In a previous post, I had briefly touched upon the idea of living in a world where the amount of content produced, both print and media, far exceeds what one can consume in a lifetime. I had come across NPR’s blog on that issue and the concept fit well with my thoughts about a book I was reading at that time.

In today’s digital world, everyone seems to be producing content. There are millions of blogs, photo collections, and online videos; thousands of TV channels; thousands of ebooks available at the touch of a button; millions of other books in the old-fashioned paper format; etc. And adding to this is the constant stream of updates from the social media networks: a few million tweets are generated every second and a few billion Facebook status updates every day. Judged purely by numbers, we are living in humanity’s golden age of creation. Never before in history have so many people contributed so much content for global consumption.

Strangely, this explosion of content has happened in parallel with the rise of a new class of computing devices: the purely consuming devices such as tablets and smart phones. These devices are great for reading, listening to music, watching videos and online shopping. In short they are great for consuming content but not for producing anything of significance. The most productive things we can expect from these devices are short emails, 140 character tweets or Facebook status updates or photo/video uploads.

Microsoft has been openly experimenting with tablet computing for a very long time. It has had a string of failures in this space. Apple came out with one product, the iPad, and conquered this market. One of the reasons, and I think it’s a big one, for this success was because Apple decided to ignore the content producers and made a product aimed primarily at content consumers. Microsoft was having so much difficulty with tablets because it was struggling to figure out how a tablet could be used in the office environment by someone who needed to work on it for 8 hours a day. It was and it still is difficult to design such a machine. Apple’s brilliance was that it totally ignored this market and concentrated only on the couch-surfer.

By concentrating on the couch-surfing consumer, Apple created a product ideal for lying back and consuming content. Take a look at the iPad unveiling event: Notice Steve Jobs uses the tablet by sitting on the couch and leaning back. Back when Windows Vista was released, Bill Gates made a promotional interview on the Daily Show. On that show, Jon Stewart asked Bill Gates how the PC, a device that requires users to lean-forward to use it, would ever replace the TV, a device that was perfect for lying back and relaxing. Bill Gates did not have a good answer at that time, but the iPad certainly made the leap from leaning-forward to lying-back computing devices.

The Paradox

So on one side we have more and more people using purely consuming devices and yet on the other side, we have an explosion of content. I term this phenomenon the ‘Producing-Consumer Paradox’. How is it possible to produce content from devices that are only great for consumption? There are two reasons for this:

1. The digital world is split between content Producers and content Consumers. The producers use devices that are better suited for production while those that are not interested in contributing content use the consuming devices. There truly are greater numbers of people actively working to create good content. The digital revolution has made it extremely easy to publish your content to a wide audience and many people are seizing this opportunity.
2. A significant portion of online content is trivial stuff that does not merit one’s attention. I include the vast majority of social network content in this category. A lot of such content can be easily produced by the primarily consuming devices.

The reason number 2 above, explains why I call this the ‘Producing-Consumer’ and not ‘Consuming-Producer’. The ease of production of trivial content provides a sense of contribution to people who are largely consuming content.

This situation raises two important questions. On the producing end, how do you make your content stand out? On the consuming side, how do you distinguish between good Producers and the mediocre or bad Producers?

The most important rule for content Producers: Respect your Consumer’s Time

If you are in the Producer camp, take a moment and think about this: Out of all the billions of other items that a consumer could spend time on, she has not only discovered your content but also decided to spend her precious time consuming your content. What are the odds of this happening? If you are part of well-established media, the odds for your content to be consumed are good but they are decreasing with each passing day. If you are a blogger or an independent video producer on YouTube, the odds of someone consuming your content are extremely low. So when that rare consumer does visit your site, what do you offer them? Is your website just full of keywords to fool a search engine or do you actually have content that someone might appreciate? The least that you can do is to respect their time. Make that extra effort to produce good content that your readers or viewers will appreciate. Of course, it is never possible to know what will please a person, but making that little bit of extra effort to respect their time will improve the quality of your content.

At about the same time as I write this, Facebook announced it’s new ‘frictionless sharing’ concept that aims to flood people with even more content. According to Faceook, every person’s every online activity merits your attention. “Raj just read a news article. Here it is.” “Raj just watched a video of a cat. Check it out.” The next time you feel the urge to contribute to this endless stream, take a moment and think: Is this really worthy of someone’s attention? Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has great take on this problem: if everything is shared instantly, then how do we distinguish between content that is worthy of being shared and unworthy content?

I once attended a technical talk and I don’t remember what it was about and who gave it. But I do remember the advice the speaker gave us: If you sit through a talk for about an hour and learn at least one new thing, the talk was worth your time. I didn’t learn anything technical from that talk but I did learn that valuable lesson. If you consider yourself a serious content producer then aim to follow that principle. Write your blogs, your papers or create your videos/audio such that you add some value to someone’s life by at least a minor amount. And I repeat, it is never possible to know if your content is really good but as long as you produce with the intent of respecting your consumers’ time, it will have an effect on the quality of your content.

What about the Content Consumer?

As a regular consumer, how do you deal with the flood of content? You can either succumb to the deluge, waste your time with trivial content or you can seek out the stuff that will enrich your lives. I am not in a position to advice anyone on how to deal with this problem. Being aware of the problem is probably a good beginning.

Are we living in a post-PC World?

There is a notion that we have now entered the post-PC world and that somehow PCs are no longer relevant. There can be no doubt that smart phones and tablets have definitely made it easier to do many of the things for which we previously needed PCs. However, I firmly believe that any sort of serious content generation will always require some sort of a PC. I say ‘some sort of a PC’ because by PC, I refer not to a Microsoft Windows based machine, but to any device that provides a user interface that is conducive to working for long periods of time. For now, this means that the minimum requirements are a keyboard, a mouse and a screen that can rest on its own. I could never write this blog on a smart phone. I have not yet used a tablet but I sense it would probably be difficult to write long posts without an additional keyboard. The current crop of post-PC devices seem to be fit only for trivial content generation. Of course, they are great for passive content consumption. Enjoy!