2020 brought with it the pandemic and a stream of content creators who equated creating content (text, audio and video) with the idea of establishing thought leadership. Creating content was also equated with creating a ‘personal brand’.

The idea stated that in case you wish to stand out from the crowd, you need to generate content and then publish it so that more people see it and get impressed by what you have to stay. In this way they would remember you and give you more opportunities to seek fame and money.

This idea also got great returns in the beginning for content creators as there was a sudden increase in followers and engagement across both informal platforms (Instagram) and professional networking platforms (LinkedIn), as it was a new way of thinking for everyone.

With that came along the need to keep up with the changing algorithms of these social media platforms to stay ahead of the curve, and to maintain the number of followers and engagement levels, that one had painstakingly achieved.

In order to not miss out and keep riding the wave, ‘consistency’ was touted as the method to maintain top of mind awareness in the minds of the target audience and also to stay relevant with changing times. Consistency meant publishing content at a prescribed frequency without fail.

Having run out of important things to say and genuine thoughts, the ‘creators’ resorted to publishing mediocre content, content inspired from each other and sometimes copied content, in order to stay ‘consistent’.

Ironically some creators are now consistently publishing mediocre content and can see their engagement levels going down and follower count dwindling, even though they are following the play book which was conceptually sold to them by these platforms and content creation gurus.

The other end of the creator ecosystem is the “consumer” who initially enjoyed listening / reading to diverse views and also benefitted from the content being churned out, but over a period of time the consumer has also realised that a lot of content being made available to them is of poor quality and does not add any informational or entertainment value. This also inspired some “content consumers” to transition to become “content creators” themselves where they plan to solve the quality gap.

There has also been a debate between long form content and short form content. The assumption is that since our attention span has reduced as a population, more people prefer short form content and that should be the preferred method of content creation.

Therefore, people would prefer:

• Text: Not more than a paragraph long
• Image: A meme in place of a diagram or a flow chart
• Video: Not more than 60 seconds long and preferably with only trending music. In case words are used, subtitles need to be added so that people don’t have to concentrate to translate spoken language to words.

This obsession of making everything simple enough in order to reach all types of consumers has further diminished the quality of what is being conveyed. At this point, a major proportion of all content being published and consumed on social media is trite.

It is the equivalent of being served junk food in exorbitant amounts.

I do not have an answer or solution to this unique situation ( it cannot be called a ‘problem’ since it does not impact the day to day functioning of an individual) , however I do have a suggestion.

I propose that the purpose of content creation should be reflection. It should be a way to help understand a situation better. In academic institutions, students are asked to write about their thoughts on a topic. The end goal of their essays/papers is not fame or money or more eyeballs. The end goal of such assignments is to make the writer grasp the complexities of the subject and then use their learnings in organising their thinking and actions better.

And that is exactly what I’ve tried to accomplish with this blog post.