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The Age of Para-Content
The Age of Para-Content
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.
#culture#trends#internet#social media#business/models#blogging#influencers#marketing#taste#themes#YouTube
·taste101.substack.com·
The Age of Para-Content
Is YouTube Infrastructure? – Pixel Envy
Is YouTube Infrastructure? – Pixel Envy
video is special. It is cumbersome; it requires complex arrangements to serve it efficiently and reliably. But some of those barriers are becoming less foreboding, giving us more places to post and watch videos. It was not so long ago that YouTube was the only name in general-purpose video hosting. Yet you can now publish to most any social network. Instagram and TikTok host a different type of video but, for lots of people, they are just as relevant as YouTube. Alternatives like Rumble and X are appearing for the perpetually aggrieved set who are convinced their broadcasts would be censored elsewhere. Yet there is nothing else quite like YouTube.
#internet#platforms#youtube#media#social media#video
·pxlnv.com·
Is YouTube Infrastructure? – Pixel Envy
Why Creators Have Stopped Editing Their Content
Why Creators Have Stopped Editing Their Content

AI Summary: A new trend is emerging among content creators on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, where they are moving away from heavily edited videos to more raw, unedited content. This shift is driven by audience fatigue with overstimulating, retention-edited videos and a desire for more authentic, relatable content. Creators like Dan Hentschel and Sam Sulek have gained large followings by posting unedited videos, finding that this approach saves time, money, and resonates better with viewers. The trend is seen as a reaction to the oversaturation of highly produced content, with even top creators like MrBeast acknowledging the benefits of a more stripped-down approach. Industry experts and creators alike report that unedited content often outperforms edited videos in terms of views and engagement, as it creates a sense of intimacy and authenticity that audiences crave in the current social media landscape.

See also [[companionship content]]

WHEN DAN HENTSCHEL, a 28-year-old comedic YouTuber, goes to make a video, he props his phone up on the dashboard of his car, talks for up to 40 minutes uninterrupted, and posts it.
social media users are getting fatigued by the overstimulating, brain-rot style of videos, where graphics and sounds appear every 1.5 seconds. No-edit creators, he says, are building deeper relationships with their followers.
“The no-edit format feels more intimate. It’s as if you’re hanging out with your friend at the gym, going for a car ride, or just hanging out at home. These no-edit creators, in particular, replicate face-to-face communication, which creates a sense of intimacy. They speak directly into the camera as if they’re looking at you directly.”
Adam Meskouri, who negotiates content and licensing partnerships with creators and runs the Instagram page @baai, which posts viral content, says that he’s seen no-edit content take off in the past couple of months. “The videos that perform the best are videos that don’t have text overlays, or cuts, or special effects,” he says. “They’re usually just continuous clips.”
#video editing#trends#YouTube#culture#editing
·rollingstone.com·
Why Creators Have Stopped Editing Their Content
The Rise Of The Generalist (How To Thrive With Multiple Interests) - Dan Koe
The Rise Of The Generalist (How To Thrive With Multiple Interests) - Dan Koe
  1. We are in a second renaissance where the creator economy is growing exponentially and people are turning to creators to learn skills necessary to thrive in a fast-changing digital environment.
  2. Specialists who focus on a single interest or skill are at a disadvantage compared to generalists who are diverse and interesting.
  3. The internet favors generalists because social media exposes creators to diverse audiences who are there to be entertained, not just to learn or buy.
  4. Failure stacking, or pursuing goals and gaining experience even through failures, makes generalists irreplaceable by allowing them to acquire a diverse set of skills.
  5. The most profitable niche for a creator is their unique combination of opinions, beliefs, knowledge, and life experience packaged into impactful content.
  6. To earn a living as a generalist, one must become an entrepreneur and build a general audience around helping them achieve a big goal.
  7. Creators should experiment with writing about all their interests and let the audience decide what resonates, framing everything through the lens of the big goal.
  8. To make interests compelling to others, creators must illustrate the "why" and importance of ideas, as people weren't born with interests but persuaded into them.
  9. Creators should establish authority in topics that resonate by creating digital assets like free products to avoid repeating themselves and give room to experiment with new ideas.
  10. Generalists should build a portfolio of income sources by launching free and paid products around their best ideas every 3-6 months until they have a satisfying brand and business.
#multidisciplinary#gig-economy#creator-economy#social media#ideals#internet#jobs#advice#YouTube#video
·thedankoe.com·
The Rise Of The Generalist (How To Thrive With Multiple Interests) - Dan Koe