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I will grant you that "consume" is awkward. I often say "I read -- well -- I listened to [The Sandlot]" and "consume" is too awkward to use colloquially as "I c
by inanutshellus 4y ago
I will grant you that "consume" is awkward. I often say "I read -- well -- I listened to [The Sandlot]" and "consume" is too awkward to use colloquially as "I consumed [The Sandlot]".
That said... Unless you've got an overtly superior alternative, time to move on and join the fray. It's simply a concise way to say "read / watched / listened" when context of which media doesn't matter.
- kqr 4y ago"I learned from"?
- inanutshellus 4y agoI like to imagine some group of pedants sitting in a cliche smoky room ruminating on this, going through all these permutations and arguing why each word wasn't good enough (e.g. "you needn't have learned!") until they finally ended up with the eureka of 'consume' which was then hackneyed by business folk and thus led to irritating our buddy JohnFen here.
- JohnFen 4y agoDon't worry about me. I'm fine. All that happens is that I think less of the work that talks that way. My reaction is of little impact to anyone in the end. I mention it here, though, because the number of people who find that language problematic seems to be on the rise, and that may inform how authors write.
- inanutshellus 4y agoI find debating about words to be fun! Thanks for the debate. :-)
- JohnFen 4y ago> It's simply a concise way to say "read / watched / listened" when context of which media doesn't matter. It's barely tolerable when used in that sense, but typically it's not used in that sense. The problem is the widespread abuse of the term. When I first started hearing it used, it was weird but didn't irritate me because it was usually used in the sense you're saying here. But then it started being used all over the place, even when speaking of a single sort of media. I'm not saying this is right, but it has become a bit of a "red flag" word to me these days, indicating to me that the the piece where it's being used is not of great quality.
- inanutshellus 4y agoYou're letting something irritate you that's not wrong. It's like getting mad when someone says "I had noodles for lunch" when you know perfectly well they had /spaghetti/, and if they'd said /spaghetti/ you could get irate because they actually had /ragu/ spaghetti (meat in the spaghetti sauce). Using the abstract word it still "fine" if that's the level the speaker wants to give.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- JohnFen 4y agoI don't think that analogy captures my problem with those words. My problem, really, is that they devalue what they refer to. "Consumer" devalues people, and "content" devalues creative effort. Saying "noodles" doesn't devalue spaghetti.
- slt2021 4y ago"Consuming content" is term used by VCs, because when evaluating startups they are mainly concerned about dry, dehumanized, KPI type metrics, like: 1) attracting XXX eyeballs/consumers per quarter 2) producing YYY amount of content for consumption 3) monetizing consumers for $ZZ/mo
- inanutshellus 4y agoI think it would devalue the ragu Bolognese spaghetti from the context of the chef! "They called my beautiful creation 'noodles!' My life is a sham! quickly commits seppuku" :-)
- orangepurple 4y agoI have a visceral reaction when I see people referred to as consumers. It's rude and distasteful beyond belief on par with calling them biomass waste producers, useful drones, useless eaters, or some sort of contagion. How about, in most cases, you know, CUSTOMERS? Or in this case listeners.
- inanutshellus 4y agoI understand but don't agree. 'customer' implies commerce happened, 'listener' implies listening happened. 'consumer' is a higher abstraction than either of those. It's the most abstract word someone could think of to say "X internalized Y". e.g. "X took Y and added it to itself... let's not get distracted with how. the important thing is, X took Y and internalized it." I guess we could, uh, go with "internalizer". I'd be down with that.
- orangepurple 4y agoPerhaps beneficiary but that may be a bridge too far
- JohnFen 4y ago> 'consumer' is a higher abstraction than either of those In the old days, we called those people the "audience". What your audience hopefully does with your work is "learn" or "be entertained".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- feanaro 4y agoBut you don't consume content, that's meaningless. When you consume something, it is used up and disappears entirely.
- inanutshellus 4y agoYour context is backwards. The context is me not the thing. You're thinking "Book + Me = Book + Me" but in the context of me it's... Me + Food = Me with more nutrients. Me + Book = Me with more knowledge. In that context, post-consumption, the state of the book becomes irrelevant (destroyed or not, it doesn't matter, I still got what I wanted from it). I absorbed the knowledge (or nutrients). Brought it into my body and made it part of me.