What is My Content?
In this highly digitized world, we are constantly consuming and creating content. I know for myself, it feels like my life is surrounded by a range of different content every second of every day. Content exists digitally on our screens and also in many ways physically.
In my own experience, most of my content is digital including photos, videos, graphics, text messages, emails, podcasts, memes, and more. All of these can be seen on websites and social media; the main sources of digital content. Aside from digital content, I occasionally enjoy reading physical magazines in my down time. This counts as consuming physical content as magazines are filled with dozens of pictures, text, graphics, and more.
Keep it or Discard it?
Despite seeing and consuming an abundant amount of content each day, there’s still a difference between some content that we discard and some that we keep with us. For example, if we’re looking at my email inbox, I will first discard emails that look fishy or unfamiliar. This is important to understand because this means unfamiliar content will be discarded, therefore content creators need to ensure their content looks trustworthy. Next in my inbox, I would probably delete the content that I’m not interested in, these might include store deals, news articles, and more. This is because if it doesn’t interest me, then there’s no point in me keeping it. Then, I will likely discard emails that are too old. Therefore meaning that timeliness is an important value in content strategy.
The types of content I will keep are content that is relevant to me, new, and interesting.
Content Organization
I like to organize my content in many ways depending on which type of content it is. However, the most common way would be to use folders. Folders are a super helpful organizational tool because they allow me to break off my content into smaller groups that all make sense to me. For example, when looking at the content I have displayed on my laptop desktop, there is so much clutter. That’s why I decided to section the clutter off into different folders and even subfolders. I made one folder for my classes and in that folder I had subfolders for each class. Therefore, now its easy to find the work I need for each specific class. I also made a job folder to organize all my cover letters, headshots, and resume versions. There are many other folders on my desktop but these are just some examples.
Am I a Content Hoarder?
I am absolutely a content hoarder. I have almost 3,000 unread emails in my gmail that I have not gone through and on top of that I save a lot of content on my laptop that I don’t actually need. I’m definitely a “just in case I need it” type of person when it comes to content.
Testing a Strategy
Despite hoarding my content, I believe that I do have a few strategies to manage my content without even knowing it. One good example is the organizational tactic I wrote about above. Another good example is filtering the type of content I see. This means, I will only follow people on Instagram whose posts and content I want to see. This helps me manage the type of content that I’m seeing on Instagram each day. Additionally, I will only subscribe to a certain type of newspaper or news station to see only Connecticut news or only National news.
How Long Do I Keep Content?
Not all content is worth keeping, but for the ones that are, they can still be temporary, depending on their purpose. For example, if a piece of content serves as information, I will keep that content as long as I need that information, then I will discard it. However, if the content is sentimental to me such as a photograph, I will want to keep it forever.
Content Conclusion
Digital and physical content surrounds nearly each and every activity that I spend my days doing. As an aspiring journalist and designer, I know that content will not be disappearing anytime soon. Therefore discussing my personal experiences with it is helpful in deciphering how to better manage it in the future.