Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

This is the summer to diss content

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Is it too late to rant loud enough to rid the communication landscape of the term "content"? Yes, it probably is.

In fact, it probably was in 2009, when Garrison Keillor responded to a question about how he creates "content" for A Prairie Home Companion:

I sure wish we could get rid of that word 'content' to refer to writing, photography, drawing, and design online. The very word breathes indifference—why would one bother about the quality of work when it's referred to as 'content'? … I loathe the word. It's like referring to Omaha [Beach] as a development.

Of course, I critizize "content" from my uncomfortable position as a slickster who edits an ezine called ContentWise.

As a writer for a leading "custom content" company, who has no better idea of what to call it. How else do you refer to all manner of print, online and video. Communication stuff?

And as a silly man who is actually looking forward to attending an event in September called Content Marketing World—in Cleveland, where they used to make real stuff, like steel.

Now, in Cleveland, they make content. Or they strategize about making content. Or they convene about strategizing about making content. How can this possibly be a positive development for the country?

The content has left the barn on this one, I know.

But that doesn't mean we have to be content about it.

Dumb Question: What’s up with all the tattoos?

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I had so much luck with "crowdsourcing" last week—I received an education in response to a question about search engine optimization—that it occurred to me to put to the Boots brethren a few questions that have been nagging me for years, but to which I can't find any answers.

The questions aren't communication-related, because as everybody knows, I know everything there is to know about that.

The questions also seem kind of basic on their face, and maybe even dumb. But why can't I find satisfying answers?

Today, we'll commence Dumb Question Week at Writing Boots. I'll pose one question per day—today, tomorrow and Thursday. I'll hope to get answers from you, and if I get no answers, I suppose that'll be an insight of its own.

And in case you'd like to send me your own Dumb Questions for some crowdsourcing help, e-mail them to me at dmurrayil at earthlink dot net, and I'll post them (along with my own stabs at their answers) on Friday.

But first things first:

Dumb Question Number One: What's up with all the tattoos?

When I was a boy, tattoos were strictly for truck drivers and sailors.

I wasn't a boy that long ago!

Slide_4555_63476_large Now, it seems everybody under 40 has a tattoo, along with a lot of people over 40, including my wife! And we won't even get into piercings, except to remember that Garrison Keillor once said that kids today look like they fell face-first into a tackle box. (And my 80-something dad once confessed that when a waiter or waitress came to the table with a pierced nose or lip, "I just can't help it. I think of cannibals.")

Ten years ago we might have called this body decoration a fad. No such thing. In a few years we're going to have nursing homes chock full very nice, little old doddering tattoo-covered ladies.

My question: In a society that generally seems to make even the most inevitable change with the alacrity of molasses—just ask gays in the military—how does such a basic social more transform itself, apparently permanently, over a decade or two?

In short: What's up with all the tattoos?

When loneliness was king

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Management consultant Tom Peters interviewed Prairie Home Companion host and writer Garrison Keillor for his website. Among the many good things Keillor said:

I remember when I started out writing for the New Yorker I was living in a farmhouse in central Minnesota, because it was so cheap. It really removed a lot of the pressure of having to sell-sell-sell. I loved it there. I was desperately lonely, but that's not a bad thing.

I was sitting in a room upstairs at a desk that was a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood across two used file cabinets, looking at an Underwood typewriter, and typing on yellow paper. It was a contemplative life that had great, deep pleasure. I wouldn't know how to recover it today.

This, for me, is how the world has changed, that a man sits at a desk in utter silence, and the phone line is simply the phone line. Somebody calls, and you don't have to answer it. You sit in silence, and hours pass and you tap-tap-tap-tap at a typewriter. I will never, ever recover that life. It's gone forever.