Table Of ContentCONTENT
The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series
A complete list of the titles in this series appears at the back of this book.
CONTENT
KATE EICHHORN
The MIT Press | Cambridge, Massachusetts | London, England
© 2022 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Eichhorn, Kate, 1971- author.
Title: Content / Kate Eichhorn.
Description: Cambridge : The MIT Press, 2022. | Series: The MIT press
essential knowledge series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021000773 | ISBN 9780262543286 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Information services industry. | Online social networks. |
Search engines. | Internet—Social aspects. | Internet—Psychological
aspects. | Information technology—Psychological aspects.
Classification: LCC HD9999.I492 E33 2022 | DDC 302.2/402854678—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000773
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Series Foreword vii
Preface ix
1 A Brief History of Content in a Digital Era 1
2 User- Generated Content 31
3 Content Farms 57
4 Content Capital 79
5 Journalism and Politics after Content 103
6 Content Automation 129
Glossary 145
Notes 151
Further Reading 159
Index 161
SERIES FOREWORD
The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers accessible,
concise, beautifully produced pocket- size books on topics
of current interest. Written by leading thinkers, the books
in this series deliver expert overviews of subjects that
range from the cultural and the historical to the scientific
and the technical.
In this era of instant information gratification, we
have ready access to opinions, rationalizations, and super-
ficial descriptions. Much harder to come by is the founda-
tional knowledge that informs a principled understanding
of the world. Essential Knowledge books fill that need.
Synthesizing specialized subject matter for nonspecialists
and engaging critical topics through fundamentals, each
of these compact volumes offers readers a point of access
to complex ideas.
PREFACE
When nearly everyone in the United States and around
the world was being asked to shelter in place at the start of
the COVID-1 9 pandemic in April 2020, Florida’s governor
Ron DeSantis held a press conference to address what he
perceived to be a serious problem— the lack of new con-
tent. “People have been starved for content,” he said. “We
haven’t had a lot of new content since the beginning of
March . . . we need to support content, especially sports.”
On this basis, DeSantis declared that alongside medical
personnel and employees working at pharmacies and gro-
cery stores, employees of professional sports and media
production companies could return to work and start pro-
ducing new content.
To rationalize his positioning of content as an essen-
tial service, DeSantis appealed to both history and psy-
chology. First, he observed, “We’ve never had a period like
this in modern American history where you’ve had such
little new content, particularly in the sporting realm. I
mean, people are watching, we’re watching, like, reruns
from the early 2000s, watching Tom Brady do the Super
Bowl then.” Second, he speculated, content might ease the
pain of people who are “chomping at the bit,” and even
have a positive psychological impact: “To be able to have
some light at the end of the tunnel . . . see that things may
