Close Shaves with Content

On social media, there's always something new to argue about. This January 13th, that temporary object of controversy — designed to infuriate and then be forgotten — was an advertisement for men's shaving razors, released by the company Gillette. The ad, under the sign of #MeToo, took aim at "toxic masculinity." In its first half, it depicted the problem: how men and boys, under pressure to prove their machismo, hurt themselves and others. They stifle their tears, bully their peers, and sexually harass their female colleagues. In its second half, it depicted the solution: how a few brave men, inspired by #MeToo, now reject such destructive behavior. They chide their friends for catcalling women, devote attention to their daughters, and break up fights between teenage boys. They shop Gillette.1

The ad got people talking — or, more properly, typing. Feminists argued with feminists about whether its message was sufficiently radical; men's rights activists posted images of themselves flushing Gillette products down the toilet; canny cynics questioned the company's motives. But no matter what social media users said, whether they praised or denigrated Gillette, they served the company's agenda. Gillette's aim, it would seem, was to game the system of Facebook's new algorithm. One year prior, on January 11, 2018, Facebook had announced that it would begin to privilege content which inspired "meaningful engagement" — mostly, content that inspired comments.2 Under the new system, branded content suffered. But a controversial ad like Gillette's was designed to buck that trend. With each new comment that they wrote, Facebook users propelled the ad, and the brand's name, to the top of people's newsfeeds.

Material like the Gillette ad — ephemera designed for dissemination on social media, including listicles, "hot takes," or how to videos — is neither "art" nor "literature." It bears no common name but "content." Some such content is "user-generated," as web 2.0 pundits predicted. But most is produced by advertisers or professional outlets.3 Today, we all face the choice that content compels: to engage or not to engage. Engagement can mean weighing in on matters of public import and contributing to progressive social movements: announcing, for example, one's own #MeToo story. It can also mean abetting a corporate machine that exacerbates inequality, erodes democracy and privacy, and increases the cultural quotient of narcissistic inanity. Each "#MeToo" typed made a cent for some most-likely-male CEO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0

Literary authors, meanwhile, face an analogous set of choices. At every stage of the writing process, from cogitation to publicity, they must decide whether and how to interact with ephemera like the Gillette ad. On one level, they must consider such ephemera as a major new cultural force, like globalization or the gig economy, on which they might comment. On another, they must consider it as a competitor for public attention, like TV or film, on whose energies they might draw. Should they create viral media? Should they write work that emulates its appeal? Today, every widely read piece of writing, whether op-ed or novel, will reach much of its audience by way of social media material. Many will embody the aesthetics necessary to do so. For literary critics, the upshot is this: to understand literary writing's value — or lack thereof — we must consider its enmeshment with "content."

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"Content" has long referred, generally, to anything conveyed by a medium or form. Since around 2008, people have used the word more specifically to refer to digital media, with a vaguely pejorative connotation.4 "Content" suggests entertainment conceived of as a byproduct or afterthought, designed to do little more than facilitate some technical or economic process, like advertising or data collection. Such mere filler entertainment, of course, predates the web 2.0 era. Think of tabloids, infomercials, or much that's on daytime TV. But today it emerges in new and newly ubiquitous digital forms. Articles about radical self-experiments ("I only drank Soylent for a week!") and reports of unlikely animal friendships ("This puppy and this iguana...") infiltrate every free minute of the day.

Today's content has much in common with its pre-digital precursors. But it also pursues a unique set of aims. Pre-internet filler — in the form, say, of the infomercial or tabloid story — was mainly designed to compel "consumption," or viewing. It profited most directly by inspiring subscriptions, pushing products, or attracting attention to advertisements. Internet and web 2.0 era content does the same. But it also profits much more directly by compelling "prosumption," or self-expression.5 Post circa 2008, that mostly means "shares," "comments," and "likes" on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Each piece of content approaches the user as a potential fashion statement: "What would this look like on me?"

Literary authors, like most, consume content. But they also create content and publicize their work through the content machine. Still, critics have yet to put the precise question: how has content's rise affected literary writing? One answer is this: literature converges with content. English language authors feed, in different ways, off content's infectiousness. Many, like George Saunders, Teju Cole, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, or Ali Smith, write novels or poems that imitate content aesthetics. Wittingly or not, they adopt the tactics through which popular content genres appeal. Others take more direct and deliberate advantage of the megaphonic, quasi-textual platform that content provides. In this way, authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Roxane Gay, or Ta-Nehisi Coates have become household names.

These developments contribute to a more general trend: a collapsing of high and low literary culture. Critics like Rachel Greenwald Smith and Dan Sinykin have shown that contemporary literary writing is more likely to "compromise" (Smith's word) with the demands of the marketplace, thanks in part to the publishing industry's corporate conglomeration (on which Sinykin focuses). The internet, other contributors to this cluster now show, further erodes the high-low divide. Seth Perlow shows how Rupi Kaur, the popular Instagram poet cum content creator, assumes the mantle of the "literary"; Christian Howard shows how authors of "Twitterature" do the same. Kinohi Nishikawa demonstrates that Vine reviewers have played key roles in determining the status of literary texts.

In this world of democratizing culture, is it the literary critic's job to separate the wheat from the chaff? (Weird Twitter from Twitterature, Patricia Lockwood from Rupi Kaur)? Literary scholars have long disavowed aesthetic judgment. We critique the idea of "taste," even as we cull most of our canon from the Booker Prize or New York Times Book Review. We do, however, overtly embrace the task of judging works on more scholarly grounds, by considering their social and political enmeshments and operations. When it comes to internet-era writing, we would be remiss to abjure, if not the first, then certainly the second type of judgment. In the social media era, Derrida's proclamation that il n'y a pas de hors-texte takes on new meaning. Every user is an amateur author or artist with an expanded audience. Written expressions matter as much if not more than they ever have, and literary critics are well positioned to assess their stakes.

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What kinds of assessments might we make? Consider, for example, George Saunders's writing. In recent years, Saunders has written literary work that not only imitates, but also ethically and aesthetically improves upon content genres. In this way, he has shown — however unconsciously — that literary writing and content are not wholly incompatible.

Saunders draws most on one of the most popular and quintessential content genres. I call it the "uplifting anecdote." Uplifting anecdotes are short, true, heartwarming stories (or groups of stories) à la Reshareworthy's "Incredible Dog Who Saved the Life of a Newborn Baby Has Lasting Legacy" or Bored Panda's "30 Suicide Survivors Share How Happy They Finally Are." Generally, they are sentimental, in the pejorative, post-1900 sense of the word. More particularly, they aim to evoke an emotion that — as Jill Abramson has quipped — as yet has no name: "the feeling of having one's faith in humanity restored."6 Years of documented engagement with the genre have left their mark on Saunders's work.7 Many of his post-2005 stories have plotlines that resemble uplifting anecdotes (boy saves girl from rapist, boy saves man from suicide, etc.). His Lincoln in the Bardo was inspired by a nineteenth century iteration of the genre: a news story describing Lincoln's response to his son Willie's death.

Uplifting anecdotes, of course, are not new; we've seen them on TV ads ("...Priceless") and in newspapers and magazines ("Kidnapped boy found!"). Nor do they exist exclusively as social media content. As social media content, however, they exhibit marked tendencies. Thanks to their pursuit of "prosumption," they promote a questionable ethics, reducing all moral action to aesthetic self-expression. Consider a comparison between two types of sentimental media, a Save the Children ad and an uplifting anecdote: the Independent's "Mexican Bakers Make Pan Dulce For Hundreds of Hurricane Harvey Victims." Because the Save the Children ad aims to inspire real action, it focuses on suffering: to draw donations, it pans over images of emaciated toddlers. Because the uplifting anecdote aims first and foremost to inspire digital self-expression, it focuses less on suffering than on the heroic act through which that suffering is alleviated; that act is then equated with the "prosumption" that the content courts. Half of the "Pan Dulce" article describes the response that the story is already inspiring on Facebook and Twitter. The heartwarming act, here, is not so much the bakers' generosity as its social media celebration, in which the reader can now easily join.

Uplifting anecdotes, in this way, typically describe heroic acts that mirror the primarily aesthetic responses that they aim to compel. Many describe the act by which some person (or animal) not traditionally considered to be beautiful or attractive is presented or seen as such (e.g. "Teen Bullied for Her Incredibly Dark Skin Color Becomes a Model, Takes the Internet By Storm"). Audiences can participate in the acts of aesthetic recognition that such anecdotes describe by sharing, liking, or commenting on the content. The problematic assumption in play is that one is welcomed into the community of worthwhile persons by being deemed an appropriate candidate for sexual objectification.8 It's an idea that's gaining traction among "incels" and other erotic activists.

Saunders's work improves the uplifting anecdote by resisting its logic of prosumption. Lincoln in the Bardo, for example, can be read not only as a loose social media allegory, but also as a reflection on, and revision of, the content genre. The novel takes place in a limbo-like setting, where virtual beings — neither dead nor alive — commune through time and space. They speak in short, status-update-style monologues, many of which resemble uplifting anecdotes. The novel's two protagonists, Hans Vollmann and Roger Bevins, open the book by relating tales of amorous loss and gain, to be repeated throughout. Vollmann tells us how, after treating his much younger wife with unusual kindness, he earned her attraction and love. Bevins tells us how, after years of hiding his homosexuality, he was embraced by a male lover, who, though he eventually left Bevins, did so only to evade social risk.

As the novel reaches its climax, however, Bevins and Vollmann's anecdotes change. Previously, both, like the "Pan Dulce" or "Teen Model" stories, had focused on happy acts of ethical and erotic recognition — the young wife's acceptance of Vollmann, the young lover's acceptance of Bevins. Now, the stories focus more, like the Save the Children ad, on suffering. Vollmann's wife, we learn, went on, after Vollmann died, to meet a man whom she loved more — passing through the Bardo, she thanked Vollmann for inadvertently setting her along that path. Bevins's lover, meanwhile, did not leave him out of personal caution; rather, he left him for a younger and more attractive man. The scene during which we learn these facts, like any uplifting anecdote, is unabashedly sentimental. But it is also ethically forceful. It inspires the sort of self-forgetting dismay that only confrontations with unredeemed loss, rather than uplift, can compel.

The Gillette ad, too, is an uplifting anecdote — or, more properly, a tapestry of them. To show how the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, the ad incorporates snippets of recognizable viral content of the past few years: widely shared smartphone videos of a man chastising some teenage bullies, a father encouraging his daughter to say "I am strong." The ad's recent sequel conforms still more exactly to the genre's parameters (a father helps his trans son shave for the first time). The message here, again, is not the Save the Children ad's "please give." Rather, it is the uplifting anecdote's "please share." Saunders's own viral content is a counterpoint. Throughout the past few years, he's produced a number of short, viral pieces — a crowd campaign, a graduation speech à la "This is Water," stories about Bill Clinton and Donald Trump — sufficiently saccharine to make some literary critics' stomachs turn. All, however, unlike the typical, uplifting anecdote, expose the uncomfortable fact of unrectified suffering. Call Saunders's increasingly accessible writing middlebrow. That's not a charge with which he seems concerned. Like many contemporary authors, he's just creating good content.

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Tess McNulty is a PhD candidate at Harvard working on a dissertation on contemporary literature and digital "content." Her writing has appeared in New Literary History, JML, Public Books, and LARB. 

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Keywords: Content, Social Media, Web 2.0, Prosumption, George Saunders

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