What Actually Is Content?

Before your phone can photograph anything, the earth has to be opened.

Copper, lithium, cobalt, tungsten and other materials have to be extracted. Silicon must be refined into a sensor capable of converting light into information. Glass must be engineered into several tiny lenses. Software must decide, within fractions of a second, how bright the sky should be, which face should remain in focus and what colour your skin is supposed to be.

Across different smartphone models, more than 70 elements may be used; an individual handset typically contains around 30. Behind the phone is an even larger physical system: cables, satellites, routers, servers, data centres and the electricity required to keep all of it running.

A smartphone camera is not a casual object. It is the result of centuries of accumulated knowledge in chemistry, physics, engineering, photography and communication.

And after all of that, what are we doing with it?

Filming ourselves walking into Zara to show people what is currently available.

Queuing for hours because a particular coffee shop is trending.

Producing an intentionally shocking opinion because the reasonable version will not travel as far.

TikTok has turned short-form video into a daily habit for hundreds of millions of people. A coffee, a queue, a dance, an outfit, an argument or a passing thought can be packaged, captioned and sent into the feed within seconds.

We have never possessed a greater ability to record and distribute our lives.

I am just not always sure why we are doing it.

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I Understand the Appeal

I cannot write this as somebody standing outside creator culture and sneering at it. I have been incredibly fortunate because I create content.

I have taken a penalty at Old Trafford during the Manchester derby. I have been flown around the world, sponsored by nearly every major camera brand and regularly sent packages containing products I once would have bought with my own money.

Content gave me somewhere to show my work. It allowed that work to travel further than I ever could and increased my professional value.

I understand the appeal because I have lived it.

But beneath the content was always a skill.

I had learned how to use a camera, understand light, compose an image, edit footage and recognise something worth capturing. The platforms did not teach me how to see. They allowed more people to see what I made.

Content did not create the value.

It made the value visible.

Perhaps that is where my confusion begins. I understood content as the delivery system for something I had learned to do. Increasingly, content itself appears to be the thing.

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Content Is a Container

A painting, a news investigation, a family photograph, a tutorial, an advert, a dance and a video showing what is available in Primark can all be placed into the same category: content.

The word tells us almost nothing about what has been made. It tells us about the container waiting to be filled. But the container is not making anything. We are.

Art asks what something means.

Journalism asks whether it is true.

Education asks whether it helps somebody understand.

Advertising asks whether it can sell.

Content asks whether it can hold attention.

That does not make content automatically worthless. It explains why its purpose can feel so difficult to identify. The platform does not need a video to be beautiful, truthful, skilful or useful. It needs the video to stop somebody from leaving.

Once attention becomes the primary measurement, trying to be shocking makes sense. Speaking with complete certainty makes sense. Giving an opinion on something you understand only vaguely makes sense.

Attention records the reaction.

It does not record the reason for it.

Even the number of “creators” depends on what we think the word means. Adobe estimated 303 million worldwide in 2022. Goldman Sachs used a much narrower estimate of 50 million in 2023 and suggested that only around 4% earned more than $100,000 a year.

That difference tells us something. We cannot agree where creativity ends and ordinary online participation begins.

Removing the old gatekeepers was valuable. People who might once have been ignored can now demonstrate an ability directly, build a business, teach, entertain or document communities that traditional media overlooked. I benefited from that change.

But removing gatekeepers did not remove the value of developing a craft, or at least having something to communicate.

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What Are You Actually Bringing?

Not every worthwhile creator needs an obvious technical skill. Sometimes the value is humour, honesty, taste, courage, beauty or an original way of looking at an ordinary life. Sometimes it is simply a connection.

Someone filming an uneventful trip to the shops may provide companionship to a lonely person watching from home. Something that appears pointless to me might make somebody else feel understood.

Connection has value.

But surely content should contain something: skill, knowledge, humour, beauty, information, emotional honesty, entertainment, access, community or a perspective another person would not otherwise have encountered.

As creators, perhaps we should ask ourselves a better question:

Why should anybody follow us?

Outside the face, body, outfit, relationship, holiday, hotel, gifted package or carefully arranged version of a desirable life, what are we bringing?

What does another person receive in exchange for their time?

There is a difference between aesthetics and aestheticised self-importance.

The same test applies to ordinary life.

I am going to the gym. I am buying a coffee. Who cares?

An activity is not automatically an idea, and an errand is not automatically a story. Ordinary life can produce brilliant content when somebody observes, interprets or transforms it. A trip to the gym can become a story about discipline, insecurity or recovery. Buying a coffee can reveal something about a city, a business or a relationship.

It can also simply be footage of a person buying a coffee.

A camera can record almost anything. That does not mean almost anything needed to become content.

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Some Content Is Simply Not for Me

Not everything I dislike is evidence of a wider social problem. Some content is simply not to my taste.

I do not enjoy watching people turn a camera on themselves and lip-sync somebody else’s song. Millions of people clearly do. They are allowed to make it, and I am allowed to find it deeply embarrassing.

If you ever see me turn a camera on myself and start lip-syncing, you should probably put me in a straitjacket.

We have become so frightened of appearing judgemental that we sometimes pretend all creative output is equally interesting, thoughtful or good.

It is not.

Some content is boring. Some is derivative. Some is badly made. Some is painfully cringe. We should not be afraid to say that.

Cringe can be cruel when it punishes somebody for being earnest, experimental or different. But embarrassment also has a social function. It reminds us that we occupy a world with other people.

Sometimes second-hand embarrassment is not caused by somebody expressing themselves freely. It is caused by watching somebody behave as though nobody else exists.

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When the Experience Starts Serving the Image

I went to the Louvre to take pictures at Blue Hour.

It took me about fifteen minutes. Then I put my phone away and enjoyed being there.

Near the main entrance, I watched girls spend the best part of an hour photographing and filming themselves. Other people waited, walked around them or became accidental extras while the same arrival was performed repeatedly.

It made me wonder whether the images were recording their experience or whether producing the images had become the experience.

I cannot argue that taking photographs means somebody is failing to live in the moment. Taking photographs is often how I enter a moment more deeply. But intention matters.

Research has found that taking photographs specifically to share them can reduce enjoyment by making us more concerned with how we are presenting ourselves. We are no longer only experiencing the place. We are imagining ourselves being observed in it.

The question changes from:

What does it feel like to be here?

to:

What will it look like when people see that I was here?

The experience becomes raw material for the picture.

The same shift affects everybody sharing the physical space. People block entrances, pavements and train platforms to record themselves. They play music in shared spaces, repeatedly walk through crowds or expect strangers to move because filming has begun.

The creator sees a set. Everybody else sees the entrance they are trying to walk through.

Creating content does not suspend ordinary consideration for other people. A street is not automatically a set. A stranger is not an extra. An entire environment should not have to reorganise itself around your video.

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The Algorithm Has Entered the Physical World

Algorithms do not remain inside our phones. They increasingly organise the world outside them.

A restaurant goes viral and people queue for hours. A product appears in several videos and disappears from every shop. A quiet viewpoint becomes crowded with people producing almost identical photographs.

The algorithm can move thousands of physical bodies towards a single pastry, doorway, shop or patch of pavement.

If somewhere requires an enormous queue because it has gone viral, I am generally going to avoid it. I value my time too much to spend hours proving that I visited somewhere everybody else was also instructed to visit.

Popularity and value are not the same thing.

If we are queueing outside the same places, buying the same products, repeating the same camera angles and dressing our lives in the same aesthetics, which parts are actually ours?

The feed increasingly supplies the desire before we express it. It tells us where to go, what to order and what the resulting video should look like. Then we present those decisions as evidence of who we are.

The strange result is that we are encouraged to build “personal brands” while becoming less personally distinguishable.

The same hotels. The same restaurants. The same products. The same captions. The same claims of authenticity. The same performance of individuality.

Perhaps originality does not require doing something nobody has ever done. It requires allowing what we encounter to pass through an actual mind before we reproduce it.

The useful question might be:

Would I still want this if nobody could see me doing it?

Without that pause, we may not be expressing ourselves at all. We may simply be showing the algorithm that its instructions worked.

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Influence Used to Be the Result

In a 2023 American survey, 57% of social-media-using Gen Z respondents said they would become an influencer if given the opportunity. More than half said they would leave their current job if influencing could support their lifestyle, and 15% already described themselves as influencers.

I understand why. Influencing appears to offer freedom, attention, travel, products and money. Some people build extraordinary businesses that way.

But influence once described the effect of somebody’s work. A person developed an idea, skill or body of work, and influence followed.

Now influence can be declared as the ambition before the work exists.

The question is no longer always:

What would I like to contribute?

It can be:

How can I become visible?

Visibility is then confused with authority. Confidence resembles expertise. A person can accumulate an audience before deciding what responsibility comes with speaking to one.

At the same time, content creation encourages us to view almost every part of life as potential material. A relationship becomes a storyline. An argument becomes a story time. A heartbreak becomes a caption. A child becomes a recurring character. A holiday becomes a production schedule.

If every experience could become content, when are you ever not at work? If every emotion is considered for its public potential, when are you experiencing something purely for yourself?

A 2025 Norwegian study of nearly 2,000 adolescents aged 13 and 15 found an association between a greater focus on online self-presentation and lower wellbeing, particularly among girls. The concern was not all social media use, but the preoccupation with managing an image, seeking feedback and continually considering how you appear to an audience.

Adolescence has always involved trying to discover who you are. Now young people may be trying to discover who they are while simultaneously learning how to package, perform and measure that person.

Adults do it too. We begin to experience ourselves from the outside and make real decisions on behalf of the version of us other people will see.

Content is not something that exists independently of the people making it. We choose what to record, what to perform and what to publish. Those choices do not become separate from us simply because they appear on a screen.

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When Content Reaches Children

This is where my criticism stops being abstract.

My children brought a public account to my attention because it featured someone we collectively knew who worked with them in a professional capacity.

They found the content funny and childish.

The content was unnecessarily sexual given his line of work. It included a statement about buying lingerie so that he could “customise” her, posts announcing that she was going to have sex with him that night, footage of her admiring herself and him while he drove, and repeated declarations of how desired he was.

Their relationship was presented as a public performance that could veer from apparent crisis to the greatest love imaginable. The tone could change just as dramatically. Content presenting her as fiercely, almost hyper-independent could shift overnight into a version of the relationship in which she appeared almost entirely submissive, her identity reduced to admiring and accommodating him, even singing while on her knees in the street.

It also promoted “just a girl” helplessness, men paying and providing, women being indulged, and the idea that some people are more attractive, valuable or worthy than others.

The children were laughing, but the laughter itself was revealing. They could see the immaturity of the performance even if the adults making it could not.

They were looking at the content from outside the performance. They could see the contradictions between hyper-independence and submission, intimacy and publicity, confidence and superiority.

The people making it were inside the performance, receiving attention and validation.

The children were effectively asking:

Why would an adult post this?

The adults appeared to be asking:

Are people watching?

Adults are entitled to private lives. But once something has been chosen, performed and published on a public account, it is no longer private. You cannot control who encounters it and then insist that it says nothing about you.

I also view these gender stereotypes as a mother. Care and helplessness are not the same thing. Girls deserve tenderness without being taught that dependence is the route to receiving it. Boys should not be taught that their value lies in paying, providing and suppressing vulnerability.

The woman performs beauty and dependence.

The man performs money and emotional invulnerability.

Both are reduced.

Aspiration should not require somebody else to be placed beneath you either. Confidence does not require contempt. Content that presents other people as “the most basic human beings”, less attractive or less smart than you, while placing yourself “first in line” or describing others as “low value”, teaches children to organise human worth as a hierarchy. When white skin and blonde hair are implicitly positioned at the top of that hierarchy, it raises another question: whose beauty is being treated as the standard, and who is being placed beneath it?

There is no clean line between how you present yourself online and who you are in the real world. An online persona may be curated, exaggerated or incomplete, but you still chose the words, participated in the video and published it.

Content is not a separate thing that simply happens to us.

We are making it.

Be one person.

Bring the same judgement, character and standards to your online life that you expect people to associate with you in the real world. And if this is genuinely your standard, perhaps you should reconsider working with children.

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The Camera Extracts Twice

A phone camera begins with extraction and ends with extraction.

At one end, minerals are extracted from the earth to manufacture the device.

At the other, attention and data are extracted from the viewer and creator, while moments are extracted from ordinary life to keep the system supplied.

Somewhere in the middle is the person holding the camera.

That person might be creating art, documenting history, teaching a skill, building a business or making somebody on the other side of the world feel less alone. They might also be producing something they do not particularly believe in because they know it will perform.

Most of us probably do a mixture of both.

I do not think the answer is to stop creating or treat every ordinary video as evidence of cultural collapse. I love cameras. I love what content creation has allowed me to do. I know something light, silly or apparently unnecessary can brighten somebody’s day.

I also know that some content is rubbish. Some is inconsiderate. Some is regressive. Some exists only because a platform demands that something, anything at all, occupy the next few seconds.

Acknowledging that does not make me anti-creator. It means I believe creation can be better than that.

A recording preserves what happened.

Creation decides why another person might care.

The answer does not always have to be skill. Sometimes it is connection, laughter, beauty, recognition or the simple comfort of seeing another human being living a life that resembles your own.

But there should be an answer.

We possess the most advanced image-making tools in human history, connected to the largest potential audience that has ever existed.

Before we make more content, it may be worth asking:

What are we making, and is it really us?