Kuvaus
We live in a contemporary deluge of content. Social media capitalise on an endless stream of audiovisual-textual bits of culture (human, corporate, and increasingly machine-produced), while streaming services offer an overflow of instant-access enjoyment. Consumer media consumption is on an even upward slope (estimated by some to have reached an average of over 600 minutes per day). Likewise, the working life of the professional-managerial class is punctuated by (by some estimates) 30 million daily PowerPoint presentations. Behind the abundance of content is a platform industry demanding increasing content, a working life increasingly demanding the management of appearances, and a consumer increasingly burdened by untamable choice.I argue that across the office cultures, streaming platforms, and social media content feeds, there is a qualitative phenomenon which is not new but is untheorised: convenience content — content whose production and or consumption is in some sense undergirded by an experience, expectation or discourse of convenience. Convenience content is easy to consume, or it might be easy to produce. It might be lacking in quality, but it makes up for it in quantity. Convenience content is increasingly ubiquitous: often a space filler that barely perturbs our attention but satisfies a constructed need for content. Rather than attempting a fleshed-out definition, this presentation is an exercise in elicitation. I will draw out a broad sensibility of convenience content as a theoretical construct through certain select examples. Then, I will present preliminary puzzles that look at content through convenience raises: the media-archaeological question, the consumer culture question, and the automated culture question.
| Aikajakso | 21 toukok. 2025 |
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| Pidetty | Centre for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen, Norja |