The Age of Content: On Misinformation and Editing

Thank you for that introduction and for inviting me here to speak. It's an honour.

Before I begin, a quick disclosure: I used no generative AI in this research. I will at some point show images that were generated in order to comment on them. I did not generate any of my parts of this presentation. I also don't consent to any part of my work being fed into large language models. With that out of the way, I want to start by citing the Editors 2026 conference description:

"Misinformation isn’t just about fake news. It’s also the assumptions we make, the language we let slide and the identities we misrepresent.

Editors are uniquely positioned to catch what others miss and to create more truthful, inclusive and responsible content.

This year, we encourage attendees to open their ears, eyes and minds—using their love of accuracy and clear communication to take their skills and responsibilities to the next level."

I must say that I love just about every bit of this conference description.

And I hope you don't think I'm pandering by saying that I love editors. As an academic who has published multiple books, I have found that a great editor can help sharpen my ideas and language and push my thinking further than I could do on my own. I have worked with some wonderful acquisitions editors and copy editors over the years and I am grateful!

But, there is one small part of this call I want to critique today. In the spirit of catching what might be missed, I want to critique one particular part of this paragraph:

The word "content."

Content is a word that has been on my mind a lot lately.

In fact, thanks to Mary Savigar, an acquisitions editor at Polity Press, I now have a new book project, tentatively titled "The Age of Content." In fact, this is the public debut of this project -- my presentation is based on the research I'm doing for that book. I would be very grateful to hear what a conference hall full of editors has to say about this!

To emphasize this a bit: this is very early in the life of this book! It's due next year, so I am going to spend this summer drafting.

While this is very early in the life of the new book, this project builds on my previous books. Two of my books, Social Engineering and Socialbots, deal with mis- and dis-information. Social Engineering focuses on how manipulative communicators ply their trade in social media, and Socialbots is a collection of essays about online bots (one that we published, I should note, way back in 2016, anticipating much of the current concerns about generative AI.)

My other books consider online cultures, whether its on the dark web or in social media.

In writing those, I have been long bothered by what I'm now thinking of as the "contentification of culture." One of my concerns is that if we are going to fight off misinformation, we need to address contentification as a fundamental problem. The argument I am going to make today is that we have no ethical or aesthetic language for content -- we have no critical vocabulary that helps us understand content, and so we struggle to deal with misinformation in the age of content.

"Content," however, is a difficult word to research. It means several different things and is ubiquitous in English. A search in Factiva returns 64 million results.

Because "content" is such a ubiquitous term, my approach has been to trace the history of an idea: the construction of a figure called the "content creator." Now, when I say "content creator," what likely comes to mind is a person who makes digital media meant to appear on corporate social media. This is often a domain of the young, the influencer.

As I critique the idea of "content creation," my being on the wrong side of 45 means that there's a danger that I appear to be...

...an old man shaking my fist at the kids these days with their TikToks and Instagrams.

But as I have found, the term "content creator" is much older than we might think. In fact, I have traced it back at least as far as 1957, in a Yale Divinity School dissertation.

The exact line is "Miss Meeker introduced the content-creators of the curriculum in an article entitled 'Meet the Authors and Artists.'" As you can see from the context, the use of "content creator" here refers to people developing a curriculum, and the term is a container for specific actions (authoring, making art). These are points I will return to later. So, given that "content creator" dates back to at least the 1950s, maybe

Content is the old man yelling at all of us.

I have been collecting instances of the term "content creator" across multiple information databases -- predominantly in English, although it appears in other language texts, as well -- and I have found usage of the term ramps up in the 1990s. This chart uses a logarithmic scale to reveal the importance of 1990s-era discussions of "content creators."

That said, there is a reason why we associate with with contemporary social media -- the term really does take off from about 2012 on. But the term is introduced in an interesting form in the 1990s. A 1995 Financial Times article gives us a typical example:

"A common classification of the emerging multimedia world splits companies into two groups: the content creators and the cable, telecoms and satellite companies which provide the links to customers."

While today we think of the individual content creator, the term emerged in the 1990s in reference to growing, global media corporations -- think Disney, the BBC, or News Corporation. The 1990s was an era of globalization and transnational corporate expansion. Such growth dreams affected the world of content creators, leading to dreams of owning content AND the means to distribute it.

As Max Frankel writes in the New York Times in 1996, "A proper media baron, therefore, feels a need to be both a content creator and distributor, an owner of cable as well as an owner of the information it carries..."

Such dreams appeared late in the decade with mergers, such as the now-infamous America Online-Time Warner merger, which married AOL's digital content distribution with Time-Warner's vast library of content.

So: as it has emerged in the 1990s, "content creation" has consistently meant "media commodity production," content creators were understood in relation to content distributors.

But at this point, you might be wondering, why "content"? And why the adoption the term in the 1990s, of all times? A major reason for this shift to thinking of media as "content" comes from the emergence of new container technologies.

The new technologies included CD-ROM (and other optical storage disks, like DVD and later Blu-Ray),

PDF, which is a very fascinating format that is infrastructural now, and

Probably most of all, the World Wide Web, which was developed in the late 1980s and popularized in the mid-1990s.

One word that was deployed in the 1990s and later to describe this was "convergence." The emergence of new digital technologies brought about discourses of convergence, where all forms of media (film, music, writing) would converge into digital streams.

As older forms of media converged into new digital containers, the word that was adopted to cover the variety of media was "content."

And instead of being called "musicians," "journalists," "artists," "movie studios," or "television studios," the individuals or organizations who filled these new containers were increasingly called "content creators."

The reduction of media practices to "content creation" in the 1990s marks a shift to what I call "containment": This is a shift in focus away from the quality of the content to the qualities of the container.

The job of the content creator is fulfillment: the container requires filling, and the order for content must be fulfilled.

Finally, we often now speak of "consuming content," which means we open the container and engage with what's inside.

The actions of containment, fulfillment, and consumption hold for all containers, whether they are shipping containers or optical storage, or

Websites. All media containers engage in containment, require fulfillment, and have an end of consumption. This brings me to the central claim I intend to make in the book project I am presenting to you:

"Content" cannot be the object of ethical or aesthetic critique. Simply put, we have no critical language for content. We can talk about the aesthetics of music or the ethics of journalism, but we cannot speak of "content" in those ways. We have no language to critique "content."

This is because the Age of Content is really the age of containers, and containers close off considerations of ethics or aesthetics: their job is merely to circulate, fullfil demands of circulation, and have their contents consumed. The content itself is locked away from ethical or aesthetic critique. Given the conference theme of misinformation, I mostly want to talk about the ethical issues of content, but first I'll quickly talk aesthetics.

The easiest way to think about this is to think about the aesthetics of content is to consider language we do not use. No one watches a movies and says,

"This content is amazing."

No one listens to music and says,

"This content is my jam."

We don't watch athletes and cheer,

"This content is going all the way!"

And yet, contentification has been reducing all of these practices into content. For example, I've collected references to people whom we normally would not call "content creators" -- each one a bit more outrageous than the last. These tend to appear in trade magazines and press releases. Stan Lee, the comic book writer, has been referred to as a "content creator." More disturbing: jazz legend Herbie Hancock referred to this way. The Beatles have been called "content creators." Most disturbing: Martin Luther King, Jr, was apparently a content creator. This reduction of all creative activity to "content" brings me to one half of my argument:

We have no aesthetic, critical language for content, because content absorbs all other forms of media production. When everything is content, there is no aesthetics.

I would argue that the process Susan Sontag observed in 1966 has been intensified. As she argues in her influential essay "Against Interpretation", "Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable." What she is arguing is that art in the mid-twentieth century was reduced to its content, which could be then interpreted by critics. A film or a poem or a play could only be seen as a system of allegories, ready to be managed by interpretation.

While Sontag is lamenting the fact that art has been reduced to its content, I'll be honest: I find myself longing for such a thing. Today, art isn't reduced to its content: art has been fully and completely contentified. We no longer treat a film as a film or a musical song as music. Instead, each one bit of content is flowing in digital streams of other content. The container, not the art, is ascendent. We simply fill the container. And we no longer interpret content -- we consume it.

But I must go back to the conference theme. We are here to talk about misinformation and fake news, not so much about the contentification of art, even if these are related. This brings me to my second concern, one related to the question of aesthetics: the ethics of content.

If all media is reduced to "content," that reduction closes off ethical criteria, as well. Just as we cannot speak of beautiful content, we cannot speak of good content.

Here as I shift to the ethical questions about content, I want to focus on what I'm calling the fulfillment aspect of contentification. I want to get a bit deeper with fulfillment.

Fulfillment as an action of filling containers is marked by metrics and capacity. Here is an image of a shelf at an Amazon fulfillment centre.

I just want to pause on this image. Note that heterogeneity of products. There's a Bratz doll, some elementary school geometry textbooks, a disinfectant, cans of chestnut paste, camping lights, and whiffle balls. Note how tightly packed the shelves are. There is incoherence here (the mix of products) but the shelves are labeled in sequence. Now this is what I call contentification!

Metrics used in relation to content include market share, likes and views, followers, and votes.

The capacity of media containers is measured in space and time, the dominance of news cycles, and attention.

Let's look at the metrics of content first and how this relates back to misinformation.

To draw on a contemporary example, shifting from topic to topic is what content creators call a "pivot" -- say, from a food podcaster to a tech blogger. If one topic is not getting enough likes and follows, simply pivot to another. The pivot is possible because it's the metrics that matter, not the content of the content. Whatever content gets the most likes, shares, views is the most important. There's a flipside to this...

Conversely, metrics might drive a dogged determination to exploit every last bit of intellectual property with ad nauseum episodes of the same franchise, as in the case of Disney and the 37 Marvel movies released in less than two decades.

The metrics of content play a role in propaganda. According to insider reports, the Russian Internet Research Agency -- a major source of Russian disinformation in the 2010s -- measured the effectiveness of its employees in terms of likes and shares on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It didn't matter what the employees were doing so long as they were gaining followers and likes. Again, it was the metrics that mattered, not the content of the content.

Metrics also drives fake news -- if there's a trending topic, such as Western Canadian separatism, then websites and social media channels will glom onto to the trend to seek advertising revenues. When the trend changes, so does the content.

The capacity concerns of containers -- how much, how fast -- also sheds light on contemporary misinformation.

Generative AI is the hot topic today, and of course one ostensible upshot is that we can do more and faster and at a larger scale. Generative AI is being embraced by social media corporations and influencers because of its ability to spin up content at an ever-faster pace.

Influencers might adopt AI because of the "grindset" -- the constant need to post. As this TikToker says, "I've been posting on TikTok since August between three and almost 20 times a day... The influencer industry... It is a hustle. It is a freaking grind" -- emmawilloughbyg

But more and faster is not just the domain of hustling individuals on social media. It's a concern of large-scale content creators, as well. In the age of content, more content, no matter what it is, is the most important consideration. I subscribe to Crave, which recently emailed me to boast of their expansion -- they now have "more leading content." I am not sure what "leading" means, and as I hope you see "content" is often an empty term. But I do know what they mean by "more."

And of course, in contemporary disinformation practice, a common tactic is to "flood the zone" or use a "firehose of falsehoods" -- a strategy of overwhelming the media environment with content.

None of these metric or capacity considerations engage with ethical questions. What is good content? Is it content that more people "like"? Content that moves faster? Is the only good content more content?

The Age of Content is an age where guys like this can thrive. I apologize about bringing up Trump. Full disclosure: I'm an American. My family and I moved to Canada due to deteriorating conditions in the USA. I would rather not talk about him but we are here to talk about misinformation and so... gotta talk about this guy.

Trump has been declared the "content creator in chief," a fitting title for someone whose greed and nihilism is reflected in the nonsensical and meaningless statements he makes. His endless talk of ratings, crowd sizes, the biggest, the best, the most is the clearest expression of the age of content. I won't burden us all with a flood of Trump content, but I do want to point to two things.

First, earlier this year, prominent Minneappolis lawyer and civil rights activist Nekima Levy Armstrong was arrested by US federal officers for allegedly illegal protests against the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement surge in Minnesota. Such an arrest is certainly notable, but what drew a lot of attention to it was

The publication of this altered image, posted by the US White House's official Twitter account.

As you can see, the alterations include completely changing her facial expression, darkening her skin, and also adding a liquid to her face, possibly implying that she has been weeping. Most likely the alterations were done with generative AI.

And as you can also see, the grandiose, hyperbolic language of Trump is included: Levy Armstrong is of the "far-left" and she was engaged not in protest but in "riots."

When asked about this altered image, the White House's response was simple: the memes will continue.

As media studies scholar and ethicist Whitney Phillips notes, meme culture is not about meaning, but attention -- it does not matter what gets attention, just that it does. The "meme" image of Levy Armstrong certainly got attention, not merely in spite of its being fake, but precisely because it is fake.

The second Trump-related item is the very likely illegal demolition of the East Wing of the White House, done ostensibly to increase its capacity.

The plan Trump has revealed is a megalomanical ballroom, built all out of proportion and glittered up with gilded ornamentation. The message is simple: it is bigger, and there is more.

Trumpian practices are the ultimate misinformation and propaganda of the Age of Content. They distract us, they overwhelm us, they flood our minds with outrages and garbage. And they change the narrative -- whatever happened to the Epstein files, anyway? This brings me to a major distinction I want to draw between our current Age of Content and past practices of disinformation and misinformation.

Drawing on his daily observations of the language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer argued that "Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously."

Klemperer is not alone in recogizing that propaganda in the mass media age was about the repition of slogans or images. Mass media propaganda was about regimentation, order, arrangement, with uniform units repeated in space and time.

In contrast, in the age of content, it's not about repetition, but about fulfillment of containers. As artist and cultural critic Warren Neidich argues, "The unruly body/mind of the multitude, in all of its possibilities, must also be constrained and contained in the wide-open spaces of the world picture/movie." What I take from Neidich is that there is a degree of openness now, wide open spaces in which people can express themselves -- and yet this expression is done within containers. The expression of the "multitude" is contentified.. This containment needs to be understood.

Propaganda in an age of content is about constant updates in a vain attempt to stave off entropy. Instead of repetition of slogans or ideas, it's simply a steady stream of content -- any content. Instead of regimentation and uniforms, it's about individuals and organizations expressing themselves. Individuals express a wide range of ideas, but do so within the social media container. Movie and television shows produce content that feeds these streams.

In the age of content, propaganda is less about modulating meaning through repetition than it is about diffusing dominance through social entropy.

As media studies scholar Kate Eichhorn argues in her analysis of social media content, "On platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram[,] factual news items tend to be mixed with branded content and sometimes misinformation." Disinformation and misinformation are put into the same container as any other expression.

In the age of content, a cute cat picture,

a photo of a war crime,

and the crossover promotion of fast food and a Disney movie can all flow in the same stream.

In the Age of Content, conspiracy theories

sit alongside images of flowers

after which we see a report on technology.

In the age of content, there is no beauty or truth, merely containment, fulfillment, and consumption.

The age of content is marked by what media studies scholar Mark Andrejevic calls "infoglut", which can "suck critique into the clutter blender; not to ‘speak truth to power’ but the highlight the contingency, indeterminateness, and ultimately the helplesses of so-called truth in the face of power.”" Instead of being able to challenge power with a truth claim, the truth claim just gets put on the shelf alongside the cat picture, the conspiracy theory, the image of the war crime. The contentification of truth gives us a serious problem.

With no critical language for "content", our inability to critique "content" on ethical grounds leads us to using ineffective terms, like "inauthentic," "fake," "misleading." Even "misinformation" or "disinformation" are hard terms to deploy. These terms cannot get a conceptual grip on content.

Which brings me back to this guy. For well over a decade, political communicators have been flustered by the lack of "message discipline" on the part of Trump: he says stuff and then people react, try to interpret it, adapt to it. But Trumpian misinformation is not about repetition -- it's about a wash of content.

The Wikipedia collection of Trump's controversies is now at 99 articles and counting.

So, what is to be done?

Well, I am not going to argue with anyone who is trying to resist the newest container technologies -- such as data centres, which are being built across North America and around the world, often without the consent of the communities where they are to be located, often with incredible environmental damage. If you hear me speak today and want to leave here and protest a data centre, I am totally supportive!

But a more humble call I am making is to reconsider our language.

As a writer, I would never tell anyone to avoid using a word. And I certainly am afraid to suggest that editors never use a word.

Especially considering I myself have used the word over 150 times in this presentation alone! But there are words that need to deployed with great caution. "Content" is one such word.

This is why I love the conference theme. What do assumptions are we making when when we say "content"? What language might be sliding?

What might we use instead of the term "content"?

At this point, you might be asking why this professor of media studies is lecturing editors on the use of the word "content." I agree. Physician, heal thyself.

I come from higher education which has been replete with content-language for generations. We have content courses. We are told to make sure our students understand the content. We create educational content. We deliver educational content, often through content management systems.

Recall that the earliest instance of the term "content creator" comes from that 1957 dissertation on Christian educational curriculum. But what I am saying to you today is the same thing I would say to my colleagues in higher education:

We are not "content creators." We are communicators. The we here is me and you: educators and editors. We are not content creators. We are communicators.

As communication scholar James W. Carey famously argued, “Communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.” What I am suggesting is that we continue to do the hard work of collectively producing -- perhaps most of all repairing and transforming -- reality. I want to unpack this quote a bit and talk about the production, maintenance, repair, and transformation of reality.

A "symbolic process whereby reality is produced": I don't want to go too much into questions of constructivism or realism. What I take Carey to mean is that there is a reality out there, but our capacity to comprehend it comes through symbols -- our language. And language is not the property of individuals, but is a social process -- we collectively deploy symbols in our struggle to understand the world. Scientific writing is an example, but it's not the only one -- journalism is of course another.

As is art. Art in its various specific forms and how those forms are experienced -- this is another symbolic production of reality.

As for maintaining reality, well: you're doing it here. A conference where people gather to collectively debate what it means to be editors is an example of maintaining reality.

As for repairing reality, these days, we have a lot of work to do. I want to quote an essay from the Walrus that appeared earlier this month:

"Reforging a shared reality is not a task that can be outsourced [to generative AI] for convenience or speed; it requires reporters to engage with the world, to observe what’s happening, to be accountable to the things we say and do. To know whether the things we’re reporting actually happened, because we observed them ourselves."

Finally, transforming reality is a collective process of challenging power. It requires a specific and critical engagement with the world and a vision for what the world ought to be instead of what it is.

To conclude, today, I want us to continue to engage with our reality through our language. I want us to communicate, not merely make content. Forgive me for coming to a room full of editors to humbly suggest some edits! What might we say instead of "content"? What does it mean to alter our message?

Perhaps what we mean is the creation of better arguments.

Or better yet, instead of creating content, we are creating ideas.

Or perhaps we ought to get specific. Since we have a critical language for beautiful and good writing, perhaps we could simply substitute "writing" for "content."

Or maybe our goal is more ambitious: our task as communicators is to create more truth, inclusion, and responsibility, rather than lock those values away within the steel box of content.

Thank you!

END