I’ve been eagerly awaiting today since January 19th. That was when I’d had a brief Twitter conversation with my friend Jonathan Mann about the word “content.” It was Twitter, so brief is an understatement, but I was already familiar with Jonathan’s position on the word. I’d shared his perspective just a year ago. In our twitter conversation, Jonathan told me he’d be releasing a video on the subject, and today that tweet became a reality.

You may know of Jonathan’s work. He creates a song a day, and some of his videos have gone viral. I encourage you to watch his video, “You Are Not A Content Creator.” It’s only a few minutes long, and it may resonate with you.

Jonathan makes a compelling case against “content.” It’s a word that comes to us from the money men who make possible most of the work creative people do. It’s a word that is so bland, it should be wearing Dockers and rationalizing moving out of the city. Worse, it seems to shortchange the time, effort, and artistry people like Jonathan and others put into their work.

Content is a whitewash that robs its users of the ability to distinguish between or even describe individual works of creativity. In the world of content, an illustration is no longer an illustration. It just is.

Maybe. Or Maybe it’s more than that. Maybe content is a word that recognizes that what we “create” today is more diverse than it may ever have been before. Maybe it recognizes that a person with a Twitter account is creating just as much as a columnist or a novelist. Maybe it recognizes that a person who creates a series of gifs and posts that to Tumblr is the author of a creative output for which we simply don’t have an accurate title, yet, and maybe the word does even more than that.

Let’s consider that person who creates a series of gifs and posts it to Tumblr. Which is the creative output, the gif, the Tumblr post, or both? It’s hard to tell. We’ve reached a point where the lines have blurred so far they create a Moiré pattern. Perhaps content gives us the ability to manage all the new types of creativity that have flourished in the Internet age.

Content also recognizes the malleability of creative endeavors like Jonathan’s. Jonathan’s output is equal parts song and video. In fact, he recently took many of his Song A Day songs and re-recorded them to release as an album, and then re-released the songs with new videos! As his audience, we welcome that because as content, we know that the final form of the creativity isn’t what matters, it is the creativity itself, the content of the output.

By equalizing all creative output, content removes our prejudices of what creative work is and allows us to see it as anything. With art, we always found ourselves wrestling with the idea, “What is art?” With content, it’s as though the question becomes “What isn’t content?”

Let’s return to the person who creates a series of gifs and posts it to Tumblr. That person has something in common with Jonathan. Both are making use of several different skills in creating their work. Jonathan’s talents as a singer/songwriter are immediately apparent, but what gets less recognition is the fact that Jonathan often shoots his own videos, edits them, sometimes creates illustrations for them, and sometimes animates those illustrations. A Song A Day piece is an amalgam of different arts, all practiced by Jonathan in the creation of each project.

Many of today’s most creative people are as self-sufficient as Jonathan and have a creativity that flourishes across many different media, a ground cover across the arts. Once upon a time, we might have called such people “multimedia artists” or simply slapped a series of slashes on their titles as they added skills to their repertoire, which was a respectful if inelegant way to deal with the fact that computers have allowed our most creative people to become one-stop shops, capable of creating whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want.

If content allows us a more liberal way of recognizing the work of people like Jonathan, content creator gives us a new way of describing such polymaths. It’s a term that recognizes the breadth of talents and skills employed by creative people, today. Not every artist, singer, novelist, sculptor or dancer needs to cloak themselves in term. There’s nothing wrong with working in just one discipline, honing just one skill to perfection, but artists working in many different areas should not sell themselves short.

Content. Content creator. Ugh. I can see those words just phoning it in. They seem as unremarkable as a Bush Presidency. They certainly don’t get the heart beating like artist, but we have no better terminology for helping us discuss the overwhelming and diverse creative output by which we’ve found ourselves surrounded since the computer and the Internet gave us a Cambrian Explosion of creativity. So why not just embrace it?

I hope you enjoyed this content.