For a variety of better and worse reasons I’ve been thinking about "content," specifically internet content, specifically content as it relates to the self and as it relates to something like media-as-entity.^[1] Maybe it’s because I’m back on Twitter, sort of. Maybe it’s ripple-effects of the conversations we were having at home around the new years regarding the differences and comparative virtues/vices of blogs and social media. Maybe it’s because yet again I got tricked into skimming an article on a reputable news site about something I was interested in but was, in the end, really only a way for them to provide affiliate links to Amazon or wherever, and the substance of the article was actually…​ quite poor.^[2] And maybe, too, it’s that one of my goals for this year is to write more, and thinking about what I might like to write (aside from finishing the novel in progress that all writers are always trying to finish) leads me to think about content and self. And sure, some extra coin in my pocket couldn’t hurt.

So.^[3]

It confuses most people I meet now-a-days (and it confused me a little then, too), but I did, after all, do my undergrad at the University of Miami. While there I crossed paths, just a little, with a guy named Nick Moran. I think we attended the school concurrently only for about a year, but it turns out he was a buddy of one of my ultimate^[4] buddies and a writer. We got in touch because he was writing for this publication I’d never heard of at the time called The Millions, and wanted to get in touch with Jane Alison, with whom I was working with at the time.^[5] Jane is fucking rad and I was happy to make the (re)connection, especially as she’d just published a very cool book^[6] which I would go on to buy and read, albeit many years later.

Nick had been writing for The Millions for a while then, and writes for them still. I’m sure he’s still as good a guy as he was the last time we interacted, but that was years ago now, I think, when I was thinking I’d try to do essays and so on and maybe reached out to ask him about that.

(I never did do essays and so on: instead I freelanced for the company I’d been working for immediately prior to "my eight months of travel," ghost-wrote and edited technology blogs, and at one point was getting paid to consolidate reviews of online casinos; I quit that last gig when they asked me to consolidate reviews of porn sites, and not only because I was doing most of that freelance work at the coffee shop in the small town we lived in at the time and thought that might be indelicate.)

All of which is to say that it occurred to me the other day, given that I’ve felt over the years that LitHub increasingly publishes primarily the kind of for-exposure content that I’ve been thinking about and getting tired by,^[7] to go and read The Millions again. I’d quit out of their newsletter a while back at a time when I was quitting all the literary newsletters I’d subscribed to just after undergrad, as they weren’t really giving me the feeling of community I was desiring via newsletter (a foolish thought, but then, I was also twenty-two). Community is still hard. Anyway.

To return to the self (though isn’t all this already about myself), I might say a few things that have been said already by a number of much smarter people than me about self-as-content, or self-as-brand, or however you’d like to dice that. For additional context, I’m not looking for a new job but a good friend recently got a new job and got me thinking about what I’d need to do were I trying to look for a new job. I don’t, as a rule, touch LinkedIn. I’m about to take down my "personal resume website" because I don’t use it and I don’t need to be paying as much as I do for hosting.^[8] I don’t really know how to describe my skill set or "career": am I a writer? Editor? Junior programmer? Something like a "product" person? Marketer? I don’t fucking know, because what I actually do to make money is relatively amorphous and depends largely on what needs to be done (or what I think ought to be done) in a given week.

But were I to get back into writing, say, I would need to create content again. But content of what? I could research and write about that, but researching time is precious (by which I mean: time is precious). I can, and probably should, write more about things I do and/or are learning about at/for work. But the wellspring of most internet content, as far as I can tell, still appears to be the self. This is, perhaps, unsurprising. Or maybe I’m just seeing it everywhere since I’m reading both Proust and Gertrude Stein right now, two writers who made careers out of writing (more or less) about themselves. It’s on the brain, this presentation.

(There is a self-indulgent strain.)

A part of it though, I think, might be connected still to hangovers from the "Age of Authenticity"^[9] The exposed self is read (pun intended) as authentic because vulnerability signals a kind of truth. I would, of course, never claim that the majority of self-driven internet content is "genuinely vulnerable" or anything like that, but I’m thinking of an early essay by a journalist and writer whom I admire that I half-read in which much of the force of the cultural commentary was couched in its relation to her personal experience. This isn’t to say that it weakened the commentary (on the contrary), but rather the source of argumentative force was conspicuous.

This brings us, perhaps, to criticism, then. And a concept of "value." I’ve been listening on and off to Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays by Cynthia Ozick while I ride the rollers,^[10] and she makes many compelling points (along with some devastating one-liners) regarding the contemporary state of criticism. "tl;dr": it’s garbage. This is unsurprising though, because I think we’ve more or less dropped any notion of "high culture" as something to aspire to (fine) and replaced it with something much more democratic, in a sense: consumption. I will spare you the anti-capitalist critique, but the short version if that what’s valued at this point appears to be very much volume of content (as it creates more opportunities for engagement (i.e., provides more thinly-veiled digital billboards upon which to sell advertisements)) over quality of content.

Sure, "quality" publications still exist on some level, and there are some subscription/membership-driven models that seem to work, but on the whole, if you’re someone just trying to get work out, the work just has to be "good enough." Often, quite bad (here I’m thinking of listicles, or the "reviews" I wrote as a freelancer).

(I’m writing all of this and realizing that this, itself, is not particularly good content. It’s incoherent, half-finished, and because I am not preparing this for "real" publication (and at this point am not trying to impress anyone) probably poorly copy edited.)

Here’s a story:^[11]

Once upon a time I was a part of a "reading group" made up of writers and we read "important books" (or at least: "hard" books we probably wouldn’t have read by ourselves) and it was brilliant because though we’d be reading, say, The Archaeology of Knowledge, we’d be discussing it in terms of writing, both as-such as an as expression of potential aesthetics or forms or modes.^[12] Occasionally we’d read a novel, too, and occasionally we’d read poetry (though I’m not sure we ever read the kind of poetry the token poet in the group was actually interested in). Occasionally, too, we would make a point of sharing writing, and once we did one of those "Why I Write"s or Ars Poeticas, I think because someone was reading Didion’s (maybe this was just after her death?). We all had nice little essays, and there were as many raison d’êtres as there were participants. Mine was something like "to impress my friends," which was a great reason for a while.

Of course nothing is constant but change, however, and for better and worse reasons the exchange of work has slowed over the past year or so and instead I’ve been thinking about something Jane Unrue told me once about "private writing," writing done just for yourself that you’re not to show anyone. I think a little bit about various authors' journals or diaries, and how even those are sort of written for selves but also posterity, and so the idea of truly private writing might in fact be a rather radical one. It’s something maybe I’ve needed to embrace post-MFA, and certainly something I’ve thought a lot about as I continue to write things I think might be good but not worth trying to publish for various reasons.^[13]

But then: what about content? Is not that the proof in the pudding, as it were?

The function of any job is to produce something, and if it’s writing it’s content (on some level), and I suppose there is value in that. There is value in doing enough to get the clicks to keep your job. I don’t want to deny that, and I don’t want to pretend like you can go out and get paid $750 for a story anymore. The market has very much moved on.

Returning to myself: I struggle with conclusions. This has always been the case with me. Endings, too. One part of me wants to blame my philosophy training, which assured me that nothing substantial can be really certain or proved in a strong sense, and so any results should be considered contingent, subject to "feeling right," and ultimately only launchpads for further investigation. The reality is, however, that it’s as much my nature as anything else: I don’t necessarily struggle with decisions but I struggle with definition. There are so many wonderful shades of gray. Edge cases to be accounted for. And who am I to suppose such certainty?

(I’m realizing the benefits of this being a blog, this being a "passing though," this being something primarily for me.)

But to end with what likely amounts to a banality: it’s probably okay that so much "content" is merely "content," because it passes the time. The same as shooting the shit, feeding pigeons. I think it feels more high stakes to me merely because I’m considering "writing," which is something very important to me (the play of language, all of that), but it’s probably okay. Nobody’s being hurt by any of it, not really.^[14] But it does make me wonder, specifically in terms of any content that I might create: for whom? for what?

(And if I am not for myself, who will be for me?)