Opening Topic: Content Inflation

Welcome to Tech Progression. We started this blog as a forum to discuss the progression of technology and its effect on our society. Our first topic will be content inflation. Content inflation is the continuing trend of exponential growth of content on the internet. Whether this content is YouTube videos, social networking sites, independent games or blogs; the trend is undeniable. More and more content is being created each day. Whole new fields of technology have been developed in response to content inflation.

A History of Content Inflation. Content inflation, as it pertains to the internet, started as soon as the internet went public. Content inflation has been driven by a couple crucial factors. First, by the fact that, at our core, we humans define ourselves based on how others view us. Secondly, by the fact that the internet, as a social medium, offers a quick, easy, instant way to share ourselves with large quantities of other humans, thus providing for us a greater definition of ourselves. Finally, by the fact that anyone and everyone can be a creator and consumer, often for free.

An Example: A great example of content inflation can be seen in the game development community. Originally games were developed by sole developers or small teams. All of the game content was generated by the developer. As the gaming industry grew, more developers were needed for the production of each game and the number of games being produced increased as well. The quantity of content continued to grow, requiring enormous teams of developers just to create one commercial game, while independent developers continued to spew out large quantities of smaller content games.

The Advent of Consumer Content: An apex was reached and a new paradigm was introduced; consumer content. Suddenly, games which would normally take five years to create were produced in two as the focus shifted from developer content to user content. After witnessing the flood of user content created by releasing developer tools to consumers, most notably Valve's Hammer editor, development companies rushed to create user friendly development tools with which to reduce their own workloads. New games, like Spore, are dependent on user content. In fact, Spore has gone so far as to release the "level editor" before the game! When Spore is released it will already be populated with user content.

The Necessity of Content Filters: As the quantity of user content grew, first on fan sites then within the games themselves, the necessity for content filters became quickly apparent. The greatest problem with content inflation is that no one has the time to individually go through each new piece of content and approve or discard it. Thus the field of content filtering was born as aggregators struggled to create new means for sorting through large heaps of fresh content. The biggest question, that is still being reasked, is how to efficiently and effectively sort the gems from the rubbish. And who determines what is rubbish and what is gems. The list of questions that content filtering brings up is practically endless. Overall though the problem of content aggregation was handled by compartmentalizing content and leaving each compartment to sort itself.

The Current State of Content Inflation: The rate of content inflation continues to increase calling for more extreme measures. Now we have services to aggregate our aggregators as seen in Meebo, which allows you to access all of your IM clients in one place (where each IM client is a place to aggregate your communications with a subset of your friends). We may, in the near future, see a super-social-networking site which would combine all of your profile information over several networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as your friend's profile information. I would propose that this future is not far off. We already have sites which tell you which sites to go to to figure out which sites to visit. Google is our portal to Wikipedia is our portal to IMDB is our portal to...the inflation is evident.

The Value of Content: The plummeting value of content is an unavoidable side effect of content inflation. Just as a surplus of goods drives the value down, so the surplus of content has driven the value of content down to zero. Indeed in this day and age internet consumers expect to get free email, free social networking, free IM, free games, free software, free books, free news, free advice and practically everything else for free. This shocking standard, driven by advertising, has fueled the piracy wars and disappointed developers expecting to get rich with their 'next great idea.'

Prospect: Will content inflation ever collapse? Will people get tired of spending hours each day updating their blog, Facebook profile and MySpace page? Will people get tired of wading through advertisements just to view worthless content? Will people finally realize that free isn't free at all? Will content filters and the web 2.0 non-intrusive advertising paradigm be enough to fuel content inflation into the next generation? What awaits beyond our current infatuation with consumer content? Where will we draw our content from next? And how much? Can people redefine themselves apart from that great social medium, the internet?