the bipolar world of content
wtf does that even mean?
my spring creative writing ma semester is called ‘genre fiction’ and the first lesson is about ‘the big genre debate’: should we have genres? are they outdated? instead of ‘romance’, ‘sci-fi’, ‘thriller’, why not just call books ‘books’?
the thing about genre, one new yorker writer said, is that it doesn’t have to be vexing. it can be illuminating.
in life, i’ve never been a fan of labels – e.g., ‘writer’, ‘journalist’, etc. but humans need categorization. so, for the past few years i’ve adopted an identity of a writer.
it was weird at first – what do you do? i am a writer. – but then you get used to it. you add on other labels, such as ‘blogger’, ‘journalist’, ‘creative producer’, ‘head of content’, and it begins to sound intriguing. you even start to get jobs.
but none of these labels – or a combination of them – is an accurate definition of who i am or what i want to do. moreover, as someone who wore many hats in his not-so-long career already, i know how cheap all of these labels are. it’s so easy to call yourself things. if you want to be a writer, call yourself one, put it in your twitter (sorry, x) bio, scribble a few things here and there, and bham! – you’re a writer. the word ‘profession’ comes from the verb ‘to profess’ – or, proclaim loudly.
what we call work now would have been a joke 100-150 years ago. imagine telling your parents in the late 1980s that you want to be a web designer. wtf does that even mean? not a real profession. go to your cubicle in a big office and crunch numbers on a calculator all day. fast-forward 40 years, you have ux designers, art directors, product designers, chatgpt prompters, so on, so forth.
the problem with labelling yourself things is that you have a very limited number of professions to choose from and, chances are, most of them would be outdated by the time you achieve any sort of success.
the world keeps changing.
a better way is to forgo labels completely, at least inside your mind. just like genres were invented by publishers, professions were invented by hr people to scan resumes quickly.
when a writer sits down to write a book, they rarely say, ‘this is going to be a pure thriller!’ (well, some do, but those writers suck.) more often than not, a book just appears on its own and it is what it wants to be. (they call it ‘literary fiction’, whatever that means.) only later do critics and publishers and marketing people put it into brackets and labels and categories. true writers have just one genre: book.
so when i think about my career, i try not to dwell on the labels because i know they won’t mean anything in 5-10 years’ time – which is roughly the timeframe one should be thinking about when planning a career.
instead, i think of it this way: i love media. i love content. i love making things that people read, watch, listen to. where is this world going? and how can i be a part of it?
here are a few things i realized.
the world of content is bipolar. as of now, there are 2 revolutions happening at once. 1 – one that calls for a subjective, indie, raw, personal type of content that allows the audience to put themselves in the shoes of the creator. 2 – one that calls for an amazing quality and experience.
the first revolution: think of all the raw youtube vlogs where people just talk about their life in a raw, unedited format. some of these channels get millions of views. why? it’s real. true. honest. people miss that. you can subscribe to their blog and have a discussion with them. it makes you feel less alone. these are the monologue podcasts, these are the confession-style autofiction books, and these are the brutally honest standup comedy specials.
the second revolution: the major streaming services and networks that pull their (enormous) funds and (amazing) talent together to produce something truly great, like the morning show (apple), queen’s gambit (netflix), chernobyl (hbo). unlike the first revolution, that calls for authenticity and can be done for free, this one is all about amazing quality and massive distribution. you can’t do this on your own, you need to be a part of the team, and have access to big budgets and technology.
so, to recap – you either create a well-produced expensive product with a gazillion other people for netflix, or you do something extremely personal and subjective that allows people to see what’s happening behind your retina. it has to be one or the other, never both, nothing in-between. the bipolar world of content.
sometimes i think, why even write novels in 2024 if everyone is watching netflix anyway? why create things by yourself when anything written by many people in the writers’ room will be so much stronger? but netflix shows don’t have that level of authenticity, relationship-building, rawness that modern books or blogs have. this is another reason why i love writing on substack. it’s just me and my stream of consciousness, no fluff. and people who read me here feel like they have a relationship with me, they feel like they know me.
everyone is afraid of ai but it will be a part of the second revolution, not the first one. in fact, ai will make the gap between the two revolutions even wider. ai will be great at creating mass-culture products, which will make indie projects like personal substack blogs and monologue podcasts where people just talk about their lives and build direct relationships with their audience even more valuable. ai will be able to do everything except for being truly human.
so – if you’re to build a career in content creation for the next 5-10-15-20 years, you have to ask yourself, what is it that you want to create? is it indie or industrial? is it spilling your guts to a niche audience and making money off patreon or making pop-culture products for the masses? there’s no middle ground. you’re either amazingly real and honest and yourself or amazingly good and engaging and part of a wider team.
it can be both, though. nobody says you can’t have two careers: build direct relationships with your audience (essentially turning being who you are into a career) while also participating in the hollywood industrial complex.
which is exactly what i am thinking of doing.
– s
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