There was the egg at the start. An Instagram account named @world record egg released a stock photo of a basic brown chicken egg in January 2019 and began a campaign to garner the shot more likes than any other internet image. At the time, the record was held by an Instagram photo of Kylie Jenner's kid, Stormi, which had over eighteen million likes. The egg's like count soared beyond thirty million in just 10 days. With almost fifty-five million copies sold, it remains at the top of the list to this day. The account's founders, who worked in advertising, then joined up with Hulu for a mental-health PSA in which the egg "cracked" due to social media demands. The arc of the egg was The acme of a specific sort of modern Internet success: build up a large enough audience around something—anything—and sell it to someone.


The Instagram egg, according to Kate Eichhorn, a media historian and lecturer at the New School, represents what we call "content," a ubiquitous but difficult-to-define term. In her latest book, "Content," which is part of M.I.T. Press's "Essential Knowledge" series of pithy monographs, Eichhorn defines content as digital stuff that "may circulate merely for the sake of circulating." To put it another way, such information is designed to be vacuous in order to flow across digital domains. "Genre, medium, and format are minor concerns, and they appear to vanish totally in some cases." A single work of intellectual property may spawn a slew of podcast, documentary, and miniseries spinoffs. Single episodes of streaming-service TV can last up to an hour and a half. Paintings by visual artists are shared on social media accompanying their holiday images in the style of influencers All are part of the "content industry," as Eichhorn refers to it, which has expanded to include almost everything we consume online. "Content is part of a single and indistinguishable flow," Eichhorn says, evoking the overwhelming stream of text, music, and video that floods our feeds.


Several publications have attempted to assess how the Internet influences us and what we should do about it throughout the last decade. "The Filter Bubble," a 2011 piece by Eli Pariser, illustrated the homogenizing impacts of digital feeds early on. Jaron Lanier, a pioneering technologist, released a book called "Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now" when Facebook and its ilk become much more ubiquitous (2018). "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," written by Shoshana Zuboff and released in the United States in 2019, depicted the structural difficulties of huge data absorption. Eichhorn's work is part of a new wave of books that are focusing more directly on the user experience, diagnosing the increasingly problematic interaction between the lone person and the virtual throng.



User-generated content used to be the foundation of the Internet. Ordinary people, driven purely by the joy of free communication, would take advantage of the Web's low publication barrier to post remarkable things. We now know it did not go as planned. Monetized material replaced user-generated GeoCities pages or blogs. In the early 2000s, Google began selling advertisements and allowing other Web sites to readily include its advertising modules, making the Internet more searchable. Today, the majority of the Internet is still based on this economic model. The capacity of material to attract attention, to get eyeballs on adverts, rather than the worth of the content itself, is what generates revenue Most items are purchased and sold through large firms such as Google and Facebook. The advent of social networks in the twenty-first century only strengthened this approach. Our digital publishing shifted to a few all-encompassing sites that increasingly depended on algorithmic feeds. Users gained more visibility but lost agency as a result. We created stuff for free, and Facebook profited from it.


The phrase "clickbait" has long been used to describe deceptive, superficial web publications that exist solely to sell advertisements. However, on today's Internet, the word might refer to anything from unlabeled adverts on an influencer's Instagram profile to pseudonymous pop songs created to fool the Spotify algorithm. Eichhorn used the phrase "content capital"—a play on Pierre Bourdieu's "cultural capital"—to illustrate how an artist's ability to publish online may influence the success, or even existence, of their work. Whereas "cultural capital" refers to how certain preferences and points of reference bestow status, "content capital" refers to the ability to create the type of auxiliary material that the Internet thrives on. Because social media attracts so much attention, the most straightforward The key to success is to have a sizable internet following. "Cultural producers who previously focused on writing books, producing films, or creating art must now spend significant time producing (or paying someone else to generate) information about themselves and their work," argues Eichhorn. On TikTok, celebrities document their regular activities. On Twitter, journalists spew inane opinions. Rupi Kaur, the best-selling Instapoet, shares reels and images of her typewritten poetry on her website. The daily drive to generate supplementary content—memes, selfies, shitposts—to fill an infinite hole has ensnared them all.


“The internet isn't What you're thinking that It Is” begins as a negative critique of on-line life, notably as seen from the attitude of domain, associate degree trade that's one in all its noncontinuous victims. however the book’s half progresses into deeper philosophical inquiries. instead of a tool, the net would possibly best be seen as a “living system,” Smith writes. it's the fulfillment of a centuries-old human aspiration toward interconnectivity—albeit a dissatisfactory one. Smith recounts the story of the French person Jules Allix, who, within the mid-nineteenth century, popularized a sort of organic net created out of snails. maybe drawing upon the MD Franz Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism,” that postulated the existence of a universal magnetic attraction connecting living things, it absolutely was predicated upon the thought that any 2 snails that had copulated remained connected across nice distances. The technology—a telegraph-like device that used snails to supposedly send messages—was a failure, however the dream of fast, wireless communication remained till humanity achieved it, maybe to our own harm.



Smith hunts for the foremost effective figure for the net, a thought that encompasses quite the vacuity of “content” and therefore the addictiveness of the “attention economy.” Is it sort of a postcoital-snail telegraph? Or sort of a Renaissance-era wheel device that allowed readers to browse multiple books at once? Or maybe sort of a loom that weaves along souls? He doesn’t quite land on a solution, although he ends by recognizing that the interface of the net, and therefore the keyboard that provides him access to that, is a smaller amount associate degree external device than associate degree extension of his questing mind. to know the networked self, we tend to should initial perceive the self, that may be a incessant endeavor. the last word drawback of the net would possibly stem not from the separate technology however from the Frankensteinian manner during which humanity’s invention has exceeded our own capacities. In a sense, the Instagram egg has nevertheless to completely hatch.