July 16, 2019

Against content, for rhythms and monotony (Across the Sundering Seas, #21)

Since I left Twitter, I have been slowly and carefully, but nonetheless steadily, upping the number of feeds in my RSS reader.¹ I enjoy having a steady stream of interesting reads come my way through the day, and that was one of the primary things that Twitter did actually provide for me. It turns out, though, that the “old” ways—scare-quotes here because after all nothing on the internet is truly old in any meaningful sense; and there is something more to say on that and the sense in which Google Reader’s 2012 demise feels a lifetime ago, but perhaps another day—it turns out that the “old” ways of reading blogs and following interesting links in them and subscribing to new sites when they’re interesting does in fact still work, and very well.

I’ve also been working on a website redesign, and I have spent a non-trivial amount of time reflecting on the makeup of my website—what kinds of things I put there, and how I structure them. That dovetailed nicely with a few reflections on “content” I saw floating around recently:

1. Om Malik: The Problem With “Content”:

   “Content” is the black hole of the Internet. Incredibly well-produced videos, all sorts of songs, and articulate blog posts — they are all “content.” Are short stories “content”? I hope not, since that is one of the most soul-destroying of words, used to strip a creation of its creative effort.

   You can tell a lot about a person and how they think about their work based on whether or not they use “content” to describe what they do. A photographer who says that he is creating “content” for his YouTube channel is nothing more than a marketer churning out fodder to fill the proverbial Internet airwaves with marketing noise.

   My website has my words, my interviews, my photos, and my identity — what it doesn’t have, as far as I’m concerned, is “content.”

   Seconded, and loudly!

2. From Malik’s post, I found my away to Khoi Vinh saying much the same, in Khoi Vinh on How His Blog Amplified His Work and Career:

   That said, I personally can’t imagine handing over all of my labor to a centralized platform where it’s chopped up and shuffled together with content from countless other sources, only to be exploited at the current whims of the platform owners’ volatile business models. I know a lot of creators are successful in that context, but I also see a lot of stuff that gets rendered essentially indistinguishable from everything else, lost in the blizzard of “content.”

   Not that the work I do is all that important or memorable, but I prefer to think of it as “writing” rather than as “content.” And for me, that’s an important distinction. Content and writing are not the same thing, at least the way that we’ve come to define them in contemporary society. Content is inherently transactional; its goal is to drive towards some kind of conversion, some kind of exchange of value. This is why platforms just think of it all as “content”; for the most part, they’re indifferent to whether it’s good or bad writing, or even if it’s writing at all. It doesn’t matter whether it has any kind of inherent worth, whether it’s video or animated GIFs or whatever— so long as it’s driving clicks, time spent, purchases, etc.

   On his own site, he later wrote:

   In retrospect, my view on content is a bit too harsh, I think. Content is an unavoidable reality of the contemporary Internet because it’s virtually impossible to do anything online today without being involved in a transaction of some kind. And there’s a lot of good content out there too, much of it on Medium, in fact. What I regret though is that it’s almost all become content, and that there is relatively little writing on the Internet these days that isn’t transactional, that actually has a tolerance for ambiguity.

   But I think he had the right of it the first time; he was not too harsh at all.

I had those two pieces in mind when I read Craig Mod’s Ridgeline Issue #27:

A long walk isn’t about distance goals, it’s about systems of walking and systems of thinking. A long walk is a good forcing function.… Long walks can be frameworks. Long walks contain rhythm and monotony. Using this framework, this monotony, I looked to amplify a few specific good habits, and nullify bad ones.

Frameworks of rhythm and monotony: these seem increasingly important to me as counterbalances to the reigning frames of our day. Because, after all, the reigning frames of not only our day but many which have come before are disruption and novelty. Whether it is the habit of writing or—more essential and indeed even for writing much more foundational—the habit of thinking, rhythm and monotony are key. I analogize thinking and writing both to running quite often, but the reason is that success in any of those endeavors is much the same: put in the time, embracing the boredom until something magnificent is borne of it.

Bonus

One extra bit for the week, since the update is coming in a couple days late. For the last couple years I’ve been a faithful reader of Audrey Watters’ [Hack Education] blog. She offers commentary I can only describe as trenchant:

trenchant : 1 vigorous or incisive in expression or style: she heard angry voices, not loud, yet certainly trenchant. : 2 archaic or literary (of a weapon or tool) having a sharp edge: a trenchant blade.

Her latest, The History of the Future of the ‘Learning Engineer’ is, as usual, cutting. But in the best way: cutting straight through the crap that is a lot of Silicon Valley hype around education tech.

I’ve never been convinced that cognitive-informed ed-tech was as big of a break from behaviorism as its proponents would have you believe. But that’s another story. Nevertheless, it should be no surprise that, despite being hailed as “first,” Herbert Simon was not the only person to have argued that education needed to be better engineered. If nothing else, “behavioral engineering” was precisely how B. F. Skinner described his whole damn project, teaching machines and otherwise.

The stories we tell about these technologies matter; the histories we tell about them matter. That goes double for those of us working in the field (like me).

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In closing, this week, I’ll quote Mod again, aspirationally:

All said and done, I believe in the systems. Find small ways to set yourself up for incremental success. Make the positive habits inevitable. Word after word. Step after step. I am writing and walking and so very grateful to all of you for following along.