On content, writing, and art

Yesterday I was emailing with the always lovely Robin Harford, who has a wonderful website over at eatweeds.co.uk. We were discussing the sad state of the web, and wondering what can be done to prevent Google and the others from abusing our content. And within that discussion, he mentioned his hate for the word “content”. He’s not the only one who feel that way; I’ve seen quite a few people mentioning this issue of the use of the word “content” to describe the product of someone’s creativity. As I said to him via email, I don’t have the same issue with the word, but that’s maybe because I’m not a native speaker and to me “content” doesn’t carry a connotation of any kind. If you say “content creator”, though, that’s a different story. He used the word “art” to describe the product of his work, and I have no issue with that. He’s a writer after all, and writing is an art form. My 5 years of high school were spent at an art school, studying traditional goldsmithing, as well as art in…