Kyle Chayka writes:

In the beginning, there was the egg. In January of 2019, an Instagram account called @world_record_egg posted a stock photo of a plain brown chicken egg and launched a campaign to get the photo more likes than any online image had before. The record holder at the time was an Instagram shot of Kylie Jenner’s daughter, Stormi, which had more than eighteen million likes. In ten days, the egg’s like count rocketed beyond thirty million. It remains at the top of the chart to this day, with more than fifty-five million. The account’s creators, who came from the advertising industry, later teamed up with Hulu for a mental-health P.S.A. in which the egg “cracked” owing to the pressures of social media. The egg’s arc was the epitome of a certain kind of contemporary Internet success: gather a big enough audience around something—anything—and you can sell it off to someone.

For Kate Eichhorn, a media historian and a professor at the New School, the Instagram egg is representative of what we call “content,” a ubiquitous yet difficult-to-define word. Content is digital material that “may circulate solely for the purpose of circulating,” Eichhorn writes in her new book, “Content,” which is part of M.I.T. Press’s “Essential Knowledge” series of pithy monographs. In other words, such content is vapid by design, the better to travel across digital spaces. “Genre, medium, and format are secondary concerns and, in some instances, they seem to disappear entirely.” One piece of intellectual property inspires a feeding frenzy of podcast, documentary, and miniseries offshoots. Single episodes of streaming-service TV can run as long as a movie. Visual artists’ paintings appear on social media alongside their influencer-style vacation photos. All are part of what Eichhorn calls the “content industry,” which has grown to encompass just about everything we consume online. Evoking the overwhelming flood of text, audio, and video that fills our feeds, Eichhorn writes, “Content is part of a single and indistinguishable flow.”

Over the past decade, a number of books have tried to take stock of how the Internet is influencing us, and what we should do about it. Eli Pariser’s “The Filter Bubble,” from 2011, demonstrated, early on, the homogenizing effects of digital feeds. After Facebook and its ilk became much more mainstream, the pioneering technologist Jaron Lanier wrote a book called “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” (2018). Shoshana Zuboff’s book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” published in the U.S. in 2019, diagrammed the systemic problems of mass data absorption. Eichhorn’s is one of a new crop of books that focus their attention on the user experience more directly, diagnosing the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between lone individual and virtual crowd. [Continue reading…]