social media "content"
I think it's great that people can make a living posting cool stuff online. But I also think we lost something along the way. People started making "content". It's now, more than ever, accepted to treat art as something consumable and easily replaceable. It's how we got into the whole gen ai mess we're currently still living through. It's a sentiment I occasionally see on bearblog as well. For all the high budget, high effort, well produced and polished videos i see on youtube, the most memorable video I've seen in the last few months was a short where a person made a basque cheesecake.
It was recorded on their phone, without any editing or fancy camerawork with the only impulse for creating it being that someone in a comment section somewhere told them they should make a basque cheesecake. It was the first and only video they ever uploaded. Nothing really happened. They talked about making cheesecake and then ate a slice of cheesecake. That was the video. The actual process of how they made the cheesecake was never even shown.
But it was more interesting to me than the hundreds of videos of 'content'. Because it felt genuine, and like the person making it made it because they cared. They wanted to share something, and then they did. No profit motive. And I think that, when we made social media commercial, when you started being able to earn money from youtube and the like - that maybe, we lost something along the way there.
And, that stuff is still out there, right.
But I think part of it is also that the language and presentation of those big, commercialized youtube channels is kind of bleeding into those less commercial channels. And that it's really hard to find them. Obviously, youtube won't recommend you anything they don't think is "marketable".
For videos, theres not really any platforms that im aware of that arent pushing the idea that your endgame as a "content creator" should be to make money from your stuff. And, I don't know, I just think it kind of sucks that so much of the art people consume is so explicitly commercial and impersonal. Even on here, you'll occasionally find people selling courses and writing posts explicitly just for the sake of marketing themselves. And, I obviously don't think trying to make money doing things you love is bad, that much should be obvious. But I also just wish there would be more spaces where that wasn't the main goal, and that those spaces were be more popular.
I just think it's a bit sad that content has seemingly become the default form of art.