Content

Media historian Eichhorn (The End of Forgetting) lays out what content is, what it’s used for, and where it’s headed in this concise survey. “Like it or not, content has become an integral part of our lives,” she writes, defining the content industry as one that “exists only in parasitical relationship to other industries, from marketing and publishing to education and entertainment.” She considers the industries that have been bolstered by the rise of digital content, notably through content farms that pay paltry wages for vast quantities of poorly written articles that only exist to generate revenue “from AdSense placements.” She also digs into the culture of fake news and clickbait (best explained as a result of the content business’s appetite for quantity over quality) and makes the unsurprising declaration that the content industry has had negative effects on journalism and the publishing industry (“Content with no journalistic integrity at all has increasingly come to be viewed as journalism”). Eichhorn keeps things tight and accessible as she spotlights the dark and damaging aspects of content: even given all the negative effects and the rise of “content resisters” who favor old mediums, she writes, the industry will only continue to thrive. This is a fine introduction for readers curious about how much of what’s online came to be there. (May)