Adding Up to Nothing: "Content" and The Shreds of Context

I hate the word “content.”

Content presupposes and prioritizes the container.  It's focusing on the jar, and not the mayonnaise: pass me some of that content to smear on my sandwich. Or be careful with that mug! I don't want to get any content on my tablecloth!

Content is not a text, a form, a genre, or a mode; it’s just effluvia. Hey guys, we got an empty septic tank over here. Let’s generate some content and fill ‘er up!

Text became content when it was decided that our primary medium of communication should be the post: impossible to describe, exactly, in terms of its form, a post might be writing of a sort, or video, or both, or neither.

I’m thinking about all this because of the recent Jonathan Haidt content (heh) making the rounds about “shreds of video," which comes from a longer panel discussion published by Close Screens Open Minds (linked below). For all of my issues with his quasi-scientific causation theory in The Anxious Generation, and for the blatant anti-Ed-tech agenda behind the video, I do still find ideas like this philosophically and aesthetically relevant. 

Here's the longer quote: "Human societies have always been about vertical transmission from one generation to the next. That's what cultural wisdom is. It's stories. It's epic poems. It's it's shared cultural references. It's the Bible. It's Shakespeare. All these things, they're passed out from one generation to the next vertically with modification...Now that's over. Young people used to consume a lot of information from previous generations and a lot laterally from kids their age. When we were kids, we watched a lot of TV. None of the programs were made by other kids our age. A lot of it was made by our grandparents' generation. So if you think about human societies, British society, American society, Jewish tradition, Hindu, whatever your tradition is, imagine just chopping it off in the early 2010s because your kids are taking in gigabytes of stuff laterally. Little bits, little shreds of video that don't add up to anything. I think we are already culturally unmoored, and it's going to get a lot worse with AI, which will fill the gap by just generating stuff."

Stuff, to my mind, a fine synonym for content.

His statement about reading books and the “vertical transmission of cultural wisdom” feels right to me, even as I am already up to my eyebrows in the AI-in-education hype on places like LinkedIn (“it’s not the kids, it’s your assessments!”).

Well, sure. Of course it's our assessments. They cannot adapt fast enough to the digital world that kids have bringing into the classroom since the first smartphones dropped in 2008 or so. Once young people had a world completely outside of adult purview, a world that seemed much more "real" (in terms of their emotions and attention, at least) than the slow analog world inside our classrooms, then we began to lose them—to become "unmoored." What we do in school became less and less relevant, the more social media confirmed that their digital world was what mattered.

Because the fact of the matter is that these old skills can't change. Reading a book takes time; listening to someone speak takes effort; contextualizing is a choice, based on how you direct your attention and memory. No digital outsourcing is going to make any of these skills and habits more "efficient" or "productive."

But these days, you can fully ignore books, reading, listening, and writing, and still feel like you have enough context to be wise. Instagram and Tik Tok have become their own contexts. That is, in the most McLuhanesque sense, these platforms only refer to themselves. The "shreds" all seem to form a tapestry, but really, as you scroll and swipe, you look at each thread for about 14 seconds before you tug on a new one, according to The Washington Post. There's no resulting big picture. It's just one scrap after another. No one is helping these kids learn how to read or interpret the "content" they're consuming, shred by shred, probably because the feed itself defies reading.

After all, a book or a poem is formed by the choices of one writer; a film or a tv show, while certainly collaborative, is crafted with intention and thought. But what is the intention or purpose of a "feed?"

Algorithms can feel like choices--"hey, I chose this for you." The feed (a reference to the a ticker-tape or teletype, I suppose) is certainly an apt word for the endless trough of slop that flows and flows, with no beginning and no end other than one of the hundreds of phone pickups you execute from the moment you wake up until the moment you put the thing down and pass out for the night.

Just to do the quick math on that, while we're at it: if a low-end user is on Tiktok for a mere 52 minutes a day, then that's, er, 208 threads they've pulled. That doesn't seem too worrisome (though I have never in my life read 208 poems in a day, or 208 student essays, or watched 208 different tv shows). But when you're a "power user," according to the Post piece, you watch for four hours (246 minutes) a day, and swipe every 11 seconds, which means you've seen 1341 different videos—different voices, purposes, ideas, messages, perspectives, jokes, allusions—none of which was contextualized by the previous 11 seconds...except, of course, that the machine thinks you "might like" it.

Adding up to nothing.

The algorithmic suggestions (which sounds and feels like “hypnotic suggestion,” now that I type it out) create a new, dehumanized, sensory-deprived, schizophrenic and detached context. At best, a heap of broken images. And Eliot thought he was living in the Waste Land!

I know that our educational institutions must carry most of the blame for backing off of actually knowing things.  A decade ago, we listened to guys like Tony Wagner when they said, “How much you know is not a competitive advantage. Information has become commoditized. It's like air.”  

So instead of giving them the oxygen they need, the thinking goes, we need to teach students how and when to inhale. When to "just Google it."

(Also, since when is air a “commodity?” Is there something that Jeff Bezos owns that I don’t know about?)

I guess my question now is, how’s that working out for us?

Sure, the old canon-busting argument suggests that any list of stuff we make to “force kids to know” is a zero-sum game. I get it. There are only so many hours in a day, so many quizzes you can give.  

But at the same time that Gen-X teachers were coming into their own in the classroom, everything we’d used and memorized (and, for sure, questioned), from microfiche to tables of contents to road atlases, was rapidly being subsumed. We didn’t need to memorize stuff anymore, but the difference was that we already had.

My son, who’s 18, has never had to memorize times tables or spelling or the succession of English Kings or the county seats of the State of Maryland. He’s never failed a pop quiz on the Bill of Rights. He’s never been handed a pile of coins and asked to make change. 

But, I guess, you know, he could Google it.

What does this have to do with “content?” 

I think when we vanillified (and, in some ways, vilified) text–that is, the arrangement of symbols and signs that convey meaning–into content, we simultaneously removed the need for context.  Googling and posting became what humans do, instead of recalling and writing; we trained our minds to default to asking the machine for more.

Text evokes tactility,  running your hand over the textus, “the thing woven,” a sensory experience that only a body living in time and space can experience. Text is the result of (conscious-or-not) choices by the weaver to work in one color over another, to make patterns, to plan and cut, to determine if the final work actually creates the image you wanted when you started.

But when you’re churning out “content?” It’s no wonder that we call it slop.