A review by zinelib
Content by Kate Eichhorn

dark informative fast-paced

4.75

This slim, elegant work is like a book report by a cultural studies PhD on a topic they were randomly assigned. Kate Eichhorn is a brilliant genius who can go deep on anything and explain it to you like you're 50. The book's title, Content, refers to digital content--user generated, automated, fake, etc.

She mostly concerns herself with the WWW, dating back to the early 1990s. 

In 1994, the editors of Postmodern Culture, one of the first academic journals to start publishing on the web, were concerned enough about this new medium to warn their readers that venturing onto the web, which had grown from an estimated 100 sites in June to over 600 sites by December 1993, may result in "a kind of information vertigo."

She points out how hard it was to find information in those days, but that at the same time as discoverability tools improved, so did efforts to game the system using search engine optimization (a term possibly not coined yet, but that I'm using to describe what Eichhorn reports). 

Eichhorn references Writely, which became Google docs a year after its 2005 launch, and which I used back then! I'm not usually an early adopter, but I was in early on that one! (This has nothing to do with the book; I'm kind of just bragging.)

I bookmarked a page that engages with the theorist Lyotard, information as commodity, and "payment knowledge," but I'm not sure what in particular I had in mind to share. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

She goes on to discuss the greater access "amateurs" have as creators, not necessarily coming down on the side of credentialism or popularism. She focuses on Instapoet Rupi Kaur, whom I hadn't heard of, a Canadian who rose to fame on Instagram at 17 for her performance poetry. 

Oof--the chapter on bots, including the Macedonian teens who contributed to Donald Trump's 2016 win, treats us to information on how Google's AdSense was (is) weaponized in the fake news industry. Many fake news purveyors are just in it for the money. They don't have to have a horse in the American race for the presidency. 

Eichhorn ends on a despairing note

...content resisters will never bring the content industry to its knees. Content and the content industry are here to stay; indeed, much of the damage has already been done. ... Content resisters [including zine creators] will stubbornly reject the temptation to accumulate content capital.

Published in 2022, this book could use a generative AI addendum. Eichhorn told me she was forced to cut AI content that, when the book was in production, seemed too outrageous to be believable. Lolsob.