When Art becomes Content: The Death of a Medium
I feel like there's 2 distinctive things when it comes to creative mediums, those being Art and Content, the first one is well known at this point, it's what people can do out of passion or with enough motivation, trying to convey a message, meaning or just for fun, while I personally consider content to be something made to appeal to people, to get an emotion out of them, may it be something good or bad.
Now, these terms can be interchangeable, some Art can be made as Content while still retaining what makes it Art, while Content can become Art in its own way too, but more often than not they're separate one from the other.
There is nothing wrong with one or the other by themselves, but there's certainly a balance that needs to be had, and an overabundance of one of them could result in the other diminishing to the point it can hurt both. While I would like everything to be made as Art in mind, it's true that it can lead to extreme burn out from chasing that definition every single time, and doing some Content can lead to some rest to come back in full swing... At the same time, a world full of Content is devoid of soul in a way, it's made to get something out of you and that can drain people by a long shot.
that's all nice and dandy but... What happens when one of them starts taking over the other? I feel like that is something that has been happening in the recent years. Let me explain:
A decade ago or so no one (or barely no one) thought of doing content every single time, whenever you looked on social media artists, played a videogame, listened to music, there was always something worth looking for, something that could speak and reach you in a level no other thing could, and I'm not talking about just what people like you and I did, I mean even things from big places or artists... Then, things started shifting around, slowly but surely.
Social media artists were overshadowed in some of the big sites with a cesspool of toxicity and ragebaiting, with the usual bot replies mimicking real humans to fool you into falling for their scams (or for you to give them money just by interacting, if you're on Twitter).
Videogames have started to become more as products than projects that came from the soul, may it be from AAA companies or the big amount of mass-produced AI generated games on places like Steam and Epic.
And Music has started to become more plagued with... AI generated music, some streaming platforms are borderline unusable because of them, there's also the fact that some popular artists moved from what made them unique to just do mainstream songs to appeal everyone.
Things like Movies and Series aren't safe either, with the rise of streaming platforms there have been an overabundance of series that barely anyone can watch them all, and also platforms like Netflix are doing secret subcategories just to make series you can play while doing other things.
Wherever you look there's been a bigger and bigger increase in making things just to get something out of people, and the worst part is that it's not just affecting these things, but also the way we do art ourselves. I've been in multiple servers and places with artists, and the amount of people that need to optimize their posts and try to do content everyday so they can stand a chance in some sites is horrible.
I know this feeling a bit too well, as I've come to learn I've been doing this in 2 different instances, one with the animal redraws back in 2023/2024 where I exclusively drew that and nothing else, and another one very recently where I realized I turned myself into a content machine, pumping new stuff almost daily. I've changed how I handle my art workflow in both of those, but who's to say it won't happen again for a third time?
There could be a few reasons of why this increase of content happened, and I feel like the 3 big reasons of why are the boom of short-form media, desire for growth and Generative AI.
The explosion of TikTok around the late 2010s, early 2020s can't really be overstated, otherwise most social medias wouldn't have done their own alternatives to it, but at the same time it came with a new idea, to make shorter form videos, from a few seconds to 3 minutes rather than the usual 8 to 14 we've been seeing on YouTube, and actually monetize from them (something that before you couldn't really do with the latter), so what if you did tons of shorter videos to earn more? they're short videos after all, you don't need to spend lots of time making them.
This also kick-started other places and people shifting gears into short-form media, there are series now exclusively made with this format in mind, and animators that would usually spend more time making something for a traditional format most likely have moved onto this type of format by now.
This overabundance of content wasn't just done by this though, but it was worsened by desire for growth.
This desire can be both for good and bad reasons, but more often than not it devolves into the bad side, with the amount of people wanting a cut of the pie that is your attention, or in reality your money, may it be directly or indirectly. Most big places boast about the amount of users or content they have, but how much of that is real? How many of these are really interacting day by day and aren't just bots, ghost accounts, or people that forgot to turn off their membership and are just ignoring those places by this point? And how much of that content is worthwhile of your time?
At least this was usually human-made things, until Generative AI came in and started poisoning the internet and things we knew. So basically you got a vicious cycle of always making short form content just to stand out and get your attention, and Generative AI makes it a lot easier to mass-produce without any checks for quality. This is not the internet I grew in anymore, and at this point it doesn't feel like it'll come back in its full glory...
... I may have been too pessimistic while talking about this, but there's actually a solution for this, but we gotta work together to accomplish it.
The solution is to break out of these things we take as the norm now. Stop scrolling through social media and tiktok equivalents, only check them out when you wanna check out something that interests you, support indie videogames that still try to do something meaningful, do manual searches of what music you want to listen to rather than letting an algorithm feed you what you want, and do word-of-mouth with friends of things that interest one and the others.
Content keeps being done en masse just to get something out of you, but only you can stop it from pestering you time and time again. You can break free from the cycle, we all can, we just need to do this together, to show that we don't want so much content anymore, before it gets even worse.
Also, support your local and/or favorite creative fellas, I'm sure as hell they're gonna appreciate that.
-Anubi "Content Police" Arts.