Do You Like My Content?

How did you get started in content creation?

I was going to skip this prompt. I mean, "content creation"? What even is that? Then I read Tipa's post, where she explained what it means:

"Content creation, as I understand it, is stuff generated to be ranked highly in search engines in order to entice people to follow it to your website, at which point they will be monetized and you will eventually get paid."

Seriously? That's what it is?  Well, I guess I never did get started in it, then.

What I thought "content creation" meant was "doing stuff that other people can see or hear or share somehow".

I don't mean "doing stuff " as in cutting your hedge, even though your neighbors and everyone passing by in buses and cars can see you doing it. Although, when the guy across the road gets out his step-ladder and his power-trimmer, puts on his gauntlets, his full-visor protective mask and his goggles and spends four hours getting every last leaf just so, you have to see it as a performance for the benefit of the neighborhood, so I guess anything can be content, if you want it to be.

If Tipa's definition is too specific and mine too loose, maybe we should ask Baby Bear what he thinks. ( Why is it that Baby Bear always a boy bear, by the way? Just askin' ).

Baby Bear in this context shall be Wikipedia:

"Content creation is the contribution of information to any media and most especially to digital media for an end-user/audience in specific contexts. Content is "something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing or any of various arts" for self-expression, distribution, marketing and/or publication. Typical forms of content creation include maintaining and updating web sites, blogging, article writing, photography, videography, online commentary, the maintenance of social media accounts, and editing and distribution of digital media. A Pew survey described content creation as the creation of "the material people contribute to the online world."

Okay, we can work with that. And, hey, look! Blogging's right up there!  Second example after - guess what? - "maintaining and updating websites". Partial, much, Wikipedia?

I'm pleased to see the idea of being paid has dropped out because if that was in there this would be a short piece:

Q. "How did you get started in content creation?"
A. I didn't. No-one's paid me yet.

Yeah, okay, so maybe that's not strictly true. For sure, no-one's paying me to ramble self-indulgently about ancient multiplayer games and singers I like. I wish! But back in the early '80s I did, briefly, get paid for writing reviews of videogames for a print publication called "MicroAdventurer". They would send me cassette tapes of upcoming games and I'd play them and send back a couple of hundred words on how much I hated them. Don't think they ever sent me a game I liked. Certainly they never sent me one I can remember now.

I also wrote a couple of other pieces for U.S. comics prozines that I thought I was going to be paid for but never was. The pieces got printed and I got sent a copy but any cheque mysteriously got left out of the envelope. One of them did offer me a regular position as a U.K. based interviewer of comics professionals but I figured it would cost me more in train fares to and from London than the gig would pay, so I declined. Plus I had that whole "don't meet your heroes" thing going on, even then...

If we drop the money requirement, then I guess my first content creation, or at least the first I can remember, was writing music reviews for the school magazine when I was maybe twelve years old. It's also where I learned the value of fact-checking. I can still recall my mortification when I finally realized, a week or two after publication, that the Argent single I'd reviewed was in fact called "Tragedy" not, as I'd written "Try To Believe".

In my defence, I'd only ever heard it played on the radio and the diction of the average Radio One D.J. in the early seventies left more than a little to be desired. Also, listening to the song for the first time in what may well be fifty years, it bloody well does sound like they're singing "try to believe", doesn't it?

Although that error kickstarted my commitment to checking my facts before going to print, I also followed what would become a consistent pattern and kept my mistake to myself. And, since my peer group of the time was, all things considered, even more ignorant than I was, I got away with it.

That was the beginning of a lifelong interest, arguably an obsession, with creating content by talking about content created by someone else. As an adolescent and going all the way into my twenties and thirties, almost as many of my idols were critics, reviewers and essayists as artists, writers or musicians. Although, of course, many were both.

Over the long years of my life I've dabbled here and there with fiction. I have a couple of unfinished pieces, clocking in around thirty to fifty thousand words each, that I'm thinking of dusting off, tidying up and introducing to the internet.

I was never much of a fiction writer, though. I can't do plots. Instead, for most of my teenage years I genuinely believed I was a Poet. If you'd asked me to define myself then, "Poet", with a capital "P",  might well have been the word I'd have used. I certainly wrote one hell of a lot of poetry, all of which I still have, but I was extremely reticent about letting anyone else see any of it, which, unless you happen to be Emily Dickinson, is tantamount to proof that you are no poet at all, just a diarist who can't parse a full sentence.

Fine. Have it that way. But I always could parse a sentence. That's probably why I was a lot happier to let people see my prose. And my opinions. Pretty much no-one going to get clear without hearing what those were.

Tipa hails "having an opinion" as the key requisite for successful content creation. I often wonder what it would have been like for my eighties' circle of friends, had we had today's social media back then. I quail to imagine the things I would have said and done. Still, I'd swap. It would literally have been living the daydream. 

I remember vividly, sitting in the darkened, closed bar of some convention hotel in the small hours towards the end of that decade or the start of the next, speculating wildly about the future of what we certainly never spoke or thought of as our "content creation", as it might look in the light of the miracle new technology some of us could see glimmering beyond the silicon event horizon.

Thankfully or otherwise, the slow tide of change took too long building to carry us along with it. By the time it arrived most of us were off the beach, watching from the promenade. I had the means but I no longer had the motivation. I still have opinions but they don't scald and burn the way they did. I can hold onto them for longer without feeling the need to throw them at anyone else.

All of my most opinionated "content" is safely locked in ink, scattered across various fanzines and prozines and apazines, most of them, if they survive, by now deep under dust in someone's loft or garage. By the time I was concerning myself with games my outlet was the ephemerasphere of forums and comment threads. My juiciest opinions might still lurk the cobwebbed corners of the interwebs but good luck finding those, either. I posted neither under real my real name nor the blogging handle I go by now. Even I can't remember what I called myself then.

So, that's a thumbnail of how I got started in content creation. In a nutshell, I soaked up what other people were creating and couldn't keep quiet about what I thought about it for fear of exploding. These days I fancy myself a little more louche, a little less strident. I do still fancy myself, though, as must be uncomfortably obvious. Knowing you have a problem, though. First step, yeah...?

But Tipa's right. If I wanted to create content for people to consume, I'd troll out those opinions. I'd stop using stupidly obscure titles and tailor myself some clickbait instead. I'd say what I believe and if that didn't get enough attention I'd think of something else to believe and say that instead.

And I might, yet. I'm kind of keeping that one in reserve. If I make it into, let's say, my nineties, I might fancy some late-flowering notoriety. You have to be either very, very young or very, very old before having opinions makes you a prodigy instead of a pariah. Or a prat.

For now I'll poodle along as I am, thanks. Every internet persona is a front but it's nice to front up as someone you think you might like rather than someone you think other people might like. I create content for me, mainly. I like to imagine me reading it and thinking "yes, that's what I think, too".

Not always as easy as it sounds.