I was telling a few folks about a talk I gave in Singapore last year and decided to just throw the deck up. The audience was a bunch of media people and essentially I went in and told them content doesn’t matter … At some point I’ll write the thing up in essay form, but until then, here’s the deck.
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Hi, I'm Noah. I am the co-founder of Percolate. I like writing on, thinking about and making stuff for the internet. I'm responsible for a few internet experiments like Brand Tags, likemind and My First Tweet. On this site I write about media, marketing, culture, technology and randomness. I like it when people email me.
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It is moreso the confluence of content and media distribution which replaces media per se. Iteration is important in the current constantly changing media world. Companies could learn from consumers’ use of media how to capture attention, which could ultimately build their brands.
Thanks for sharing the deck. I really dig the part about ‘not being able to predict success’ as this resonated very well with me.This was in connection with a discussion I was having with a client of mine.
Hi Noah,
I liked your deck a lot. The bit about not being able to predict success is something I wrote about in a post called “The Dandelion Approach”.
I didn’t really understand your point about content not mattering though.
Are you saying to stop focussing on the quality of content itself, but instead consider how to impact people? i.e. the effect is more important than the content itself?
All the best,
Daniel
Ha, not totally sure what I’m saying Daniel, you’ve caught me. I was trying to interpret McLuhan, who said that content isn’t important … his point (I think) and the one I was trying to make is that it’s a mistake to think that content is all that matters. How the content is delivered (the medium) is often (if not always) actually more important and says as much as what’s inside … That make any more sense?
I think someone should write a book about how we have misinterpreted, misquoted, and misunderstood the many aphorisms of Marshall McLuhan.
I have been a reader of McLuhan since 1968, when, as an 11th grade student, I was introduced to his smash hit of a sound bite, “The medium is the message”. It happened that my history teacher was one of McLuhan’s grad students, and he taught us while still very heavily under the influence of ‘the sage of ST. Mike’s’.
While I found your presentation compelling, I squirmed at some of what it was actually saying. Your dismissal of the importance of content rankled me. But now I see that someone named Daniel has had the same issue, and your very balanced response to him has actually settled me down.
The thing that is both most aggravating and most captivating about McLuhan was his ability to reduce insights into sound bites. They were the result of untold amounts of reading and years of study and observation, mostly of English literature and history, but also of popular media. The man built up a huge storehouse of intellectual inventory, from which he could draw different bits of information to create new patterns and perspectives which seemed to pour forth on every page of any one of his books.I believe it was that particular talent that defined him.
There’s a lot of masked inventory behind each one of those ideas, which means that when you reduce them to a few words, a lot of it gets left out, leaving a lot of room for interpretation. And when he did try to explain what he meant, he did it with high poetry: note your slide 14, where he refers to content as the “juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” Not many writers, never mind social scientists or media pundits, are capable of such literary craftsmanship. But as captivating as that turn of phrase is, it still doesn’t explain much.
So thanks for your clear response to Daniel.
No question, social media is the biggest news story of the decade so far, much bigger and more interesting than the content of most of the conversations that happen within it. But the only people who are as obsessed with the idea of spreading their idea as they are with the idea they are spreading are marketers, pundits, circuit lecturers, politicians, bloggers and media junkies. Far as I can tell, the rest of us are perfectly happy to dine on the burglar’s meat.
Keep the presentations coming! wn
Thanks for the thoughtful comment Will.
I think the biggest thing to understand with the presentation is that it was a presentation. It was missing a whole lot of the context that accompanied it in the hour-long presentation that went along with it. Also, the presentation was meant to provoke, which is also something I think McLuhan did quite a bit of (I’m fairly convinced that he wrote entire theories just to test the limits of what people would buy into when printed in a book).
On your last point – “But the only people who are as obsessed with the idea of spreading their idea as they are with the idea they are spreading are marketers, pundits, circuit lecturers, politicians, bloggers and media junkies. Far as I can tell, the rest of us are perfectly happy to dine on the burglar’s meat.” – I actually don’t agree. I highly recommend the book And Then There’s This by Bill Wasik, which really effected my thinking on this subject. Wasik argues that we as a culture have become totally obsessed with how culture spreads, pointing to things the rise of memes and the fact that The Tipping Point is a bestseller as two of many pieces of evidence supporting this being a mainstream pursuit. Of course this isn’t something people think about, but on the web I truly believe the impetuous for passing things along is as much about being part of the process of spreading (if not more) than the actual content itself (a point I think it perfectly captured by infographics).
Finally, I’m still not sure I think content is important. That’s an incredibly difficult thing to accept as a content creator, but the bottom line is if no one ever sees something what difference does the value make anyway?