Regicide is Painless: Killing the idea that content is king
During this morning’s opening keynote sessions of the second O’Reilly Tools of Change conference, which is being held this week in Manhattan, a number of the speakers did their best to kill the age-old (well, maybe not age-old, but certainly decade-old) notion that “content is king.” Instead, Stephen Abram, in a great talk entitled “Information 3.0: Will Publishers Matter?” stressed that context is king, not content. He then went on to describe different aspects of what’s becoming known as a “sharing economy,” where people don’t trade money in a typical transaction but instead give their time to create or share something with a community (e.g. Wikipedia, which was mentioned a dozen times in the morning sessions alone). One sessions later, author Douglas Rushkoff, in a speech entitled “Whose Story is This, Anyway? When Readers Become Writers,” doing his own bit to kill the idea of content being king, said that “contact is king.” Rushkoff’s idea is that the main point of content is to offer people the opportunity to socialize. And it’s that socializing, or socialization, that’s the real point; it’s the contact that’s important, not the content in and of itself. He summed up his point by saying that “Content is an excuse for people to interact.” I think both ideas, that it’s either “context” or “contact” that is king — instead of content — are really interesting and, in their own ways, revolutionary (and this might be the only time in histroy when a revolution will be good for a king).
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“Context” is king? “Contact” is king? “The main point of content is to offer people the opportunity to socialize. And it’s that socializing, or socialization, that’s the real point; it’s the contact that’s important, not the content in and of itself.”????
Well, yes and no. But the contact that the reader has in mind when he picks up a book is not the socializing of the web forum or the wiki or the discussion group at the local library or Starbucks. It’s the contact with the words of the person who wrote the book or the article or the story or the poem. That initial human contact is between the individual reader and the individual writer, the person who put his thoughts on paper and created something that other people would want to read. Without the content, there’s no focal point for all this socializing, no reason for all this contact and conversation. The focus provided by the content is the real point. If socializing is what’s really important, why is discussing books on a blog a better use of one’s time than standing around the water cooler talking about American Idol? What makes joining a book group at the library superior in any way to sitting on a barstool cursing out your favorite politician? It’s all discussion, right? It’s all contact? It’s all socializing?
Which is probably why pirates posted the text of hundreds of comments about the most recent Harry Potter novel on the internet instead of posting the text of the novel itself.
That’s a bit more sarcastic than I really care to be — after all, this site and some others are at least thinking about what form books will take in the digital future. But the notion that content isn’t central strikes me as so wrong-headed that there’s almost no point in taking it seriously.
Bests to all,
–tr
[…] des premières communication autour du thème de la suprématie du “contenu” dans un billet dont je traduirais volontiers le titre ainsi : « Le régicide est indolore, ou comment tuer la […]
Nice MASH reference. What’s the role of editor in the collaborative content/constant contact environment? Do we become moderators or hosts rather than taste-makers and fact-checkers?
Redefinition is not a revolution. As the internet ages, we begin to see what it is good for and what it is not so good for. It is a fabulous publishing platform for some kinds of content–news, the conventional knowledge of an encyclopedia, conversation, financial data. So, far it is a crummy publication platform for book-length material–novels and the long-form argument of non-fiction. So, presenters at a conference intended for book publishers end up talking about context and contact, and how chapters are more important than whole books, and that publishers should fear competition from Facebook, and nobody reads any longer, or if they do read they read in a fundamentally different way than before, etc. Why do they say such stuff? Because the curve still stretches beyond their sight.
Perhaps saying that “contact” or “context” is an Earl or Duke doesn’t get much attention….anyway, a critical question seems to be whether “publishers” (in the sense of large, commercial firms) remain “king” or does the net provide opportunities for other players to come in and usurp the traditional role of publishers by providing content in ways that utilize the attributes of “contact” and “context”?
Nothing solves a major industry problem like rephrasing a dead slogan!
[…] Is content really king? […]
[…] content […]
est il availible en Francais, my English not good
What an interesting way to get people interested in reading! Book trailers are like movie trailers, but for books! You can find them all over the internet now, but here is a site that’s featuring them on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/booktrailers
[…] 4. Content or Context as King? Multiple sessions touched on the back-to-the-future notion that once again, content rules. Valuable content, well written, appropriately distributed reaps audience. When Social Media Club founder Chris Heuer and I debated this over beers at the Dell Lounge, Chris pointed out, “No, Monika. CONTEXT is king.” […]