The term “content creator” is so funny to me.
It’s as if William Shakespeare, Steven Spielberg, and someone shaking their butt on Instagram are all in the same category.
Artistes 🤌
Discussion
Reminds me of this quote I saved a long time ago from Maria Popova:
"I loathe the term 'content' as applied to cultural material. It was foisted upon us by a commercially driven media industry that treats human beings as mindless eyeballs counted in statistics like views and likes, as currency to be traded against advertising revenue. Somehow people have been sold on the idea that the relationship between ads and 'content' is a symbiotic one, but it is a parasitic one.
More than half a century ago, long before the web, Susan Sontag wrote beautifully about the trouble with treating art and cultural material as content: 'Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art… Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.'"
Wow, that’s quite compelling. You could add social media to the mix where text, images, audio, and video have blended together in a catch-all platform.
I have to admit “content” doesn’t trigger me as much as “creator” does. I believe you do yourself a disservice by thinking of yourself as creative and the art suffers from self-importance.
No one knows where their ideas come from, and there’s a reason artists often look to God or a muse. Regardless of your relationship with a higher power, removing ego from the equation opens yourself up to the signal.