! And it's hard to explain to her why, because so many of her friends do the same thing. As in, taking a moment of real life and captioning it like they're some TikTok influencer about to make it into a meme or something. And our daughter doesn't even have a smartphone. I dread what things would be like if she was zombified by her personal screen device for hours a day like most teenagers these days.
@@adamrad2220 yeah, the reason is subtle. I actually think this is the Buddhist idea of Dualism... living life while observing/commentating it at the same time. I've heard many different explanations of it out there, but that's my understanding of it. If so, this is an ancient sin from one of our oldest traditions! It precludes spontaneity.
Love you for citing PBS Idea Channel; I was a teenager during that channel's original run in the early-to-mid 2010s and it was super formative for how I engage with digital media today. It was so ahead of its time for its critical theory-oriented video essay edutainment and I feel like for how influential it was it's wrongfully been largely forgotten about
Having grown up with the internet, I fell into this "content" trap as an artist who primarily draws artwork. It seemed easy because I can whip up something in a day, but that it is, I'm in a good mood and not pressured. Apply pressure is only going to delay me, not make me more productive. And that's basically "content" in a nutshell. Peer pressure.
i just have to shout out the animator who came up with the absolutely brilliant gimmick of colored stripes re-orienting and revealing themselves to be patrick's shirt as he puts it on, i'm sure this comment will get buried but seriously that was awesome i went back and re-watched it your work did not go unnoticed
It was cool enough that the letters of his name became the stripes, and when they morphed into the shirt I realized how little I’ve accomplished with my own life.
What breaks my heart about what content's become is that so many of the creative professionals I know (including myself) got into the content industry as a way to bridge the gap between wanting to tell stories and create entertainment for people while still learning, building connections, and generally having no money for either earning enough to escape the industry and make t.v. and movies, or in the very least fund your own independent projects while still keeping a job. My issue getting into the biz, and I know I'm not alone, was that it was already prohibitively expensive to get in and expand in any way, either into new creative ideas and practices or by just taking on new opportunities. Rent was already crazy in the city where I needed to be to do the job I do (this is before remote working was so mainstream,) and companies were already well on their way to creating content via "analytics tea leaves reading" so budgets/creative direction were largely being spoken for in most of the content companies around me. So... personally, I found myself with this deep desire to create bigger projects either for my company, or for me, but without the time, or money, or real resources to do it. I got stuck in the "content company circle" basically. Working too hard to move or do anything extra, getting paid too little to change anything about it, hoping one of my projects would get fully recognized while getting virtually zero credit for anything I, or my colleagues, were doing. Furthermore, the creative process for the last 10 to 15 years has been utterly poisoned by "enshitification thinking" from Sillicon Valley. I've been a creative professional for the last 15 years and the last 10, I can't think of many projects where I was just trusted, as a creative, to create sellable media without the inclusion of about 30 extra cooks and analytics advisors who believe "you need to put a cake in the first :03 seconds or else it won't sell." "Content" is a term that came from profit-first-creative-second thinking. It's a product, not a piece of media, or entertainment, or art. It's "we didn't give a honk but please give me dollars." Companies stopped believing in the work. Plain and simple. They stopped believing in creating unique, quality media that tells their story uniquely. They stopped desiring doing the actual work, in the creative process, to create content that only THEY could be known for. They started salivating over the next quarter, speedracing results against all logic, and fully believing that their data - out of EVERYONE who is collecting largely the SAME data - was "the data" to crack the code to "no effort + no money = media profit." They got lazy, believed in the marketing term quick fixes more than the actual creative minds they were employing, and shot themselves in the foot. That on top of the extreme onslaught of quantity over quality content has lead to over saturation - and people are over it. We're over de-valued creative work, that's been de-valued because people who don't even respect the medium of entertainment are making all the calls and holding all the cash. The circus is rad because of the performers and artists, people. Not the ring leaders who hoard the ticket sales.
@@assassin8636 My understanding of the point is that: art has become devoid of soul for the sake of low effort money making and over reliance in measurable statistics. it's there in the last sentence. art is good bc of the people creating it, not the execs behind it.
It is depressingly unsurprising that it was Bill Gates who started the "content" ball rolling. I'd not heard about that essay, but I am absolutely unsurprised.
@langdons2828 Not really started, more like accurately predicted the structure and basis of most services, distribution, and use of the internet. Basically, internet economics.
@@chevon5707 is he? I thought he was one of the more sane and decent billionaires out there comparatively speaking, considering we have morons and psychopath/sociopath's like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Bezos is a straight up Lex Luthor villain type too. Bill Gates ik founded his own organisation that is genuinely helping people and spending a lot of money in terms of humanitarian causes. I mean yeah sure for billionaires thats peanuts, but he does it more than others.
I've been trying to articulate my distaste for the word in this context for YEARS - I think this video does a much better job than I ever will. Missed opportunity for a 'Now is the summer of our discontent' joke though
Content is making something to fill a niche/gap - like buying a new sofa to fill a corner of your living room. It may be pretty, but it's also lifeless. Art is making something to fill your soul.
Many many decades ago I worked in a factory and had to go into the office area from time to time - (and this only occurred to me years after it changed) - within a few years the sign on the office door which used to be marked 'personnel' was changed to 'human resources'. In two words, they removed and devalued the individual, the person - and substituted the mass, the conglomeration, the collective. I knew something bad for workers was coming, and for the UK in the 70's/80's, it did, for the worse (certainly for the employees) - and has gotten worse ever since. The change of the office door title wording was like a signpost for the cold uncaring corporate blatantly politically corrupt society we have now. The value of people now seems to be marginal - I saw that one of the US hospitals was dumping patients on the sidewalk because they couldn't pay anymore. The future of how things were going to turn for ordinary people was literally right in front of me in 1980, on that little door sign. I see a parallel devaluation in calling people's life's passions, the product of decades of dedication to craft, their deep and insightful observations on life and humanity - 'content' (and I have a feeling that billionaire media owners use of AI is only going to make things immeasurably worse).
If I may go on a tangent here, it’s sort of like what the late music critic Mark Fisher wrote about during the Recession-before 1980, there was “popular modernism” which enabled high-brow, experimental and independent art to be appreciated by the masses, at the same time as the Government was more about developing the economy and building the NHS, APT, and the like, and the newspapers had labour-centric desks rather than writing relentlessly about “workplace tips” and “productivity”. From my perspective, things were more stable and genuinely aspirational, and humans seemed more valued then, unlike what my Generation Z has experienced
Personnel is also collective, refers to all the workers. I feel the difference is less between individual and collective as it is the dehumanization of the workers, from personnel- workers, the people doing the job, to us being merely "resources", just cogs in the machine.
Another issue for getting away from content and toward actual media creation, is that content moves so fast--it's almost impossible to properly have a record of every piece of content released. We have started to talk about trends as something that last literal days or hours, as opposed to trends lasting years or decades. This makes recording the history of content phenomena and creation nearly impossble as by the time you get to recording what is going on, the digital world has moved on and as result, we basically erase history immediately in order to move on to the next trend. I believe this is part of why it seems like we've lived 100 years in only the past 5. While some major historic events have occurred, the internet trends have done more than stimulate and promote--they have bamboozled our brains into thinking more has occurred--when only more has occurred online. And anyone trying to make a living through some sort of media output MUST play this crazy game. You can't really survive without pumping out a consistent amount of "content." Few people have managed to get and maintain influence without playing this game.
The description of how treating everything as content discourages experimentation hits so close to how I've been feeling. The most important video I've seen on this topic so far. TY
From what I've heard, the only reason this strike has happened in the first place is because of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings holding out against their demands, and all the sociopathic shit about hoping the writers and actors will come crawling back once they become homeless seems to have come from Hastings. So John Green's 2013 jokes about Hastings have come back around from incomprehensibly dated to hilariously topical.
To give Hastings the smallest possible benefit of the doubt, there's a good chance that those rumors were orchestrated one of the other studios to try to throw Netflix under the bus. Disney or WBD would gladly do that if they felt it was the best course of action; Netflix is a business competitor, after all. Just because the studios have a shared enemy in the strikes doesn't mean they need to look out for one another.
Really? So, all of the other media CEOs are actually willing to cut a deal with the writers and the actors, but they can’t all because of him? Like, that’s what you’re telling me here?
@@Markunator Fun fact, a bunch of indie studios have already met the demands and are able to continue production now. Indie studios can do it but the big ones can't. Something wrong there.
I’ve been pondering the difference between art and content. It’s as if art is made for its own sake, to exist and content is made to capture your attention, to distract you from the fact that you exist.
@@relaxingsoundscapes7 - Not for me. "Created to entertain" implies a kind of pure motive. When I think of the word "content," I think of someone who doesn't necessarily have a strong desire to express themselves, or entertain, or show off their talent. I think of someone who lives in 2023 and knows that the way to make money and to get famous is to come up with a gimmick for Tiktok and TH-cam. "Content" implies that self-promotion and adsense money are the only priorities. Whether anyone is entertained or not is almost irrelevant.
Not all content inherently want to only distract. Content can also be made to reflect on the reality and give more tools to the watcher ( I would argue that this is most of the worthwhile art present, even abstract art work with this).
This is definitely the key idea. For example, some of my favorite "TH-camrs" live stream, or record and upload with minimal editing. They do things like repair electronics or cars. There's no music, no graphics. I don't consider it to be creative or artistic whatsoever, but it is definitely "content", and competes with creative and expressive works.
I feel this too.... no one spends any time on anything anymore. Just get it out fast. more content... more! doesn't matter what!! just produce sludge!!
It's such a simplistic word. I don't know why we haven't come up with something a bit more...relative? Concise? I hate 'content' as much as I do "influencer" and "TH-camr"
This is exactly how I feel when I watch stuff like Defunctland’s youtube documentaries, for example. He’s making like, filmmaking art but it’s just thrown into the concept of “internet content” which doesn’t feel right when you think about it
When Patrick said 'there's another crochety old man who agrees with me' I was totally expecting for it to instantly cut to a completely unscripted Patrick's Dad rant. That said I can't say I'm at all disappointed that instead it was Martin Scorsese's head floating in the air, surrounded by pink hearts. First of all, same, and secondly, as a member of your apparently very small female audience, I am totally in favor of the inclusion of floating pink hearts in your videos, especially when they're used to compliment Martin Scorsese.
This video has been a great thing to be half listening to whilst focusing on cooking dinner. I sure hope this doesn't reframe the content of this video [sic] in a dramatically ironic way
Remember times when we were individual, personal youtube users with videos, now we are "channels"? But luckily, in my language we talk about videos, shows, movies, series etc. When we talk about [content, in our language], it suits only for making content in instagram, facebook, tic toc etc. Fastly produced,simple, easily digested stuff in social media.
so, I haven't started the video yet, but I am looking forward to this immensely. Only a few days ago I was reading up on writing exercises on a writer's forum when I saw all these young people talking about their art, their STORIES, and calling them 'content'. I don't make content, I tell stories. There's something sterile and wrong (commodifying) about the word and how it shapes our relationship to art.
I have spent way too much time curating various video essay playlists containing some of my favorite videos on TH-cam for several years now. I started this when I realized I might have watched a life changing video a year ago and already forgotten about it. I know that no one will ever look at these playlists so maybe it shouldn’t matter but I do this to in some small way fight back against the ideology that this is all disposable content. And guess what? This video is going in my favorite! Lol
You know what other word Netflix popularized that I absolutely hate? "Binging". Prior to Netflix deciding that watching a bunch of a show was binging it, we called that a marathon. And the only two associations I had with binging was when you stuffed your face with junk food until you needed to throw up and with eating disorders because of the phrase "binge and purge". It was in the unholy trinity of disgusting corpo-speak with content and pipeline drawing such a clear picture to me of what they think of us and the art we enjoy: we are all just little piggies at the trough and all of this stuff is just the slop they have to keep feeding us down the chute. It actually drives me nuts when people roll their eyes about this and go, "It's just a word, who cares?!" Man, this stuff matters. I'm pretty sure I thanked Mike from Idea Channel when he did his video on content and I appreciate the time you've taken on this too, Patrick. It's pretty gross that they talk about creative pursuits in this way. I don't have to like it and I freaking DO NOT!
Thank you for mentioning Mike Rugnetta, I had completely forgotten about him and I have loved his perspective. It's crazy how we forget the creators we used to watch regularly because the TH-cam algorithm doesn't serve it to us.
Joywave’s album _Content_ deals in part with the commodification of creative work into “content”, particularly in its title track. (It also plays on the conTENT vs. CONtent ambiguity, but it was released in 2017, so based on 8:22 it’s in the clear.)
Patrick, you don't _have_ to put in all those title cards and stuff and extra things, but I am glad you do! It is one of the reasons I love your videos so so much.
speaking of 'content' I've only posted videos on YT a handful of times, but it never ceases to amaze me that there's no 'art' category. I make art: illustrations for comics, books and games and there's no category for it! It makes me wonder what all the art channels on YT classify their 'content' as. The closest category, which feels like a mile off, is 'entertainment'.
The worst people (in the literal history of humanity) aren't just the ones calling art "content", they're the ones who also talk (soullessly) about "consuming" or "ingesting" said content. Once you're at that point you're in real danger of becoming the spiritual equivalent of what humanity had become in Wall-E.
Yes! I can't for the life of me recall the moment people went from "watching videos, movies, etc." to "consuming content." Or from "creating films, recording songs, etc." to "pushing out quality content."
@@Shiftarus If it's snobbish to want to properly classify and acknowledge the hard work put in by a creator, then sure I guess? But just because I call it "toilet paper" and someone else calls it "bathroom tissue" doesn't mean I wipe my ass better than them; I just don't like to use an unhelpful euphemism. It's just the distillation of immeasurable work and sacrifice made to create art into a single, nebulous, boardroom-friendly term that rubs me the wrong way. Like people who would refer to David Bowie's discography, or Betty White's massive acting career, or Vince Gilligan's writing as "content" ... that just strikes me as taking the piss, because if you paid even a little attention to any of those things, you'd know that term doesn't do it justice. Idk...food for thought...or sustenance for brain activity, if you fancy.
@@Shiftarus If you're still considering it "watching cat videos" and not "consuming content," then yes, you are. You're totally doing it better than they are. I watch Maru roll into a room because it's cute. You watch Maru roll into a room because you're consuming quality content. We are not the same.
@@JamVar Their hard work is acknowledged by those who consume it, enjoy it, comment on it, discuss it, etc. It's insanity to get caught up in "art" vs "content."
Arghh! Solidarity, brother. I’ve been ranting about this for years & you’re the first person I’ve encountered in any format - digital or otherwise - who shares my ire. For the same exact reason. So glad you made this video; very proactive & articulately argued. ✨🏆
I've also wondered why there is not a better word for what we do with content, aka "consume". It's such an awuful word but seems to have expanded the same way "content" has.
I work in a hospital and I always correct people who refer to patients as customers. It's a public hospital too, so we aren't even a 'business', it is literally a public service.
@@PlayedbyInstinct that’s good….. but in offices, meeting rooms and in corporate documentation, the word Customer is used by the bean counters and top level management
This just reminded me of that one time when the science community started describing light as particles in addition to waves, which was a huge revelation and revolutionised our understanding of fundamental particles. The problem here is that we are going in the opposite direction; starting with particles and waves, and now we are slowly losing sight of the particles and are left with the gentle waves of the algorithm that will never reveal its nature, or any nature, to us because all it does is conform to us.
I don’t know that I’ll be able to think of “content” the same way again. Thanks Patrick, this was genuinely thought-provoking. And while this is completely unrelated when you began talking about the WGA strike and the loopholes of cutting writers out of their profits I see parallels with early comic books, such as Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster famously selling their rights to Superman at $10 a page as work for hire because there were no rules to stop comic publishers from taking someone’s creation like that. National made millions while paying Jerry and Joe whatever they wanted and expecting them to be grateful for it.
I'm glad Patrick discussed this subject, which has been bothering me for several years. The only way I can describe it ,is like this: Labelling everything "content," treats the best and worst of art as nothing more than endless supply for a nonstop meat-grinder. Nothing is cared _about,_ so nothing is cared _for._ That's a bad mindset for a culture.
As someone who also has come to loathe the word content, I think you're spot-on here. It's a useful term sometimes and the line is hazy at best - but overall, I think of content as something you consume while art is something you experience. Content is an extension of grind culture - always make more, quantity over quality. Art is an invitation to stop, linger, and dive deep into something.
But what this fails to realize is that videos you find mundane or derivative are in fact also Art. What this all seems to boil down to is not liking certain Art and wishing it wasn't called the same thing. But that is EXACTLY why the word exists. It describes the results provoking some intense debate on it's artistic merits.
Patrick would likely say that what he does is art, while many/most of us would say it's content, and it certainly doesn't meet the threshold you set for "art." It's just semantics and is entirely subjective.
@@Shiftarus I didn't say anything about works being mundane, derivative, or things I didn't like - those are your words. There's plenty of art that fits all of those descriptions for me, yet I can still see it as art. What we're talking about has more to do with the purpose behind something's creation.
I've been thinking a lot during this strike about how Quentin Tarantino was able to get his start because he appeared in the background of a Golden Girls episode (he played an Elvis impersonator! it's very fun) that ended up being used in one of the show's clip show episodes. because he showed up in reruns of two episodes for years, he was able to save up enough money to fund his real dream and become a filmmaker. there are certainly other people like him right now - actors appearing in small, background parts in popular shows who, if given the chance, could become some of our greatest contemporary artists - but we'll never get to see the work they would have made. we'll never fully understand what we're losing as a culture right now.
“Happy Holidays! Oh, you are offended? Too general? Just say ‘it’? “ Fine. I’ll say it your way, “I like your videos and your pictures and your captions and your replies on social media!”
I heard it the first time when a friend of mine worked for a German media company in Munich around 2005 and his job was to find and acquire as much HD *content*, since that was the thing everyone needed for the new HD ready flat screen TVs
I watch/ listen to ALOT of video essays and I have to say this is one of the best ones I've viewed recently. Thank you for all the years of work Patrick
Great video, it helped me understand the visceral feeling of disgust I get everytime people use variations of the phrases "consume content" and "content creation"
I came here because Brandon Sanderson recommended this video in his Intentionally Blank end of year podcast. Thoroughly enjoyed it, only to have Patrick reference Brandon at the end of the video. lol
The moment I saw the title, I hit the like button. This proved to be a mistake, as I then subsequently had the impulse to like the video many times while watching, only to be disappointed when I remembered I already had.
I basically agree with Patrick here, but there is a depressing truth underlying it: *Most people don’t care about movies as much as Patrick Willems or Martin Scorsese.* If everyone loved cinema that way, we wouldn’t have this model because it would fail. It’s working because the internet is an omnipotent machine for finding the lowest common denominator. Troubleshooting ways to serve those who want more art is the answer, but this content thing won’t go away.
Patrick, I just want to say Ive been watching your videos since seeing your video talking about the background people in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy and I love everything you have to say. The effort you put in clearly shows, some of the skits between you and Emma are cool. I learn a lot from listening to you. Big thumbs up
Everytime I hear "content" in this context I remember a verse from one song of a musical Rent: 'So I own not a notion I escape and ape content. I don't own emotion- I rent.' It is just sad how true that verse have become.
I've been feeling really depressed lately about this whole situation, and I'm worried that my dream of working as a show runner/director for TV is pointless dead-end. Is there anything us common folk can do to push back against these changes?
An interesting discussion is how media companies made us feel so concerned for the content that they make. It's either we have to engage in the streaming numbers, we have to keep track of the box office to get more of the content we want. Media companies use engagement to measure and weigh the emotional and capital investment.
This issue is actually much larger than just movies, people have become products in every field. Glad you mentioned something, although this isn't my format of educational entertainment I appreciate it for what it is. Hopefully we can bring this more attention.
I think it would be fine to just call a creative work a "creation" and call multiple works "creations". If you look up the definition of "content" it doesn't include works themselves, only what's in them. Calling yourself a "content creator" is like calling yourself a "filler maker".
Sounds good to me. Maybe you could also say 'creature', in the same sense as 'sculpture'? Although that would just make people think of 'Frankenstein'.
That's exactly the perspective. "Content" is the view of the platform owners, who need Stuff to fill the never-ending slop trough that keeps people coming back.
yeah that's the whole point . content is filler. well, not to me, but like Heads said, and Patrick in teh video, it is to the studio execs.... and the influencers who only work for the algoritm and not to create art or entertaining materials or music or whatever.
Fun episode - I'd happily talk to you at a party about this issue haha. You also see this with music. Although Spotify pays residuals, many people dispute the effectiveness of the current payment model. Everything is algorithm-based, and the limited curation that occurs (selected playlists) only encourages bottlenecking of creativity into something that will place a song onto those playlists. And other playlists such as 'shower-music' or whatever limits the value of the music being created to a product for a specific task or mood. However, for many musicians this is the only option available, as they know physical and digital sales will be negligible if a fan can just listen to their music for free instead. How do you think a residual scheme on something like Netflix would avoid the same pitfalls?
I think the point of this video is that Netflix has already fallen into the same trap, although a movie playlist for different moods is something I haven't seen and would sadly work just bc of the sheer amount of "content" on the platform being impossible to sift through. Worse than the flattening effect of labelling everything content is oversaturation. Just like music, knowing you have an endless pool of media to watch or listen to makes it more likely that you will ignore anything that doesn't instantly grab your attention bc there's more than enough to waste. Besides educating consumers on the issue, i don't think anything can or will be done about it
Woman here. Video essays are gaining in popularity. Women may be a much lower percentile now, but it’s getting better. Most of them lean towards podcasts and view TH-cam as not capable of this, oddly enough. But it’s getting better. I found you two days ago and suddenly I’m going through all of them. There will be more of us in time. Thank you for your research and your In depth discussion. It’s lovely and refreshing.
I'm glad there has been some big pushback against this kind of commercialization of art, as thinking about how art has kinda regressed to some extent due to this "contentification" really depresses me, like genuinely. I have a plethora of thoughts on the topic and I hate that it stresses me out so much.
Without a doubt this is one of the best articulations of the dire consequences of our modern media landscape, rivaled only be Bo’s song “Welcome to the internet.” If you won’t call your videos art, I happily will. The average persons gleeful adoption of the executives language and disdain for anyone that aspires make art rather than “content” shakes me to my core. Some of the commentary on the strikes is utterly deranged.
I answered a bunch of questions and comments about this episode in the new Patrick Replies video: th-cam.com/video/LRKeFRaYF-E/w-d-xo.html
This isnt content.. to long didnt watch
I think you are just not content with content.
Bro your mom "must be the content episode" had me laughing hard
awesome video, if i may give you some criticism, i felt that you spent a lot of time, especially in the beginning. Pre-emptively defending your ideas from potential criticism, i think it dilutes your message and kind of messes with the pacing of your script. It's not like these criticisms are worth addressing in the first place in my opinion.
if they claim a 50 minute video is "just pedanticism" they probably aren't capable of thinking through what you are trying to say anyway.
why the diss content though?
Calling everything on the internet "content" is like purposely referring to any living thing as "flesh." Arguably accurate, but horrific when thinking about the industries that sell them.
Profound
eh, skin and bone is alive too. As are trees, fungi, etc, so it's not even correct. Calling "content" accurate is imprecise, accurate means more than "not technically wrong", it's closer to "I couldn't have said it better myself".
@@LibertyMonkFlesh in this sense is referring to "living creatures" not just their muscles, organs, and skin. It's a metonym that's been around since Old English.
Fun fact, it shares a root with the Old Norse word for pork and bacon (flesk) lol
@@st.friendship I am "inspired" to call meat foodstuff "flesh" now. Me at a diner: "Hello, yes, I'd like to have a flesh, leaf, and fruit sandwich, please. Mineral and seed only, no emulsion. Extra crispy on the flesh." 😆
@@ianrosenbalm6555 My vegetarian friends do exactly that! "A chicken sandwich? Ah, no thanks, I don't like eating flesh." When you put it that way, sounds pretty reasonable.
I've grown to absolutely hate the word "content" over the past five years. You have no idea how happy this video makes me.
I’m not saying you should like the word, but the fact that you took it far enough to *hate* it says more about than it could ever say about the word or it’s usage.
I've often felt the same way, the brief montage in the beginning sometimes plays out in my head in a parody of TH-camrs. 'like content, sub, patreon, content' blah blah goddamn
The usage of the word always irked me in the past few years indeed.
If you hate the word "content", please add "representation" and "pride" to the hate mix. Companies RUIN EVERY word and cause, period.
Eh. I feel like representation and pride still have concrete meaning whereas content is just everything.
I think it can be boiled down to:
Using the word "content" in place of "media" or "art" makes it sound clinical and divorced from humanity, creativity, and emotion, and implies monetary value that art doesn't necessarily prioritize, at least not as exclusively as "content" does.
Yep, content is consumed, whereas art is created and engaged with. At least for me this is how I see it. It's the difference between Marvel films and auteur led films etc
Edit : oh lol I commented this earlier in the vid, but he talks on this exact thing at min 25
It's like you're saying that videos can be created by AI.
content is not always monetized
@@phir9255 such as ?
Besides, it’s not necessarily the case that it’s monetiseable. Just a good indicator
"Content" makes it sound like any other commodity
I don't watch a lot of tv or movies, but I was recently laid up in bed due to surgery so I spent several weeks basically consuming whatever 'cool new shows' Netflix recommended. It was mind numbing and I hated it. Then my film buff sister came over and we decided to watch one movie from each decade starting in the 1920s. It was incredible the difference. Even the movies I didnt like, I still felt engaged. I still had something to say about them when they ended. I understand there is the bias of choosing some of the best movies from the past 100 years, but it still really underscored the difference between "content" and "art". Like I said, I didnt enjoy all of the films but they still made me FEEL something. You could really feel how much thought and effort was put into them. It may sound pretentious or a little "old man yells at cloud" but it's just true that 'content' refers to disposable, scrollable, 'second screen' crap that trains audiences not to care about what they're watching. I would be offended to have my art lumped in with that too.
This's a really great comment man, i hope you're feeling better after the surgery, your film buff sister is a national Tresure, God bless her.
There's a video from Leather Apron Club where he talks about how ugly modern art is ruining society, as it too is largely "content" and based on temporary shock value about some then-current typically political whatever. Same thing applies to movies, photography, games, etc. It's all getting more and more vapid and trying to push an agenda instead of interesting or pleasurable ideas. Big part of the reason why I abhor streaming and I don't even go to the theater to see "good" movies.
Yeah this thing happened to me just last week. I watched some movie on Netflix, and about a week later I remembered I wanted to rate it on IMDB. So when I was thinking of a score, I realized I don't remember the plot or the characters. I avoided reading the plot summary because I wanted to recall the movie myself, but I honestly couldn't do it.
well it's also gonna be more fun watching a movie your sister choose for you together than watching a Netflix show alone
Have you seen Leo McCarey's 1937 film Make Way for Tomorrow? I recommend it to everyone I talk to about movies. So good.
The host of a German TV show (R.I.P. Peter Lustig) used to say "okay, enough television, turn it off now" at the end of each episode. You cannot imagine something similar happening in todays climate.
if i ever get serious about making videos that aren't just TF2 clip compilations, i 100% wanna steal that to use myself
obv not word for word, but y'know
Whelp, didn't expect that. Great episode, by the way, Patrick and team. We see this in the book world with Kindle Unlimited and other monthly subscription services, particularly the "all you can consume" variety. The problem is that once people lock into a subscription to a single platform, we lose them as customers. They stop buying books or films or shows, and start buying the service. PLATFORM becomes king, not CREATOR. So the economic incentive is not to bond people to character, theme, narrative or other artistic ideals--but to a service. I see a short-sightedness to this that most industry suits don't seem to comprehend. I can't help but see analogy in the silver age churn of disposable comics, for example, leading to contemporary issues in new reader acquisition for the entire American comics industry. Is there any hope for an advertisement-dependent service like youtube to head this off? If this is not too long for a Patrick replies question (sorry about that) what three immediate changes would you make to youtube to counteract all of this if you were put in charge?
I thought the problem with comtemporary comic book sales is that they are largely only appear in specialized stores these days. Sure, Silver Age Comics were more disposable, but at least you could find them anywhere.
@@IkeOkerekeNews That's a valid point, as those shops are a little isolating--but you could argue book shops are also a specialized store. I've heard people in the industry lament they don't have more "watchmen." Meaning consistent, reliable sellers that reach a new audience. Traditional books have a ton of those--but comics have very few. I think it's this idea of constant churn, even in the modern comics industry, leading people to never feel they have a good entry point. Comics FEEL relentless, like a TH-cam feed--that batman needs a new story every month (or seven new stories) even if they aren't good stories that need to be told. But that might be my assumptions speaking.
I hate that this cold, calculated, approach, to art is happening more and more with each day. It makes enjoying media harder and harder now.
@@BrandSandersonyou’re 100% correct. It’s why I rather watch animated superhero cartoon over reading the comics.
@@BrandSanderson
I agree with all of these points. I would say that comic publishers tend to advertise to a largely insular market, with extremely high cost per value of the product provided. The channel Comic Drake recently did a great deep dive on this exact subject, but the reason why manga has become so popular in the US is that there have been very effective marketing campaigns (especially digital), while the industry tend to focus on anthology books rather than single-story or series books, meaning that you tend to get more bang for your buck. I would also say that despite the vast interest on them, the Big Two's focus on their superhero shared universes has been stifling to readers who might be interested in other genres.
Dystopian is the right word when talking about “content”, it reminds me of the novel 1984 when they try to reduce the number of words in the dictionary to better control the way people think.
Yes agreed😊
I think the point is not the word "content" but the hyperconsumerism that surrounds it, as you noted as soon as you finish a movie you get a trailer for something else, shows are produced as second screen fodder that can be on while you doom scroll on your phone, as soon as a game gets released the hype cycle for the next one begins, and so on. we're being force fed with media and entertainment we more and more have no time to spend with and no money to pay for. great content btw!
I think it's def our problem too. Like, how much time do we(Me) spend absorbing content? Screen time's up to hours and hours and hours, and that's just passive consumption too. Can any of us even go to the bathroom without using our phone? Nah, because then we'd have to think. And we don't want to do that. Because thinking makes us anxious, thinking makes us go crazy.
The problem with the word itself is how it centers platforms and corporations over art and artists.
Content is just a Container, but not the food.
no wonder you're hungry all the time, you''re too busy with Tupperware but not the food itself.
it's the same like Modern content, they too busy creating the container, but it's empty inside.
churned out fast, but it had no meaning in it and completely thoughtless.
most series aren't created by someone who was obsessed and passionate to make their dream Movie or series happen.
instead, they're copying hundreds of movies, and just cut and paste it into their Frankenstein Movie/Series.
My issue with "content" is that it now can be used to refer to both a film that a director pours his whole heart into, and the AI voice reads you a reddit post while family guy clips play on the bottom of the screen slop that is served up on tiktok and Instagram.
Dude, you don't have to say "I know this is not important" all the time. It's a good video and language matters. If this wasn't important and meaningful I wouldn't have watched it for 40 mins.
As one of your 10% of women viewers I really appreciate your Taylor Swift video. I like that you were able to speak about her without demeaning her or her listeners.
I enjoyed him discussing her in an under examined manner. I have heard no one else discuss her rise as a filmmaker and visual creative.
Taylor Swift is a horrible person and her fans are insufferable
@@ChurchWorshipandvideoShe sucks
Emma's line delivery is wonderfully serious. Any video guest starring Ma and Pa Willems, is always going to be worth a watch.
His parents are gems. Every time I say the name Patrick I have to force myself to not say it in an Irish accent
And a slightly disappointed comic tone 🤗🤗🤗@@gonzo6489
The crazy thing to me is that when your business IS "art", treating it like replaceable content is BAD business.
More- it treats everything the same, from a 10 minute chicken scratch to year-long continuation of an idea; all just cogs to be swapped and refitted depending, some of it good, some of it bad, but all of it disposable.
It is only if you're the one producing art. If you deal with someone else's work, then making it repleaceable is the smart business. This is perfect for youtube, but not as much for disney and other traditional corporations getting into streaming, since it cannibalizes their old business model.
Or Hollywood is less art than you think it is.
The sad truth is that currently "art" changes nothing. The system is rigged, people watch a movie about how the powerful oppress them agree and the next day go back to work for minimal paid. They perfected the art of giving people enough for them to not revolt, but nothing more.
but... it allways has been... its allways been just trading cards and the social capital around having/making/talking about trading cards
The one good thing about this ocean of content is that someone can watch TH-cam for 10+ years, seemingly has explored everything that is to their liking and then something like this pops up and you find find quality work that you really enjoy because it speaks to you and gives you some reassurance that your weird gut feeling isn't just you getting out of touch, but you're a part of a collective that has the same overall thoughts and feelings. Well done.
You undermine your own point. You have to wade through hours and hours and hours of "content" to find that one thing that speaks to you. You just confirmed that the vast majority of "content" is basically garbage that is easily forgotten five seconds after you watch it
Thanks for making this video.
I used to be an independent musical artist, I was doing alright...I got to the stage where I was about to sign a deal with Universal/Decca, but something in me started to die when I realised that more and more platforms like Spotify, along with record labels, were pushing some kind of background wallpaper version of music.
Labels were interested in my "angle" or my "content production" or "social media presence".
The streaming platforms started encouraging artists to post singles every four weeks in exchange for algorithmic support. Doing the opposite, taking a year to craft a whole album and releasing it as an album for example, would lead to a lack of support from the algorithm.
I noticed that more and more, it wasn't about art, it was about content and making yourself some kind of "meme".
It wasn't about the music, it was about the platforms having more content to populate their playlists which reward conformity to a certain unchanging mono-aesthetic, and therefore earn more money and listeners for them...not for you as an artist.
Then I looked all around me, and more and more I realised that everything was being de-valued, and branded as "content".
I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees this as a very worrying sign for the future.
Keep up the good...um...content.
👏👏 Well stated. This realization has also pulled the rug out from under my creative endeavors. While I enjoyed taking hours an days to create a song or video, it was disheartening to experience firsthand that I could get more clicks by just spewing words to create "content."
👏👏 Well stated. This realization has also pulled the rug out from under my creative endeavors. While I enjoyed taking hours an days to create a song or video, it was disheartening to experience firsthand that I could get more clicks by just spewing words to create "content."
The Algorithm is the new god we all are giving sacrifices every now and then.
There's a really good video of a talk between Rick Beato and Ted Gioia, which is largely about the relationship between tech/money and arts/music. There are really specific causes for all this stuff, and I think you might enjoy the video. I'm also a musician and it was a good watch.
How depressing! Keep making your art regardless. I have had five books of poetry published. Last book took me 10 years to write. Not everyone values "fast".
This so perfectly encapsulates a feeling I've had but have never been able to accurately put into words. It's that feeling you get when you watch a fantastic film on netflix, and it just ends, and it's no more than 'that thing you spent your afternoon doing'. It instantly gets buried under whatever is recommended next, which might be another episode of love is blind. It always left me feeling sad, but I never knew why. Thank you for putting this into words patrick!
Stop watching netflix
Actually, the solution is deliberate watching.
As in, you get a series or a movie you like, or you curate yourself a watchlist, and you make it a point of logging on just to watch this specific thing, and you watch only a single episode, or a single movie, and then you log off - give yourself time to stew over what you saw.
@@4rumani
Good advice from@@4rumani
I'm consciously removing "content feeds" from my life for this very reason
It's why I don't stream films or music, DVDs are 10 for £1 in a few charity shops, that keeps me going.
As an aspiring animator/ director that has been heavily considering the idea of creating/ publishing independently online, this touched on so many topics I’ve been thinking about. Thank you.
As someone with a background in analytics, "content" is very clearly a logistical concept that has escaped containment. When you're trying to navigate massive moving parts, you're gonna have some buckets you have to put stuff in. It's like when companies look at workforce in terms of headcount. And it's kind of necessary. When trying to look at the overall health and direction of a large organization, this is just the only feasible way to express the data. But I've even seen this kind of language create these effects internally. Having to remind people in meetings that these numbers I'm talking about represent the LIVED experience of real people and whether they are going to have a good day or an awful one, both customer and employee. That bottom line thinking can and will just break EVERYTHING if we don't allow room for nuance and outliers.
And this was in a fucking CALL CENTER environment. Even in these little things, it can really show how corporate suits don't make the intellectual connection between "line on graph" and "1,000s of living, breathing people".
I've once been referred to as a resource not an employee whose paid to offer my time and skills...are they only worth extra energy to get a job done without thinking about how we treat those people.
of COURSE they don't. that would be humane and would be valuing something other than profit at all costs 100% of the time. they don't do that.
And you read business journals and the people who have successful businesses keep saying "You have to treat your people like people" and then they forget and then the business falls off again.
I don't fully understand why they keep forgetting this important lesson, but I heard the other day some auto industry commentator talk of "market competitiveness" not as "industry making good cars for people to buy" as a regular human Jo would, but as "Company posting attractive results on the stock markets for investors to invest in".
I feel you Patrick, I've been discussing this withsome friends that are hooked on watching content nonstop on the mayor platforms. They always feel bored, empty or anxious for more content. And it was difficult to explain them the reason was treat art as just content itself.
Thank you!
Marty is my sheperd. His essay really touched me at the time not only because he was right, but because it showed the frustration of a master watching his passion being burned to the ground. Art is supposed to move, surprise and challenge the audience. As "content consumers", we are being used to be indulged, pleased (maybe tamed). Great discussion, thanks.
Reminds me of the time I took a career aptitude test and they suggested I should become a "subject matter expert."
I’m glad you said, almost verbatim, that this comes down to the difference between art and product. We have artists creating art and honing their crafts, but all the distributors want is simple product. Thanks Patrick, you are a truly great video essayist/ TH-cam filmmaker.
I think people using the word content is actually a pretty reasonable thing to get pissed off about. I write songs and i put a lot of love and care into them, my hope's, dreams and insecurities are all in there and to have it be thrown into the content box with everything else makes me feel really hopeless.
Content is like the new buzz word for artist. When you throw everything into one box without any form of standard. It depreciates the value of almost all work produced.
Corporations want this so that Art will be "Just another TH-cam video". A vlogger will earn just as much if not more than the artist. It's sickening!! Those greedy psychopaths won't spare corpses for profits.
I think the “problem of content” was best expressed by Tim Minchin in his song “The TH-cam Lament”:
All my carefully-worded metaphors
All my flat-nine-dominant-seven chords
All of my schtick, my lyrical trickery
All those bows, all that applause
All my intertextuality
All my self-aware hypocrisy
All of those rhymes, those irregular times
All my softly-spoken sophistry
All my make-up, all my lights
All my photoshoots in tights
All my pretensions, all my intentions
All my glitzy opening nights
All my crowd-dependant jokes
All my mirror-balls and smoke
All my tilts at wit and whimsy
All my poetry, my swear words and my smut…
…will never get as many hits as “Kitten Waking Up”.
This video is a really good summary on why this year has particularly been not fun to discuss movies or shows with and why my viewing habits with streaming services are so scattered. It’s really sad to see companies treat all these movies and shows as products and just completely stop there. Honestly putting monetary motives into a product isn’t a bad thing by default, but in a lot of cases, it feels like that’s all they are doing.
Is that true or you're just making it up
Totally agree, calling all visual work “content” completely delegitimizes it. It also flattens the landscape for creative work and makes it all equal. A 10 hour video of Patrick from SpongeBob guzzling mayonnaise is now the same as an Oscar winning film. The only difference is the amount of eyes you can get on it because that will tell you how much money it can make. If everything is content, then great art, bad art and non-art all become part of the same white noise whose only value comes from how long they can keep eyeballs. I’ve seen incredible videos on TH-cam, expertly shot, written, performed, videos that say something meaningful and valuable, but because of this mindset of everything as content, they just become another meaningless way to take up time until the next piece of content. I wish we had a better word for great art made on TH-cam. It deserves better.
I was just thinking that we need a word to call "things that aren't mere content". I do admit that I do consume some easy content, but they are different than video essays that require hours of research or actual piece of art. To deflatten everything, we need a word to describe it.
Just call great art on TH-cam art and the banal stuff content. Obviously subjective but I see no reason to make up a new word for it especially since the current one was made up by corporate vampires.
I call things what they are. An hour long video essay on pop culture history, a 20 minute episode of a cooking show, and a 5 minute comedy short may all be hosted on TH-cam, but they're all different kinds of things.
@@SuperPal-tr3go I get what you're saying but I have a counter argument. Not all valuable things on the internet are art, for example I don't consider video essays as art although some people may disagree. And as a response to Stinkoman below who says they call things what they are, I also get the sentiment but what would still put the Lindsay Ellis-es and the Maulers into one bucket and that feels wrong. Lastly, the cynic in me thinks that a new "catchy" word would be easier to accepted by the public instead of re-teaching them something that feels pedantic.
@@inkasaraswati7625 You seem... discontent.
I had to come back to this video after an experience I just had with a friend of mine. One thing don't think is spoken enough about is how much this change to "content" affects the way people enjoy the actual "content". I recommended an anime (Tengoku Daimakyo) to a younger friend of mine and his first question was "When does it get good", implying he would find an episode or moment in the middle of the show to watch instead of watching it from front to back. After convincing him to watch the whole thing his response is "Oh it's only 13 episodes I can finish this by tonight. He then invites me to the Discord to play Madden as he "watches" it on his second monitor in dub (he doesn't know Japanese). This incredible piece of media that I anticipated, theorized about, and was blown away by was boiled down to background noise. The most maddening part was after about 10 minutes I hear "This shit boring" and we never spoke about the show again. While this is obviously an extreme example it is honestly pretty sad that whenever I speak about art to someone it's possible that this is their method of consumption. I hope there's a turnaround at some point.
I feel ya man. Sometimes your close friends ,who are generally smart and perceptive, just don't seem to get it. People have become "basic"
Okay sorry man but thats not a societal thing, thats just what other people do, they have different tastes, not everyone thinks anime is high-brow material. There’s plenty of times when you recommenf something to a friend, they dont like it, and when they recommend to you, they dont like it either. Its called difference of opinion
@@GuineaPigEveryday I think you missed the point of my comment. My issue wasn't with his opinion on the show, you're right everyone is going to have different tastes and be into different things. My issue was with the way he consumed it. You don't have to see anime as "high-brow material" to sit in front of a TV and actually give your full attention. The societal issue I was pointing towards is a generation of consumers who consume art as "content" and don't consume it in the way it was intended to be consumed.
@@GuineaPigEverydaythis is a dumb comment, it wouldn’t matter if they were mentioning the friend doing this with a movie, show, or video on TH-cam. The point is the fact that their friend cannot honestly engage with art when it’s recommended they just simply consume it as content. Try re-reading a comment before angrily replying and making yourself look kinda clownish and illiterate.
I mean, he plays Madden. I wouldn’t expect much from him.
15 years ago, I used to work in a small IT firm and one day the Chief Strategy Officer unveiled "the content delivery project". "People want content, we will deliver content" he said. To this day, I still don't know what this project actually produced. But Management applauded him after his talk, I guess that's the only thing that mattered.
It was
Thank you for putting to words what has been bothering me for a long time now. This word content makes it sound like I'm making cattle feed or something. Our viewers aren't cattle, and I'm trying to make videos that will actually be worth their time.
Artists have to stop calling themselves "content creators"
I hate that phrase, SO Much.
If you are part of Gen z or millenialls, Let me explain something to you;
People who put their sh* on Instagram, youtube, fakebook etc. ARE NOT ARTISTS! And definitely "inflluencers" ARE NOT ARTISTS. Now you know. You're welcome.
No real artist was the creator of any "content". "Content" is an expression of the commodification of life in a market economy. True art is the artist's expression, the form in which he expresses and shares the essence of life. The fulfillment of an artist is the opportunity to express yourself artistically, not to express yourself in order to sell.
I have a real problem with many people in TV/cinema/streaming claiming to be artists. Mediocre actors in rehashed story lines who are phoning it in aren't artists, they are just doing a job to earn money. I would reserve the word artist for someone who is actually using their imagination to create something original.
Artists are dying , replaced by Content creators for a hot minute
Reminds me of the push among artists to replace the term "motion capture" with the more appreciative "performance capture," and I would say that there is a big difference between the two.
this is good content
No, it's great content
@@carlos_hb It is Fetch!
❤
Didn't expect well known anime CONTENT provider, Mother's (Jeff) Basement to be here
Great to see you here
I had to teach zoom classes to middle schoolers during the Cov lockdown… and even though it was never explicitly stated, I felt like my teaching was “content” in the minds of my students.. (and very often it was second screen content) and it still sort of fills me with dread to remember it…
Well, would you like to be young in a time of "content", screens everywhere and no one taking a stand against it? Happy not to be young...
That’s why you can never allow it to happen again. Never forget that jightmare
And it’s even worse than that, I just realized.. one kid put a ton of guac on a chip and announced (in person, not online) something like “when you put too much guac on your chip” - he “captioned” a moment of his actual life as if it were a piece of content.
@@radioforthebirdsHah, our 13-year-old daughter does this sometimes. My wife and I actively disallow it in our house! And it's hard to explain to her why, because so many of her friends do the same thing. As in, taking a moment of real life and captioning it like they're some TikTok influencer about to make it into a meme or something. And our daughter doesn't even have a smartphone. I dread what things would be like if she was zombified by her personal screen device for hours a day like most teenagers these days.
@@adamrad2220 yeah, the reason is subtle. I actually think this is the Buddhist idea of Dualism... living life while observing/commentating it at the same time. I've heard many different explanations of it out there, but that's my understanding of it. If so, this is an ancient sin from one of our oldest traditions! It precludes spontaneity.
Love you for citing PBS Idea Channel; I was a teenager during that channel's original run in the early-to-mid 2010s and it was super formative for how I engage with digital media today. It was so ahead of its time for its critical theory-oriented video essay edutainment and I feel like for how influential it was it's wrongfully been largely forgotten about
Having grown up with the internet, I fell into this "content" trap as an artist who primarily draws artwork. It seemed easy because I can whip up something in a day, but that it is, I'm in a good mood and not pressured. Apply pressure is only going to delay me, not make me more productive. And that's basically "content" in a nutshell. Peer pressure.
i just have to shout out the animator who came up with the absolutely brilliant gimmick of colored stripes re-orienting and revealing themselves to be patrick's shirt as he puts it on, i'm sure this comment will get buried but seriously that was awesome i went back and re-watched it your work did not go unnoticed
I agree. It’s a great animation!
It was cool enough that the letters of his name became the stripes, and when they morphed into the shirt I realized how little I’ve accomplished with my own life.
Where?
@@cosmicspacething3474The intro sequence.
What breaks my heart about what content's become is that so many of the creative professionals I know (including myself) got into the content industry as a way to bridge the gap between wanting to tell stories and create entertainment for people while still learning, building connections, and generally having no money for either earning enough to escape the industry and make t.v. and movies, or in the very least fund your own independent projects while still keeping a job.
My issue getting into the biz, and I know I'm not alone, was that it was already prohibitively expensive to get in and expand in any way, either into new creative ideas and practices or by just taking on new opportunities. Rent was already crazy in the city where I needed to be to do the job I do (this is before remote working was so mainstream,) and companies were already well on their way to creating content via "analytics tea leaves reading" so budgets/creative direction were largely being spoken for in most of the content companies around me. So... personally, I found myself with this deep desire to create bigger projects either for my company, or for me, but without the time, or money, or real resources to do it. I got stuck in the "content company circle" basically. Working too hard to move or do anything extra, getting paid too little to change anything about it, hoping one of my projects would get fully recognized while getting virtually zero credit for anything I, or my colleagues, were doing.
Furthermore, the creative process for the last 10 to 15 years has been utterly poisoned by "enshitification thinking" from Sillicon Valley. I've been a creative professional for the last 15 years and the last 10, I can't think of many projects where I was just trusted, as a creative, to create sellable media without the inclusion of about 30 extra cooks and analytics advisors who believe "you need to put a cake in the first :03 seconds or else it won't sell."
"Content" is a term that came from profit-first-creative-second thinking. It's a product, not a piece of media, or entertainment, or art. It's "we didn't give a honk but please give me dollars."
Companies stopped believing in the work. Plain and simple. They stopped believing in creating unique, quality media that tells their story uniquely. They stopped desiring doing the actual work, in the creative process, to create content that only THEY could be known for. They started salivating over the next quarter, speedracing results against all logic, and fully believing that their data - out of EVERYONE who is collecting largely the SAME data - was "the data" to crack the code to "no effort + no money = media profit."
They got lazy, believed in the marketing term quick fixes more than the actual creative minds they were employing, and shot themselves in the foot. That on top of the extreme onslaught of quantity over quality content has lead to over saturation - and people are over it. We're over de-valued creative work, that's been de-valued because people who don't even respect the medium of entertainment are making all the calls and holding all the cash.
The circus is rad because of the performers and artists, people. Not the ring leaders who hoard the ticket sales.
So what's your point here you're not making sense here
@@assassin8636why?
@@assassin8636 My understanding of the point is that: art has become devoid of soul for the sake of low effort money making and over reliance in measurable statistics. it's there in the last sentence. art is good bc of the people creating it, not the execs behind it.
It is depressingly unsurprising that it was Bill Gates who started the "content" ball rolling. I'd not heard about that essay, but I am absolutely unsurprised.
Yeah that guy’s an absolute ghoul
No surprise seeing as he thought the Doom Guy wore a trenchcoat
@@RedLion_52 lol really?
@langdons2828
Not really started, more like accurately predicted the structure and basis of most services, distribution, and use of the internet. Basically, internet economics.
@@chevon5707 is he? I thought he was one of the more sane and decent billionaires out there comparatively speaking, considering we have morons and psychopath/sociopath's like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Bezos is a straight up Lex Luthor villain type too. Bill Gates ik founded his own organisation that is genuinely helping people and spending a lot of money in terms of humanitarian causes. I mean yeah sure for billionaires thats peanuts, but he does it more than others.
I've been trying to articulate my distaste for the word in this context for YEARS - I think this video does a much better job than I ever will.
Missed opportunity for a 'Now is the summer of our discontent' joke though
Content is making something to fill a niche/gap - like buying a new sofa to fill a corner of your living room. It may be pretty, but it's also lifeless. Art is making something to fill your soul.
succinctly put❤
i have been railing against the blanket overuse of the word "content" for like 5 years. this entire video was made for me i already know it.
Many many decades ago I worked in a factory and had to go into the office area from time to time - (and this only occurred to me years after it changed) - within a few years the sign on the office door which used to be marked 'personnel' was changed to 'human resources'.
In two words, they removed and devalued the individual, the person - and substituted the mass, the conglomeration, the collective.
I knew something bad for workers was coming, and for the UK in the 70's/80's, it did, for the worse (certainly for the employees) - and has gotten worse ever since. The change of the office door title wording was like a signpost for the cold uncaring corporate blatantly politically corrupt society we have now.
The value of people now seems to be marginal - I saw that one of the US hospitals was dumping patients on the sidewalk because they couldn't pay anymore.
The future of how things were going to turn for ordinary people was literally right in front of me in 1980, on that little door sign.
I see a parallel devaluation in calling people's life's passions, the product of decades of dedication to craft, their deep and insightful observations on life and humanity - 'content' (and I have a feeling that billionaire media owners use of AI is only going to make things immeasurably worse).
If I may go on a tangent here, it’s sort of like what the late music critic Mark Fisher wrote about during the Recession-before 1980, there was “popular modernism” which enabled high-brow, experimental and independent art to be appreciated by the masses, at the same time as the Government was more about developing the economy and building the NHS, APT, and the like, and the newspapers had labour-centric desks rather than writing relentlessly about “workplace tips” and “productivity”. From my perspective, things were more stable and genuinely aspirational, and humans seemed more valued then, unlike what my Generation Z has experienced
Personnel is also collective, refers to all the workers. I feel the difference is less between individual and collective as it is the dehumanization of the workers, from personnel- workers, the people doing the job, to us being merely "resources", just cogs in the machine.
Another issue for getting away from content and toward actual media creation, is that content moves so fast--it's almost impossible to properly have a record of every piece of content released.
We have started to talk about trends as something that last literal days or hours, as opposed to trends lasting years or decades.
This makes recording the history of content phenomena and creation nearly impossble as by the time you get to recording what is going on, the digital world has moved on and as result, we basically erase history immediately in order to move on to the next trend.
I believe this is part of why it seems like we've lived 100 years in only the past 5.
While some major historic events have occurred, the internet trends have done more than stimulate and promote--they have bamboozled our brains into thinking more has occurred--when only more has occurred online. And anyone trying to make a living through some sort of media output MUST play this crazy game. You can't really survive without pumping out a consistent amount of "content."
Few people have managed to get and maintain influence without playing this game.
The description of how treating everything as content discourages experimentation hits so close to how I've been feeling. The most important video I've seen on this topic so far. TY
It's the era of 'we don't own anything' and ''everything is content'.
Reject streaming. Embrace physical media.
@@bikramarora1819or storing media on storage devices
@@bikramarora1819Don't let nostalgia blind you too much. Physical media just means a shelf stuff with disc boxes that never get opened.
physical media is subject to entropy.
embrace digital backups@@bikramarora1819
From what I've heard, the only reason this strike has happened in the first place is because of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings holding out against their demands, and all the sociopathic shit about hoping the writers and actors will come crawling back once they become homeless seems to have come from Hastings. So John Green's 2013 jokes about Hastings have come back around from incomprehensibly dated to hilariously topical.
To give Hastings the smallest possible benefit of the doubt, there's a good chance that those rumors were orchestrated one of the other studios to try to throw Netflix under the bus. Disney or WBD would gladly do that if they felt it was the best course of action; Netflix is a business competitor, after all. Just because the studios have a shared enemy in the strikes doesn't mean they need to look out for one another.
Really? So, all of the other media CEOs are actually willing to cut a deal with the writers and the actors, but they can’t all because of him? Like, that’s what you’re telling me here?
Hollywood makes shit no one wants while demanding more for the privilege of making shit.
@@Markunator Fun fact, a bunch of indie studios have already met the demands and are able to continue production now.
Indie studios can do it but the big ones can't. Something wrong there.
@@devdanferguson7616that could be the case
I’ve been pondering the difference between art and content. It’s as if art is made for its own sake, to exist and content is made to capture your attention, to distract you from the fact that you exist.
If art exist for it own sake, would anyone care if people pay attention to art?
Art is expression content is advertising
@@relaxingsoundscapes7 - Not for me. "Created to entertain" implies a kind of pure motive. When I think of the word "content," I think of someone who doesn't necessarily have a strong desire to express themselves, or entertain, or show off their talent. I think of someone who lives in 2023 and knows that the way to make money and to get famous is to come up with a gimmick for Tiktok and TH-cam. "Content" implies that self-promotion and adsense money are the only priorities. Whether anyone is entertained or not is almost irrelevant.
Not all content inherently want to only distract. Content can also be made to reflect on the reality and give more tools to the watcher ( I would argue that this is most of the worthwhile art present, even abstract art work with this).
This is definitely the key idea. For example, some of my favorite "TH-camrs" live stream, or record and upload with minimal editing. They do things like repair electronics or cars. There's no music, no graphics. I don't consider it to be creative or artistic whatsoever, but it is definitely "content", and competes with creative and expressive works.
I feel this too.... no one spends any time on anything anymore. Just get it out fast. more content... more! doesn't matter what!! just produce sludge!!
It's such a simplistic word. I don't know why we haven't come up with something a bit more...relative? Concise? I hate 'content' as much as I do "influencer" and "TH-camr"
This is exactly how I feel when I watch stuff like Defunctland’s youtube documentaries, for example. He’s making like, filmmaking art but it’s just thrown into the concept of “internet content” which doesn’t feel right when you think about it
It’s concearning
When Patrick said 'there's another crochety old man who agrees with me' I was totally expecting for it to instantly cut to a completely unscripted Patrick's Dad rant. That said I can't say I'm at all disappointed that instead it was Martin Scorsese's head floating in the air, surrounded by pink hearts. First of all, same, and secondly, as a member of your apparently very small female audience, I am totally in favor of the inclusion of floating pink hearts in your videos, especially when they're used to compliment Martin Scorsese.
This video has been a great thing to be half listening to whilst focusing on cooking dinner. I sure hope this doesn't reframe the content of this video [sic] in a dramatically ironic way
Remember times when we were individual, personal youtube users with videos, now we are "channels"? But luckily, in my language we talk about videos, shows, movies, series etc. When we talk about [content, in our language], it suits only for making content in instagram, facebook, tic toc etc. Fastly produced,simple, easily digested stuff in social media.
so, I haven't started the video yet, but I am looking forward to this immensely. Only a few days ago I was reading up on writing exercises on a writer's forum when I saw all these young people talking about their art, their STORIES, and calling them 'content'. I don't make content, I tell stories. There's something sterile and wrong (commodifying) about the word and how it shapes our relationship to art.
I cannot elaborate just how eagerly I awaited this video
The production behind your "content" is always A+
I have spent way too much time curating various video essay playlists containing some of my favorite videos on TH-cam for several years now. I started this when I realized I might have watched a life changing video a year ago and already forgotten about it. I know that no one will ever look at these playlists so maybe it shouldn’t matter but I do this to in some small way fight back against the ideology that this is all disposable content. And guess what? This video is going in my favorite! Lol
I would be interested in your playlist! Filtering videos to the best of, is difficult in the era of content
Great idea.
I went to your playlist on your channel. Thanks for making them public so I could say. Yeah, pretty good playlist you built up.
Love the playlist!
you and the other comments got me to check out the playlists and now i have to watch them haha they are good
“I talk to myself on-camera in front of a hypothetical audience...
I’m too self-absorbed to have a normal conversation”
You know what other word Netflix popularized that I absolutely hate? "Binging". Prior to Netflix deciding that watching a bunch of a show was binging it, we called that a marathon. And the only two associations I had with binging was when you stuffed your face with junk food until you needed to throw up and with eating disorders because of the phrase "binge and purge". It was in the unholy trinity of disgusting corpo-speak with content and pipeline drawing such a clear picture to me of what they think of us and the art we enjoy: we are all just little piggies at the trough and all of this stuff is just the slop they have to keep feeding us down the chute.
It actually drives me nuts when people roll their eyes about this and go, "It's just a word, who cares?!" Man, this stuff matters. I'm pretty sure I thanked Mike from Idea Channel when he did his video on content and I appreciate the time you've taken on this too, Patrick. It's pretty gross that they talk about creative pursuits in this way. I don't have to like it and I freaking DO NOT!
Thank you for mentioning Mike Rugnetta, I had completely forgotten about him and I have loved his perspective. It's crazy how we forget the creators we used to watch regularly because the TH-cam algorithm doesn't serve it to us.
Scrolled too far to find someone mentioning him. Used to love the ideas channel
yarrr, content!
Joywave’s album _Content_ deals in part with the commodification of creative work into “content”, particularly in its title track. (It also plays on the conTENT vs. CONtent ambiguity, but it was released in 2017, so based on 8:22 it’s in the clear.)
Patrick, you don't _have_ to put in all those title cards and stuff and extra things, but I am glad you do! It is one of the reasons I love your videos so so much.
The idea of “content” is like hotel art. Does it require skill to produce? Yes, but its general purpose for existing is to fill empty space.
I hate when people use the word “product” instead of hair styling products. I feel your frustration, Patrick.
speaking of 'content' I've only posted videos on YT a handful of times, but it never ceases to amaze me that there's no 'art' category. I make art: illustrations for comics, books and games and there's no category for it! It makes me wonder what all the art channels on YT classify their 'content' as. The closest category, which feels like a mile off, is 'entertainment'.
Clicked on your profile and it said there was no "content" which was, ironic at the very least
@jharblox8195 lol! That is funny 😂 Yeah, I post my "content" elsewhere.
The worst people (in the literal history of humanity) aren't just the ones calling art "content", they're the ones who also talk (soullessly) about "consuming" or "ingesting" said content. Once you're at that point you're in real danger of becoming the spiritual equivalent of what humanity had become in Wall-E.
Yes! I can't for the life of me recall the moment people went from "watching videos, movies, etc." to "consuming content." Or from "creating films, recording songs, etc." to "pushing out quality content."
or are you just being a snob? When you watch cat videos do you do it BETTER than them?
@@Shiftarus If it's snobbish to want to properly classify and acknowledge the hard work put in by a creator, then sure I guess? But just because I call it "toilet paper" and someone else calls it "bathroom tissue" doesn't mean I wipe my ass better than them; I just don't like to use an unhelpful euphemism.
It's just the distillation of immeasurable work and sacrifice made to create art into a single, nebulous, boardroom-friendly term that rubs me the wrong way. Like people who would refer to David Bowie's discography, or Betty White's massive acting career, or Vince Gilligan's writing as "content" ... that just strikes me as taking the piss, because if you paid even a little attention to any of those things, you'd know that term doesn't do it justice.
Idk...food for thought...or sustenance for brain activity, if you fancy.
@@Shiftarus If you're still considering it "watching cat videos" and not "consuming content," then yes, you are. You're totally doing it better than they are.
I watch Maru roll into a room because it's cute. You watch Maru roll into a room because you're consuming quality content. We are not the same.
@@JamVar Their hard work is acknowledged by those who consume it, enjoy it, comment on it, discuss it, etc. It's insanity to get caught up in "art" vs "content."
Always holding onto the hope that content never turns into contempt.
Top comment worthy
Wait until you realize that content is a product of contempt. Contempt breeds content.
@@bikramarora1819 contempt is what fuels content to the point it’ll all become indistinguishable and boring. A copy of a copy of a copy…ad infinitum
Arghh! Solidarity, brother. I’ve been ranting about this for years & you’re the first person I’ve encountered in any format - digital or otherwise - who shares my ire. For the same exact reason. So glad you made this video; very proactive & articulately argued. ✨🏆
I've also wondered why there is not a better word for what we do with content, aka "consume". It's such an awuful word but seems to have expanded the same way "content" has.
Studio Execs calling the output of their companies CONTENT has the same implications as Hospital Corporation Execs calling sick people CUSTOMERS.
Yeah and that latter one is really disturbing
I work in a hospital and I always correct people who refer to patients as customers. It's a public hospital too, so we aren't even a 'business', it is literally a public service.
@@PlayedbyInstinct that’s good….. but in offices, meeting rooms and in corporate documentation, the word Customer is used by the bean counters and top level management
This just reminded me of that one time when the science community started describing light as particles in addition to waves, which was a huge revelation and revolutionised our understanding of fundamental particles. The problem here is that we are going in the opposite direction; starting with particles and waves, and now we are slowly losing sight of the particles and are left with the gentle waves of the algorithm that will never reveal its nature, or any nature, to us because all it does is conform to us.
I don’t know that I’ll be able to think of “content” the same way again. Thanks Patrick, this was genuinely thought-provoking. And while this is completely unrelated when you began talking about the WGA strike and the loopholes of cutting writers out of their profits I see parallels with early comic books, such as Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster famously selling their rights to Superman at $10 a page as work for hire because there were no rules to stop comic publishers from taking someone’s creation like that. National made millions while paying Jerry and Joe whatever they wanted and expecting them to be grateful for it.
When you talked about studios canceling shows for a tax write off animation absolutely cops it the most
I'm glad Patrick discussed this subject, which has been bothering me for several years. The only way I can describe it ,is like this: Labelling everything "content," treats the best and worst of art as nothing more than endless supply for a nonstop meat-grinder. Nothing is cared _about,_ so nothing is cared _for._ That's a bad mindset for a culture.
As someone who also has come to loathe the word content, I think you're spot-on here. It's a useful term sometimes and the line is hazy at best - but overall, I think of content as something you consume while art is something you experience. Content is an extension of grind culture - always make more, quantity over quality. Art is an invitation to stop, linger, and dive deep into something.
Agreed
But what this fails to realize is that videos you find mundane or derivative are in fact also Art. What this all seems to boil down to is not liking certain Art and wishing it wasn't called the same thing.
But that is EXACTLY why the word exists. It describes the results provoking some intense debate on it's artistic merits.
Perhaps, but whether a piece counts as content or art is completely subjective.
Patrick would likely say that what he does is art, while many/most of us would say it's content, and it certainly doesn't meet the threshold you set for "art."
It's just semantics and is entirely subjective.
@@Shiftarus I didn't say anything about works being mundane, derivative, or things I didn't like - those are your words. There's plenty of art that fits all of those descriptions for me, yet I can still see it as art. What we're talking about has more to do with the purpose behind something's creation.
Emma's delivery of each line is great, makes me laugh every time
She's the secret sauce
Yeah..... "Huwite males, amirite?" It's gold, I tell you, gold.
I am not alone, then 😎👍
I'm not going to lie, it's quite possibly my least favorite thing about these videos besides the lengthy intros. Otherwise, I love Pat's "content".
weird how tastes vary.
I've been thinking a lot during this strike about how Quentin Tarantino was able to get his start because he appeared in the background of a Golden Girls episode (he played an Elvis impersonator! it's very fun) that ended up being used in one of the show's clip show episodes. because he showed up in reruns of two episodes for years, he was able to save up enough money to fund his real dream and become a filmmaker. there are certainly other people like him right now - actors appearing in small, background parts in popular shows who, if given the chance, could become some of our greatest contemporary artists - but we'll never get to see the work they would have made. we'll never fully understand what we're losing as a culture right now.
“Happy Holidays! Oh, you are offended? Too general? Just say ‘it’? “
Fine. I’ll say it your way, “I like your videos and your pictures and your captions and your replies on social media!”
I heard it the first time when a friend of mine worked for a German media company in Munich around 2005 and his job was to find and acquire as much HD *content*, since that was the thing everyone needed for the new HD ready flat screen TVs
I'm reminded of a very famous quote - "Don't ask questions. Just consume Product, and then get excited for next Product".
Watched this one on Nebula and felt very seen-- thanks for making it, it means a lot to see it articulated so well.
Looking forward to the next piece!
I watch/ listen to ALOT of video essays and I have to say this is one of the best ones I've viewed recently. Thank you for all the years of work Patrick
Great video, it helped me understand the visceral feeling of disgust I get everytime people use variations of the phrases "consume content" and "content creation"
I came here because Brandon Sanderson recommended this video in his Intentionally Blank end of year podcast. Thoroughly enjoyed it, only to have Patrick reference Brandon at the end of the video. lol
The moment I saw the title, I hit the like button. This proved to be a mistake, as I then subsequently had the impulse to like the video many times while watching, only to be disappointed when I remembered I already had.
I basically agree with Patrick here, but there is a depressing truth underlying it:
*Most people don’t care about movies as much as Patrick Willems or Martin Scorsese.*
If everyone loved cinema that way, we wouldn’t have this model because it would fail. It’s working because the internet is an omnipotent machine for finding the lowest common denominator.
Troubleshooting ways to serve those who want more art is the answer, but this content thing won’t go away.
Patrick, I just want to say Ive been watching your videos since seeing your video talking about the background people in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy and I love everything you have to say. The effort you put in clearly shows, some of the skits between you and Emma are cool. I learn a lot from listening to you. Big thumbs up
Everytime I hear "content" in this context I remember a verse from one song of a musical Rent: 'So I own not a notion I escape and ape content. I don't own emotion- I rent.' It is just sad how true that verse have become.
"Everybody's on a barge
Floating down the endless stream of great TV"
I've been feeling really depressed lately about this whole situation, and I'm worried that my dream of working as a show runner/director for TV is pointless dead-end. Is there anything us common folk can do to push back against these changes?
I just disengaged. I’m still telling the stories I want to tell, but I’m flying solo now
Be persistent and lucky
You and Kyle Bosman would get along swimmingly
An interesting discussion is how media companies made us feel so concerned for the content that they make. It's either we have to engage in the streaming numbers, we have to keep track of the box office to get more of the content we want. Media companies use engagement to measure and weigh the emotional and capital investment.
AUTOMATIC DISLIKE for pre-roll ads.
AUTOMATIC "don't recommend channel" for pre-roll ads.
This issue is actually much larger than just movies, people have become products in every field. Glad you mentioned something, although this isn't my format of educational entertainment I appreciate it for what it is. Hopefully we can bring this more attention.
I think it would be fine to just call a creative work a "creation" and call multiple works "creations". If you look up the definition of "content" it doesn't include works themselves, only what's in them. Calling yourself a "content creator" is like calling yourself a "filler maker".
Sounds good to me. Maybe you could also say 'creature', in the same sense as 'sculpture'? Although that would just make people think of 'Frankenstein'.
When will science finally invent a word for “works”? When science, when! :)
That's exactly the perspective. "Content" is the view of the platform owners, who need Stuff to fill the never-ending slop trough that keeps people coming back.
yeah that's the whole point . content is filler.
well, not to me, but like Heads said, and Patrick in teh video, it is to the studio execs.... and the influencers who only work for the algoritm and not to create art or entertaining materials or music or whatever.
Fun episode - I'd happily talk to you at a party about this issue haha. You also see this with music. Although Spotify pays residuals, many people dispute the effectiveness of the current payment model. Everything is algorithm-based, and the limited curation that occurs (selected playlists) only encourages bottlenecking of creativity into something that will place a song onto those playlists. And other playlists such as 'shower-music' or whatever limits the value of the music being created to a product for a specific task or mood. However, for many musicians this is the only option available, as they know physical and digital sales will be negligible if a fan can just listen to their music for free instead. How do you think a residual scheme on something like Netflix would avoid the same pitfalls?
I think the point of this video is that Netflix has already fallen into the same trap, although a movie playlist for different moods is something I haven't seen and would sadly work just bc of the sheer amount of "content" on the platform being impossible to sift through. Worse than the flattening effect of labelling everything content is oversaturation. Just like music, knowing you have an endless pool of media to watch or listen to makes it more likely that you will ignore anything that doesn't instantly grab your attention bc there's more than enough to waste. Besides educating consumers on the issue, i don't think anything can or will be done about it
Woman here.
Video essays are gaining in popularity. Women may be a much lower percentile now, but it’s getting better. Most of them lean towards podcasts and view TH-cam as not capable of this, oddly enough. But it’s getting better.
I found you two days ago and suddenly I’m going through all of them. There will be more of us in time.
Thank you for your research and your In depth discussion. It’s lovely and refreshing.
I'm glad there has been some big pushback against this kind of commercialization of art, as thinking about how art has kinda regressed to some extent due to this "contentification" really depresses me, like genuinely. I have a plethora of thoughts on the topic and I hate that it stresses me out so much.
Without a doubt this is one of the best articulations of the dire consequences of our modern media landscape, rivaled only be Bo’s song “Welcome to the internet.” If you won’t call your videos art, I happily will.
The average persons gleeful adoption of the executives language and disdain for anyone that aspires make art rather than “content” shakes me to my core. Some of the commentary on the strikes is utterly deranged.