In a recent blog post, Chris Brogan takes issue with the concept of “Content is King.” He suggests we should “work hard on content, but focus on relationships“, and while the ultimate goal of enhancing connects between people is a noble one, I see this interpretation as a broad brush approach that does a lot of content a disservice.
Throughout recorded history, many creations by artists, writers, musicians and philosophers and others were definitely not seen as relationship building when first released to the world. Though now recognized as masterpieces, and works that resonate through our cultures today, when first created, these works were seen as shocking, threatening and antagonistic by many in society. Think of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 Theses to the door of a church. The first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, leading to fistfights and rioting in the audience. The philosophy of Socrates, who lived what he believed, and ultimately paid with his life.
These (and many others) are examples not of creativity driving polite conversations and relationships, but of people using their creations to shout in anger, to point out, mock, and confront conventional thinking. The typical response was being ignored, marginalized or attacked, not the building of a large loyal audience at the time. By contrast, many of the contemporaries of these revolutionary thinkers made comfortable careers out playing the game, working their networks, creating safe, comfortable, non-challenging and ultimately forgettable content, or perhaps more accurately, product. As a result, they are mere historical footnotes, stub articles in Wikipedia. They made themselves irrelevant by regurgitating truisms and trite conventionalities.
I fear in many cases that much of the Social Media space is sliding into this sterile frame of mind. If content is always written from a relationship point of view, the logical consequence is to fall into the trap of creating what we think people want to hear, even unconsciously. We spend too much time congratulating each other for agreeing with each other. As much as we think we are being new and different, we risk becoming merely a cadre of conventionality.
One of the comments on Chris’ post I found especially disturbing:
“you can have great content but if people don’t connect with you and build that relationship then your content means nothing.”
If we use this simplistic metric, so much of the great creations of our civilization would need to be written off. For the truly inspired thinkers, their creations would not change regardless of whether they thought it would bring friends, fame and fortune, or would cost them every friend and possession they had. For them, the most important relationship was with truth as they saw it; the only audience that mattered was their creative conscience, not the temporal equivalent of how many retweets they got over a five minute span.
While I don’t believe in shock for shock’s sake, if one doesn’t get strong negative reactions on occasion, I’d be worried.
The price of progress, the fare of growth is struggle and argument. We grapple or we simper.
Go ahead; poke the bear.
I agree. I think there’s an amazing way to think with social media, being challenged by your peers, and then there’s the rather sad way: counting hits or followers and constructing content and responses purely to garner more. I know many people who engaged in creative projects just because that’s what the cool kids were doing and they wanted in with the cool kids. Imagine: writing long works of fiction with the sole purpose of using it to engage with (the highly-prized) others.
That’s kind of sad, now that I write it out like that. Are we so in need of peers that we’re willing to go that far? I guess we are.
Excellent points, but I was getting the idea that Brogan was addressing the hugs-don’t-feed-my-kids department of social media and his deep inherent affection for people. I think both of you (and me) exist under one social media umbrella. Because again, social media is a tool with as many different uses as there are people to use them.
Thanks for the comments! Valerie when I read Chris’s post in combination with the comments I was sensing sort of an alarming universality in the approach to content; perhaps some readers were taking his idea too far.