How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines

For Kate Eichhorn, a media historian and a professor at the New School, content is digital material that “may circulate solely for the purpose of circulating”

“Content is part of a single and indistinguishable flow.”

the interface of the Internet, and the keyboard that gives him access to it, is less an external device than an extension of his questing mind. To understand the networked self, we must first understand the self, which is a ceaseless endeavor.

We know that what we post and consume on social media feels increasingly empty, and yet we are powerless to stop it. Perhaps if we had better language for the problem, it would be easier to solve. “Content begets content,” Eichhorn writes.

Cultural products and consumer habits alike increasingly conform to the structures of digital spaces.

“Genre, medium, and format are secondary concerns and, in some instances, they seem to disappear entirely.” One piece of intellectual property inspires a feeding frenzy of podcast, documentary, and miniseries offshoots. Single episodes of streaming-service TV can run as long as a movie. Visual artists’ paintings appear on social media alongside the... See more

Eichhorn uses the potent term “content capital”—a riff on Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”—to describe the way in which a fluency in posting online can determine the success, or even the existence, of an artist’s work.

“Cultural producers who, in the past, may have focused on writing books or producing films or making art must now also spend con... See more

To understand the networked self, we must first understand the self, which is a ceaseless endeavor. The ultimate problem of the Internet might stem not from the discrete technology but from the Frankensteinian way in which humanity’s invention has exceeded our own capacities.

the ultimate problem of the Internet might stem not from the discrete technology but from the Frankensteinian way in which humanity’s invention has exceeded our own capacities.