I think I finally figured out what I hate so much about calling all creative work "content" - it's that it reduces everything to real estate for advertising
I only call my work content when I'm finishing my lunch break with Kevin when he's also working for home and tell him and I'm off to the content mines.
Call it content and I call you a consumer, not a customer.
There is a great thing in the middle called content design, which is (or should be) user-centred.
The word "content" feels like such a poisonous well to me. Brings an awful taste to a medium of art, heart and soul. It boils it down to a base level of "consume, this is just a vehicle" for whatever other thing is underneath.
Art being commodified is already grating; this is worse.
Content is what we call communicative and creative artifacts considered purely for their utility in the attention economy.
Patrick H Willems on YouTube has a great video about his hatred for “content”, particularly as applied to film.
Twenty years ago as papers were in their death spasms a buzz phrase was the commodification of content. It didn’t matter how good your writers were or how much you spend on background research. In the edit it was just widgets for the internet.
"Content" is the insulation stuffed inside the advertising walls.