In December 2023, Rockstar Games dropped the trailer for the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI. In just 24 hours, it was viewed over 93 million times! In the same period, a deluge of fan content was made about the trailer and it generated 192 million views, more than double that of the official trailer. Youtube’s 2024 Fandom Survey reports that 66% of Gen Z Americans agree that “they often spend more time watching content that discusses or unpacks something than the thing itself.” (Youtube Culture and Trend Report 2024)

Much like the discussions and dissections populating YouTube fan channels, ancient scholarly traditions have long embraced similar practices. This dialogue between the original text and the interpretation is exemplified, for instance, in the Midrash, the collection of rabbinic exegetical writings that interprets the written and oral Torah. Midrashim “discern value in texts, words, and letters, as potential revelatory spaces. They reimagine dominant narratival readings while crafting new ones to stand alongside—not replace—former readings. Midrash also asks questions of the text; sometimes it provides answers, sometimes it leaves the reader to answer the questions”. (Gafney 2017)

The Midrash represents a form of religious para-content. It adds, amends, interprets, extends the text’s meaning in service of a faith-based community. Contemporary para-content plays a similar role in providing insights, context and fan theories surrounding cultural objects of love, oftentimes crafting new parallel narratives and helping fans insert themselves into the work.

highly expressive YouTubers perform an emotional exegesis, punctuating and highlighting the high points and key bars of the song, much like the radio DJ of yore. TikTok is now flooded with reactions to the now unforgettable “Mustard” exclamation in Kendrick’s “TV Off,” affirming to fans that this moment is a pivotal moment in the song, validating that it is culturally resonant.

Para-content makers may be called “creators” or “influencers” but their actual role is that of “contextualizer”, the shapers of a cultural artifact’s horizon. The concept of “horizon” originates from “reception theory” in literary theory which posits that the meaning of a text is not a fixed property inscribed by its creator but a dynamic creation that unfolds at the juncture of the text and its audience.

American economist Tyler Cowen often uses the refrain “Context is that which is scarce” to describe that while art, information and content may be abundant, understanding—the ability to situate that information within a meaningful context—remains a rare and valuable resource. Para-content thrives precisely because it claims to provide this scarce context.

As content proliferates, the challenge isn’t accessing cultural works but understanding how they fit into larger narratives and why they matter. There is simply too much content, context makes salient which deserves our attention.

Your friend’s favorite line in a song became a hook for your own appreciation of it. Seeing how people reacted to a song’s pivotal moment at a house party made clear the song’s high point. Hearing a professor rave about a shot in a movie made you lean in when you watched it. Often, you developed your own unique appreciation for something which you then shared with peers. These are all great examples of organic contextualization. Yet this scarcity of context also illuminates the dangers of para-content. When contextualizers wield disproportionate influence, there is a risk that their exegesis becomes prescriptive rather than suggestive.

The tyranny of the contextualizer online is their constant and immovable presence between the reader and the text, the listener and the music, the viewer and the film. We now reach for context before engaging with the content. When my first interaction with a song is through TikTok reactions, I no longer encounter the work as it is, on my own. It comes with context juxtaposed, pre-packaged. This removes the public’s ability to construct, even if for a moment, their own unique horizons.

I find it tremendously hopeful that “Stoner” is thriving in a world in which capitalist energies are so hellbent on distracting us from the necessary anguish of our inner lives. “Stoner” argues that we are measured ultimately by our capacity to face the truth of who we are in private moments, not by the burnishing of our public selves.

The story of his life is not a neat crescendo of industry and triumph, but something more akin to our own lives: a muddle of desires and inhibitions and compromises.

The deepest lesson of “Stoner” is this: What makes a life heroic is the quality of attention paid to it.

Americans worship athletes and moguls and movie stars, those who possess the glittering gifts we equate with worth and happiness. The stories that flash across our screens tend to be paeans to reckless ambition.

It’s the staggering acceleration of our intellectual and emotional metabolisms: our hunger for sensation and narcissistic reward, our readiness to privilege action over contemplation. And, most of all, our desperate compulsion to be known by the world rather than seeking to know ourselves.

The emergence of a robust advertising culture reinforced the notion that Americans were more or less always on stage and thus in constant need of suitable costumes and props.

Consider our nightly parade of prime-time talent shows and ginned-up documentaries in which chefs and pawn brokers and bored housewives reinvent their private lives as theater.

If you want to be among those who count, and you don’t happen to be endowed with divine talents or a royal lineage, well then, make some noise. Put your wit — or your craft projects or your rants or your pranks — on public display.

Our most profound acts of virtue and vice, of heroism and villainy, will be known by only those closest to us and forgotten soon enough. Even our deepest feelings will, for the most part, lay concealed within the vault of our hearts. Much of the reason we construct garish fantasies of fame is to distract ourselves from these painful truths. We confess so much to so many, as if by these disclosures we might escape the terror of confronting our hidden selves.

revelation is triggered by literature. The novel is notable as art because it places such profound faith in art.