Are We Content?
The news that scientists in
Scotland have successfully cloned an adult female sheep, bringing forth a young
female named Dolly, has raised questions of considerable public urgency, the
most troubling of which in my own mind is: Dolly? The cells from which Dolly
was cloned, it turns out, were taken from a sheep's ample mammary glands. The
Scottish embryologist who obtained the cells was reminded of the full-figured
country singer Dolly Parton. Such are the improbable byways of on the wintry
Caledonian moors.
A more
substantial issue raised by the advent of cloning (itself from the Greek
klon , meaning "twig" or "branch") is, of course, the possibility that
commerce in the very stuff of which we're made will ultimately turn humanity
into merchandise, our genesis controlled by some mutant form of agribusiness.
"Turning People Into Product" was the headline above a New York Times
commentary by Brent Staples that evoked, among other things, the
science-fictional prospect of "the wholesale manufacture of synthetic human
beings."
The word was apt. Product in this collective sense,
used without an article, has none of the quantitative, formative, or even
poetic associations that the word had otherwise acquired--as in "gross national
product," "a product of Groton and Harvard," or "the fruit and product of his
labors past" (Dryden). It is used, rather, as a white slaver might speak of
"flesh."
Product as a generic mercantile term for "marketable commodity" has been
around for years, but it seems to have first acquired prominence as jargon--and
specifically as a term with a somewhat off-putting aroma--in the recording
industry during the 1960s. In his book Rock Gold: The Music
Millionaires , George Tremlett observes that "people in the music business
always talk about [music] with one word that you hardly ever see mentioned in
the popular press: Product . Sound recordings may be technically superb,
with all the benefits of the latest digital electronics, but it's only 'good'
Product, 'live' Product, or 'strong' Product if it sells. Otherwise it's 'dead'
Product."
Product has since come to encompass all aspects
of the entertainment world, and the cynicism it once embodied is today only
occasionally highlighted by means of its presentation in quotation marks.
Employed matter-of-factly, even unself-consciously, product is perhaps
now found most often in connection with the motion-picture industry. "This
year's nominees," wrote one newspaper critic recently, after noting that a
single big-studio movie was in the running for an Oscar for best picture,
"represent a triumph of independent films over Hollywood product." Another
critic says of the director Quentin Tarantino, "He has been acclaimed for some
of the most hollow product ever to pass itself off as art."
Product in the entertainment-industry sense used above occupies a
distinct class within the phylum content . Whereas product is, for
the most part, a commodity that exists or is envisaged, content , in its
most advanced and today most widely used sense, means the totality of all
substance (in particular, commercially viable substance) that can be made
available through the various communications and information media: not just
movies, TV shows, and music but also software, games, sports, news,
directories, advertising, and everything online--now and in the future.
When content is used this way, both the specific
source or substance and its medium of transmission are irrelevant to its
definition, much as source and medium of transmission are irrelevant to a
definition of the word heat . In a recent e-mail communication, the
Random House editor Jesse T. Sheidlower writes:
I added this to the
forthcoming edition of Random House Webster's College Dictionary , but it
took a tremendous amount of effort to define. We argued about what it really
means and sent drafts back and forth for about a week before we arrived at the
following definition which (like all definitions that one struggles with) looks
perfectly innocuous and simple: "content n. ... substantive information or
creative material viewed in contrast to its actual or potential manner of
presentation."
This is
the meaning of content in the cloying phrase "content is king," the
mantra repeated endlessly by Bill Gates and other multimedia conquistadors.
"The dominant corporations are bigger than ever and have more control than
ever," the media critic and former Washington Post national editor Ben
Bagdikian said recently in a newspaper interview. "What they are aiming
for--and have gone a long way toward achieving--is to control the origination
of content and the natural delivery system."
The same content appears in the term content
provider . Although at first used to designate corporations such as Time
Warner, Disney, and Microsoft--which scour the universe for matériel to give
life and purpose to their distribution networks--the term has been trickling
down to apply to individuals. "We like to think of ourselves as content
providers," I heard a cleric say recently about his line of work, a comment
that I took to be knowingly ironic but which could also have been a sincere and
pathetic attempt to be with it. (Church talk presents this problem often.) The
composer and multimedia performer Laurie Anderson now calls herself a content
provider:
At first, I thought,
"That's one of the grossest things I've ever heard." And then I thought about
it, and I go, "Well, that's not really horrible." In fact, I eventually started
to like it. Every time I renew my passport--"content provider," I put that
right in.
The big issue with content
is, of course: Who owns it? Information is the resource-extractive industry of
the next century, and the concept of intellectual property --a term that
dates back 150 years--comes up when individuals or companies assert a
particular claim and embody it in the form of copyrights, trademarks, and
patents. Intellectual property refers, basically, to nontangible
creative product and, like a rising sea, it seems to cover new territory with
every passing year. The National Basketball Association has famously sought to
trademark the scores of its games. Harley-Davidson has sought to trademark the
rumble of its motorcycles. Patents can even be held on the genetic blueprints
of various forms of life.
In biotechnology, as in
telecommunications, intellectual-property law remains at an embryonic stage.
But it is not premature to begin thinking of Dolly's ovine progenitor not so
much as a sheep--or even as product--but, in some sense, as content. In her
clone's eyes, of course, she will always be a significant udder.
