Content | Kontrary

Work is Irrelevant

Work, that of pursuing a specific passion or purpose, has become irrelevant. As technology increasingly gains momentum, we’ve moved from the age of work/life blur to the age of tech/life blur.

For instance, if you’re a writer, it’s not the content that matters (the work itself), but how the content is consumed and packaged. “We are on the brink of accessing digital content through what they call the ‘splinternet,’” argues Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath. “Devices, hardware, software, applications and content, rather than being offered interoperably in a wide-open World Wide Web are increasingly going to be stacked up in proprietary ecosystems in which denizens can talk only to each other.”

So iPad apps like Flipboard, Zite and others like it are becoming the norm and offer “a much more natural way to consume content on a tablet, and the aggregation they provide is like having a customized newspaper available at any time,” argues Matthew Ingram on GigaOm. “The aggregation, personalization and customization that such apps allow is the future of content consumption.”

The introduction of the tablet has changed the reading experience such that it is now acceptable to charge for content. This is really the way the New York Times metered subscription is set up. When you pay for a New York Times subscription, you’re not really paying for content (the work), but paying to read it on your computer screen, your tablet, your Kindle, and your mobile app. You’re paying to read it how you want to on the splinternet. You’re not paying for the work, but the technology to consume it.

In the age of newspapers, we did charge for information, but now we charge for the customizability of how that information is delivered. It’s the media company’s job to design the experience of their digital offerings, not just create the content and they can’t keep up. So now, even though newspapers didn’t invent the printing press (the rapidity of typographical text production led to newspapers), they’re being pressured to invent the next revolution.

In reality, what will happen is just how the Internet created blogs (and what many are now calling a sub-optimal reading experience), tech start-ups will continue to invent new ways to consume information, and as a result, new companies and creators will come along with new types of content in response.

This is all happening at such a rapid pace (and in all industries, not just media which I’ve only used as an example), that we’re much more concerned with the rhythm and output of innovation than we are of the work itself.

We know most content on the web is crap. We know there’s nothing really amazing or revolutionary about what we consume on our iPhones. The most popular activity is Scrabble. I like to look and see where people are on Foursquare. You might check on the weather. On Google, I rarely find what I’m actually looking for, but I will receive twenty-four million results for trying. The tech/life blur says nevermind the banality of what you consume on technology, just be subservient to the fact that it exists.

That is why there is such a ginormous focus on work fulfillment when we have never cared about such a notion before. We want to work towards something bigger than ourselves, but technology is already bigger than ourselves, and so there’s a certain confusion, an aimlessness and a fractionation of our work. That which tells us that if you’re a writer, you’re no longer a writer. You’re a blogger, and an amateur coder, you can sell, you’re a marketer, you know PR, software and a bit of graphic design, you’re an accountant and you’re a publisher. Your side projects feed into your day job. And all of your jobs feed through the Internet. This is what it means to live on the Internet, consumed by the processes instead of the action.

Work is empty. Technology fills us. It’s not what we do, but how we do it. Of course that can only last so long before the focus on how we do something obliterates all meaning of what we’re doing.

How Amateur Content Makes Us Dumb

Photo: mypixbox

It’s a misnomer that the web was the innovation that gave amateurs their place alongside experts in credibility. We were actually primed for this during the industrial revolution when things like hot dogs became an abstraction of real food. Processed and pushed into its casing, hot dogs look nothing like and have no relation to anything they are made from. As meals go, this is one for the amateurs. Real foodies eat sweet pork sausage that is made on-site at the restaurant. And the real, real foodies (experts), make sure that the pork didn’t come from an industrial hog.

The web did however reinforce what we already knew – that you can’t define expertise by whether you are a blogger or a journalist, whether you have a PhD or not, or whether you have put in your 10,000 hours, so the distinction between amateur and expert remains along the line of abstraction – or hot dogs vs sustainable sweet pork sausage.

Here’s how I look at it —

Amateur content is 1) written for a mass audience and 2) does not make connections between larger systems or ideas. Just like you don’t care where your hot dog came from or what it’s made of, amateurs write in a silo and on the surface. This has nothing to do with size. Both Oprah and a small personal development blogger can distribute amateur content on any given day (and do).

Expert content on the other hand is 1) written for a niche audience – but in a way that a mass audience can learn from – and 2) does make connections between those larger topics and ideas.

Amateur content has devolved into meta content, where it’s increasingly abstracted to the point where everything is “how to be rich, be happy, quit your day job, have sex every day and live well” and in these five buckets (happiness, money, work, life, relationships), we’re seeing people repeat the same things over and over to the point where there is no value anymore.

Oh it is alluring to read, again and again, how you can incubate and execute an idea or motivate yourself on a Monday, especially when can’t quite seem to master these seemingly elusive tasks. But it’s also a self-referential profanity of the mind.

And rather pointless I might add, as you would not still be consuming such content if any of it was of any value. All processes are the same – pick one and go with it. Or develop your own if you want to be teacher’s pet, but don’t ignore the deep dive that getting your fingers sticky with actual knowledge provides. Expert content drives a whole other level of learning and discovery and questioning.

The five buckets of furthering your own sparkle and hustle are only meta descriptors for the actual beef of living. Work, life, love, money and happiness are useful insofar as they are labels or subject headings to the intricate web of understanding. But when amateur content insists that we relate to our lives on this meta level, it ignores well, the rest of the iceberg.

This isn’t to say amateur content isn’t entertaining or necessary in some contexts. I like a good hot dog from time to time, love Oprah all the time, and generally consume amateur content for different (and good) reasons throughout the day. But we need more writers to create expert content and more publishers to distribute it. Not only for the sanity of our selves, but for the evolution of media.

Content will have to be that which cannot be easily copied, and that which cannot be abstracted into a big meta bow. And it will have to dive deep into the many sub-headings and levels, continually sifting and winnowing through energy innovations, media, healthcare, philosophy, the sharing economy, technology, fashion, the food industry, political history and much, so very much more.