“Content” is the black hole of the Internet. Incredibly well-produced videos, all sorts of songs, and articulate blog posts — they are all “content.” Are short stories “content”? I hope not, since that is one of the most soul-destroying of words, used to strip a creation of its creative effort.
The World Wide Web is the most powerful medium for learning, sharing, and understanding our species has created. Our descendants will judge us harshly on the first thing we tried to do with it: commoditize our attention by packaging our insights and humanity into transactional units.
(The optimist’s take: It’s still early days; we haven’t yet tapped the web’s full potential.)