I can’t tell if you agree with me or not. If transformations don’t change anything, what do you mean when you say “… the precise idea is inseparable from Cory’s presentation”?
I’ve got no problem with artists feeling that if they create a work in one medium then it should be consumed in that medium, or that if content is transformed too much it loses something. But if audiences don’t feel that way, then I’m afraid artists can kiss my arse.
That’s a very good definition of “content” as used in a pejorative sense, and I’d also agree with your point about how IP loons see “content” too. But what does it have to do with the article?
Cory seems to be creating an immensely aesoteric problem where there is in fact no problem at all. He says:
[people who create “content” have ] constrained their content by eliminating all the form-dependent elements, and thereby constrained their ability to communicate the full range of human ideas.
Call me demanding, but it would sure help if somebody could give a good contemporary example of what he’s talking about. We can’t be talking about the fact that infographics don’t work well as ASCII art or something - or are we?
In the sense that practitioners use these words: If a specific part of what you’re calling presentation is actually part of the information being conveyed, then you’re using the term wrong and it’s content.
If that isn’t what you intend, then you’re confusing the well-defined technical usage with the much wider and less-defined colloquial usage. Which is a great way to completely destroy the meaning of any philosophical statement.
The words of Cory’s stories are content. That content can be rendered and framed in many ways – print it in braille, read it aloud, graffiti it on the side of a building, translate it into another language – and that’s presentation. Yes, a bad presentation is a problem, but that’s a problem with that specific presentation, not the result of this distinction.
If there is an illustration that Cory said should be included with the story, that’s content. If a magazine commissions an intro sketch for it, or bases a cover upon it, then as far as Cory is concerned that’s presentation… though of course from the artist’s point of view it’s content, and from the magazine’s point of view the distinction becomes fuzzy.
Are the terms being overextended and misused elsewhere? Sure. But they’re also simply being used differently elsewhere. And neither invalidates the technical usage; they’re irrelevant to it.
But in a technical sense, “content” is fungible. While there are exceptions, from a technical standpoint, boingboing articles (say) are not unique snowflakes. Otherwise, you would not be using Wordpress, RSS would not be a thing and technical people would not be able to refer to “content” or “payloads”. To your back end or the technical folks responsible for building websites, unit count and format matter more and that’s the way it should be. It matters to them so you, the writer of articles, the creative person, do not have to worry about leading or margins or font size or pagination every time you write an article.
If you think that you can fuss over all the minor details while being able to keep on writing, then go right ahead. Open up that text editor, write out your stuff, put in all the HTML formatting. build me a magazine layout. Put in the page marks, the drop caps, the page numbers. I mean, content is inseparable from the presentation, right? The very visibility and comprehensibility of this comment whether on mobile device, monitor, screen-reader, etc puts the lie to Cory’s thesis.
The abuse of a technical term by some people invalidates neither the term itself nor the concept underlying the term’s existence.
The story, the work of art, consists of what Cory chose to put on paper (or, in modern times, in a file), and what he chose to fix as necessary to present his work (separation into paragraphs and chapters, perhaps; the precise word order in all cases). This has very little to do with the source of the presentation, soit Webpage, soit Kindle, etc. (what you are calling the medium). I would tell you that the real medium is text, and how you choose to project that medium is rather immaterial to the success (artistic or otherwise) of Cory’s book.
I’ll be blunt: audiences don’t even really notice a difference anymore. If you lay out Cory’s book badly on the Web, they may well say “Great book, but the Web designer sucks.” That is because what the Web designer adds has very little to do with what is essential to present Cory’s idea. If they read it in a format like older Project Gutenberg text files, they won’t have any problems understanding what he was getting at.
When I write a piece of music, I have a whole slew of choices to make to present my idea, and some choices are more germane to the idea than others. I may take pains to specify phrasing in one passage, and not in another, because the interpreter’s choice in the latter won’t change the apperception of my idea: we tend to lock down the choices we figure are needed to present the idea clearly (and what is locked down can vary - plenty of room for improvised music, eh?). The trick is to create ordered successions of sounds that get across our ideas: that’s the Darstellung or presentation of the idea. You can make limited substitutions, perhaps substituting a brass quartet for an organ, for example, or chip tunes for an organ, and maintain the idea, but after a point, you get an new work: Bach chorale preludes are original works, not arrangements, even though he normally quotes the original chorales in full. In that way the content is inseparable from the presentation.
It’s also part of the presentation, because it undoubtedly will have a specific role in presenting his idea, and will need to be presented in a specific region in the text to do so. In that way the content is inseparable from the presentation.
Yup, and we’ve been using those terms for several centuries now, so it annoys us to see techies misusing them.
On the other hand, your experience of that content would be substantially different if it was posted as a serial on a corkboard in Comic Sans, yes?
(Agreeing with the notion that “the word ‘content’ is an attempt to make art into a fungible commodity”, by the way. It’s the same notion that results in the armies of paid contributors to shitty SEO’d websites.)
From a software development standpoint, “content” has always been regarded as an afterthought, some kind of copy that marketing will write a few days before ship – to us developers, building the infrastructure by which any arbitrary content (and increasingly the meta data describing presentation details) is stored, transported, presented is the real work, despite the fact that really, it’s ALL about the content (think about developing a word processor application or a web plugin).
“Content” as deprecatory and even secondary seeped into the larger industry parlance, but its context and meaning were never quite preserved – it came to imply low wage hacks, journalists and copy-writers whose sole purpose was to provide filler for a website.
We’re not misusing them. We’re using JARGON, with full awareness that it is jargon and not the normal usage. A problem only arises when others insist that these should mean the same thing that the traditional words which they’re based on mean. Think of them as homonyms; they are not and are not intended to be redefinitions outside of their intended scope.
Jargon is a huge timesaver for those it’s intended to communicate among, at the cost of confusing those outside that circle. And that’s just fine as long as people are aware that there was no intention that the specialized usage fully represent – and certainly not replace – the original. I’m sure your fields, whatever they are, have corresponding example of words that communicate well among the practitioners but don’t mean what someone outside your field would use them to mean.
My field was servers for a good bit of my working life, so yeah, I know the jargon, but those of us with a foot in both camps (technical and artistic) see the damage that the jargon incurs, in how people who use the jargon tend to misunderstand the relationship between “content” and “presentation” in the broader sense, and tend to see the most important parts of a presentation as “fungible”. Hell, we’ve seen it in this thread. The vocabulary you use to talk about something shapes your viewpoint, and that’s been evident with most of the techs replying on this thread.
If 'content" becomes “fungible”, then, in most cases, the value of a Website/app/help file/ quoi que ce soit incorporating that “content” is next to nil, and all that lovely “presentation” you’re doing amounts to gilding dung. (I use “in most cases” advisedly. I do understand that some information to be presented is both fungible and valuable - search results come to mind as an example. Even then, if the “content” isn’t accurate and apposite, a pretty “presentation” won’t make the search engine usable.)
As a designer by trade I tend to disagree with the idea that content and presentation are identical, or indistinguishable. They are deeply connected but they are not identical. You should not confuse the fuel for the engine, though you need both working in concert to make the vehicle go. I think, for example, of a poster I saw from Germany in the 1920s. I read no German and so could not understand its content but I could see how design and typography were used in that poster and how people in English-speaking countries had used similar design elements. Both the content and the presentation convey, but again that does not make them identical.
I disagree completely with this. If you want to truly understand something you need abstractions in order to strip away the non-generalizable bits from concrete examples. In physics you have particles, in chemistry molecules, in biology cells, and so on. Obviously not every particle, molecule or cell is the same. But treating them such allows the discovery of things applicable to all (or at least most) cases of each class. And even the exceptions are interesting for the sake of being exceptions.
“Content” is a similarly useful abstraction, and if anything, we need to be reminded of it all the more these days. When the Web was started, it was understood that we needed to separate the actual content from presentation, and that the user should be the one to decide what fonts to use (if indeed any – the content could be spoken for blind people or used as input to a program, etc.). This useful feature is being lost by people who can’t abstract the content as being different from the presentation.
Be careful about your generalizations, Pat. I do not consider all content equivalent/fungible. That’s a massive overextension of the fact that much, and often all, of the presentation can in be separated out and reused.
We don’t redesign paperback books for every new novel; if anything, the layout and rendering of the contents may bear recognizable indications of a particular publishing house’s practices. And that’s a set of style decisions that authors are generally willing to trust to the publisher, though there may be specific exceptions in specific places in specific stories. TO THAT EXTENT, the style of the presentation is separable from the author’s writing, and that style is reusable, and reused, across multiple editions and multiple authors.
I must admit I also feel particularly strongly about this because I’ve watched what an overemphasis on style – because it was almost impossible to keep your fingers out of the style – has done to the web. The original vision of HTML was that it was semantic markup, and that based on those semantics the details of rendering could be chosen by the browser and the user. That would have been a huge boon to the reader, especially but not limited to the reader who needs adaptive technology. Instead, people began trying to tweak presentation details directly thru the HTML, and moving into interaction techniques which are certainly appropriate if you’re thinking of the browser as a “thin client” for interactive applications but which do little but get in the way of presentation of relatively static data.
If someone wants to write content that takes full advantage of that, more power to them; then the presentation is legitimately part of the content – though they’re giving up some audience and exposing themselves to greater risk that a bug in the experience turns off someone who was actually interested in what they’re trying to present. But it’s being used at times when it really does do nothing but Look Pretty and Get In The Way, and in ways that defeat the original goal of improving the reading experience.
Neither content OR presentation is fungible. But if they’re properly defined, it really should be possible to separate them – again, see the examples I cited earlier – so that the guy who’s using a screen-reader gets an experience that’s tailored to him, and the gal who’s using a palmtop gets an experience that’s tailored to her, and the guy who hates flashy interactions and just wants to Read The Stuff gets an experience that’s tailored to him, and the one who wants full background music and interactive 3D rendering of the starship’s plans and wants to check that the line of sight really did permit that shot gets an experience tailored to her, and…
And we can’t do any of that while we’re defending turf and arguing about how the marketeers abuse the terms no matter WHICH definition you’re using. The distinction between content and presentation, IF not overused and IF used with respect for the authors and designers and so on, is a useful one.
All I’m asking is that we stop feeding an argument which shouldn’t exist in the first place and focus on how to productively move forward.
As I said, there are good and bad presentations. Just as there is good and bad content. That’s not evidence that the distinction has no value; if anything I’d consider it evidence that they can be independent axes.
(And I’m not one of those who wastes time hating on Comic Sans. Yes, it’s overused and used inappropriately, but if you wanted to make your point you should have cited a font that is actually hard to read… and there are plenty of those. And yes, I have some printing experience as well as programming experience.)
Replace the word “content” with less interpretation-dependent “data”, and the situation clears up considerably.
(See also Data-Driven [whatever].)
Like the yin-yang symbol, in every data there is a hint of presentation (the form they are already stored in, being it plaintext, XML, or SQL table) and in every presentation is the hint of data (the nature of what is being presented, being it a time-series of integers, sound, sound+video, or text).
Perfect, Shaddack. Thank you.
After going over this thread and Tim Bray’s piece twice I get the feeling that most of you guys actually agree with each other - without noticing it.
I dont understand your connection between the concept of intellectual property and understanding creativity in economic and quantifiable terms.
Maybe I’m unusual in my thinking in that I deal with the phases of creating a work and any economic potential of the work completely separately. I can ask myself “how many songs can I write/record/produce in X amount of time?” and quantify that, I can ask myself “How many units do I think this can sell and can I recoup my production investment?” or the dreaded “will my clients pay on time for the creative work I did for them?”. Those are distinctly economic questions but I don’t see that they are automatically related to “do I feel inspired to create today?”
Perhaps you mean in the sense that “If I don’t create some salable works today I can’t make rent and thus must efficiently monetize my creative output”? Of course we can understand salable in the sense of something people might want to buy or something which will attract eyeballs for advertisers. By this view I can understand your comment regarding fungibility.
Paraphrasing Robert Solow:
Everything reminds the BoingBong editors of intellectual property. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the blog.
Intellectual property is generally about economic prerogatives. In principle, to create an incentive to desirable ends such as profit or progress, and in practice a monopoly on economically-salient rights. This encourages people to think of creative works in economic terms – hence, “content”. “Product” is an earlier term referring to artwork that means much the same thing in this sort of context, but which seems to have gone out of style.
Good illustration of the fact that “content” is being interpreted by different people to mean very different things. Make sure you know which meaning the speaker intends before taking offense.
