COLUMN: Content in the Aughties
In practicality, 2001 was a 113-day year. All the top-10 lists are straining to think of anything significant that happened in the first nine months and 10 days of the year. So, I’m focusing on the future with the hope of claiming the pop culture tag line for the whole decade. “Content in the aughties” has a nice ring to it. That’s CONtent, not conTENT.
I think if the world has really changed in any great way other than taking your shoes off before you board a plane, it is that we have been confronted with our overall vapidness. I’m not talking about the smoldering depths of Dostoyevsky existential despair, it’s just the realization that stuff that really shouldn’t matter has been eating away at us like the mechanical shark in Jaws I through III.
The Internet strikes again as a metaphor for life. While the number of Web pages is outnumbering the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the world’s beaches, the amount of actual content has stayed at about the same level as when you could buy Microsoft stock at three shares for a dollar out of Bill Gate’s dorm room. It is only in the last couple years Web sites have started hiring people called content managers and content editors. It is as if magazines and books all of a sudden decided they needed words on the pages once people got past the cool photos on the cover. Although nobody buys Playboy just for the articles, there are literally dozens of people who actually do eventually read it.
In the aughties of content I look forward to:
The rethinking of the power office, power suit, power tie and power car. People might actually start to care about what you have to say or write rather than how you look. Image can only take you so far, eventually you have to say something. Two words – Albert Einstein. Bad hair, bad suits, bad accent – changed the world.
The shrinking of celebrity. I know Catie Couric is both cute and astute, but do you really need someone who makes $14 million a year to read the news in the morning? Or, for that matter someone is a pitcher, a punter or basketball playmaker earning more money than the entire faculty in most school districts? I’m not saying any of these people will be scaled down to even the horror of middle-class wages, but I predict that as a society we will start caring and paying a little less.
The decline of the stuff-based economy. It has become a cliché that every year retailers start inflicting a torrent of guilt on consumers for not buying more stuff for the holidays. This year it carried right through to the after Christmas sales. Look, our landfills are overflowing, vehicles, houses and waistlines are getting bigger and there is a booming business in storage unit rentals. We have so much stuff right now that we can hardly get out the door. If this really is a market economy then one might think that noting poor sales one year retailers would scale down their inventory for the coming year. One might also hope for bioengineers to perfect the flying pig.
Of course I could be wrong and by 2010 we will all have the IQ of a banana nut muffin, Jennifer Lopez will be the president and Harry Potter will replace Gideon’s bibles in motel rooms, but that would be too cynical, even for me.