Please join us for this ANU School of Sociology x ANU Computational Culture Lab event on 'The “Contentification” of the Web: Studying Digital Culture Before and After GenAI' by Dr Scott Wark (Goldsmiths, University of London).

The “Contentification” of the Web: Studying Digital Culture Before and After GenAI

Generative Artificial Intelligence is changing the web. From undermining whole industries to flooding digital spaces with ‘AI slop,’ it’s clear that the web –digital culture – is in transition. This paper uses a critical engagement with GenAI as the basis for a reflection on its implications for our capacity to conceptualise and critique digital culture. In the platform-driven, Web 2.0 era, digital culture has been organised by a tension between the user and the platform: the user has been encouraged to produce and share content, while the platform is designed to control culture’s byproducts (in the form of data, labour, value, access, etcetera). One possible future inaugurated by GenAI is a break with this Web 2.0 compact. This paper questions this narrative by arguing that we ought to see GenAI as an extension of existing processes encapsulated by the term ‘platformisation.’

Amongst other things, platforms have arguably been designed to automate the production and circulation of media content. In this view, the emergence of ‘AI slop,’ or content reduced to a bland ‘mean,’ is an extension of an already-existing process: what I call ‘contentification,’ or the production of contentless content for the purposes of keeping media circulating and attention captured. What does ‘contentification’ mean for digital culture and its study? Such processes may undermine the attention-based economy that supports the web as we know it today. But this moment ought to make us question how we conceptualise and study digital culture and its content(s). GenAI is able to smooth content into a contentless, mediocre mean because this is what comprises the vast majority of the web’s contents: filler such as stock images, marketing copy, placeholder videos, etcetera. To understand GenAI, it’s the production and circulation of this kind of media that we urgently need to study.  

Scott Wark is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research combines an interest in theoretical approaches to media and culture with analyses of digital cultural phenomena, media infrastructures, data processing, artificial intelligence, and techniques of racialisation. He is co-editor of Figure: Concept and Method (with Celia Lury and William Viney; Palgrave, 2022) and Pharmacologies of Media, a special issue of Media Theory (w. Yiğit Soncul)