WINTER OF OUR CONTENT

Dick Pountain/29 October 1996/PC PRO

Business loves buzzwords, and the computer business being no exception, our very latest buzzword is 'content'. As an aside, most buzzwords are perfectly meaningful, abstract terms that become appropriated by engineers (or similar specialists) and given a precise but narrower meaning within their speciality - think of 'interface' or 'loop' and what they mean to programmers. Then the marketing department, as a desperate attempt to get a grip on what exactly it is selling, re-appropriates these terms and widens their meanings out again, severing in the process any remaining relationship to reality - as in "he and I don't interface awfully well but I try to keep him in the loop".

'Content' is following this classic trajectory right before our eyes. A dictionary definition of the word is "everything that is inside a container", and in a computing context that could be broadened to include "everything that passes through a communication channel" too. In other words content is all the stuff you do with a computer, rather than the stuff you do it with. It's what flows over the Internet rather than what the Internet is made of. 'Content' is a lovely example of buzzword formation because when reflated by the marketeers it can embrace the whole universe - like, wow, it's all just content man. All of a sudden we are hearing about content from all sides. Usually it's 'rich content' that someone is about to bestow upon us (no-one is interesting in 'poor' content of course) as for example Microsoft promises with its recently re-launched MSN.

Two aspects of content are particularly significant at the moment, namely who is legally responsible for it, and who gets to own it. The first aspect is of course crucial to the whole debate about pornography on the net, since it seems most of the world's governments would like to make ISPs responsible for that content, as the softest option for controlling smut-flow. The ISPs are at least partly justified in getting narked by this, pointing out that the telephone companies are not held responsible for the content of phone calls, nor are the postal services held responsible for the content of letters - in both those cases the offence lies with the sender, not the carrier, making obscene calls or mailing obscene materials. On the other hand, broadcasters and paper publishers like the publisher of this magazine ARE legally responsible for their content, so if I utter a sufficiently appalling, seditious, and libellous blasphemy in the next sentence, Guy and/or Derek and/or James could in theory wind up in jail (just kidding chaps). So the question reduces to whether the net is more like a post office or a magazine publisher. My guess is that it's actually like both. The Internet email function is clearly the electronic equivalent of mail - ie. it's point-to-point and needs to be private in order to function, and hence ISPs cannot be made responsible for its content. However the World Wide Web and Usenet are most definitely public media - even though they are many-to-one, seek-and-find relationships like people going to see a play, rather than broadcast ones like watching a TV show. You could argue that ISPs stand in the same relation to Web pages that printers, rather than publishers, do to magazine pages, but having once worked on Oz I know better than most that printers as well as publishers are sometimes held responsible for content.

The second important aspect of content is who owns it, and the answer to that will soon be "Rupert Murdoch and hardly anyone else." Content is actually shorthand for "everything that ordinary people are interested in, ie. excluding those boring chips and bits of wire it is delivered through" so it means art, sport, drama, news, information, history, politics, and, er, everything man. The problem with content is that it is only worth having when created by people with some talent (if you don't believe that, I sentence you to two weeks of random Web surfing as punishment.) The reason that's a problem lies in the biological nature of our world, in which talent is unevenly distributed. Of course it is almost heretical to express this view in some political circles, but express it I must. An egalitarian society is not one in which everyone has equal talent (to wish for which is not merely utopian but actively counterproductive) but rather one in which everyone has equal access to the products of talent and equal opportunity to develop those talents they have. I'm reminded of bitter arguments in the '60s with more anarchistically-inclined colleagues, over teaching science. They wanted to relate to their students with complete equality, whereas I believed it was an unequal relationship in one respect - I knew more about chemistry than the students did, and it was my job to remedy that imbalance.

If left to themselves Market Forces will just exacerbate the unevenness of the distribution of talent, hoarding the services of the most talented by offering them obscenely inflated rewards, and monopolising the delivery channels by outmanoeuvring the decent but naive custodians of public information. (If you think that I'm being paranoid there, just watch the unfolding saga of the new digital TV channels closely.) A doomed defence of the right to spread kiddy-porn will just distract people from the real issue, which is who owns the 'respectable' content, and how much are they going to charge us to see it.