One of the problems with having a blog is thinking of a topic worth writing about. The log-in details sit in your inbox, quietly taunting you about your underwhelming output. "Write something. Anything!" your brain implores you – the blog needs content. And it demands to be fed.
Bill Watterson, the much-missed creator of Calvin & Hobbes, once illustrated this burden using a fine analogy, drawing a strip about his six year-old protagonist throwing garbage under his bed to silence the hungry monsters that lived there. In his notes, he admitted that, every once in a while, he’d churn out ‘content’ in order to fill the void, even when he felt like he had nothing to say.
And that’s the problem with content. We’re all in a constant struggle to fill an infinite void.
Perhaps we should blame the internet, and its ability to instil in us an insatiable hunger for stuff? Or maybe it’s the fault of the 24 hour news channels, which now routinely stretch the stories that could be covered in a half-hour bulletin, into a full day’s worth of coverage.
Actually, let’s point the finger at the word itself. Content.
What is content?
. The response I got after posting it suggests that I’m not alone in shaking my fists at our collective inability to clarify our terminology. And there are few more troublesome examples than ‘content.’
Technically, anything can be considered content, once it’s given a context. It’s simply a word that defines the material that fills an empty vessel. Inspiring stuff, eh?
If we apply that notion to our sector, content becomes the material we indiscriminately gather to fill the agenda, once we’ve decided to stage an event. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person left feeling disheartened at an industry seminar recently, when the audience was asked: "Is content always important?"
In a communications medium like ours, content isn’t just important; it’s the reason we exist.
To be clear – we’re not the only industry that sometimes views content as the after-thought. Look at any media platform and you’ll find examples where the technology was invented first, only for people to then scrabble around for enough stuff to fill it. TV, radio, cinema – they’re all guilty.
Championing storytellers
So let’s try and view things differently. Let’s champion the storytellers, rather than their chosen medium.
Imagine a writer, hunched in his studio flat. His brain is itching with a story he needs to tell. As he grabs a pen and paper, he begins to map out the narrative. Once his tale starts to take shape, he’ll probably begin thinking about the best platform for helping it find an audience.
Will it be a book, or a magazine article? A TV documentary, a dramatised mini-series, or a blockbuster movie? Maybe it’ll be a radio play, or a piece of performance art. The fact is, those are all secondary considerations. For now, all that matters is the story.
This is how we all communicated before we even had the written word. It’s how we entertained and informed each other, and passed on the things we’d learned. No-one ever sat around a campfire and asked if anyone had got content to fill the silence.
It stands to reason that I’d be banging this drum. After all, as a planner, it’s in my nature to want to get back to the original objectives of the brief. And as a writer, I value over everything else.
So let’s focus on the reason why our events exist. It’s because someone, somewhere, has a story to tell. It just so happens that a live experience is the best way to share it with an audience. If we do it right, they might even be able to get involved in its telling.
The content as king is dead. Long live the story-teller.
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