"Consuming" always irritates me. We don't read written works or watch videos, we consume content.

Generally consuming something means that it no longer exists after it has been consumed. A fire consumes a home and it can no longer be lived in. I consume a hamburger and therefore you cannot eat it. Content on the internet isn't consumed in this sense. If anything it's your own time and attention that is consumed when watching videos.

> If anything it's your own time and attention that is consumed when watching videos.

Yes. 'Content' certainly isn't consumed from the perspective of the content providers, who can keep streaming the same data until they choose not to.

[Edit] Hmmm. Consumption, in the sense of irreversibly using a one-time resource, is sort of relevant. Once I have consumed food, I cannot re-consume it (in it's original form). Using this meaning, however, I 'use' rather than 'consume' a physical book or other format where I have a physical copy of the data (e.g. in the form of a non-rented DVD or similar).

The novelty of such works, however, is consumed when seen for the first time. You can never see a work of art for the first time a second time. And that's important.

A big difference is that others can consume the same thing, a million content creators is more than enough to supply content to the entire world. There is no reason why consuming digital content should cost a significant part of your income when it is so cheap to produce at global scale.

But consummation of a marriage does not mean a cannibal feast.

The etymology of the words “consummate” and “consume” are completely different. The former is from con (altogether) and summa (sum total; taken from summa (highest supreme)): my interpretation is “union with god”. Which fits with its adjective definition: high degree of skill; complete or perfect. The later, to consume, is from con (altogether) but added to sumere (take up). And if someone were to altogether-take-up I would assume that there would be nothing left.

This is from the verb "to consummate", not the verb "to consume".

TIL that these two words do not mean the same thing.

The new way of interacting with videos and other media online does warrant a different term. Many people really don't watch videos, they consume content, ie. scroll or swipe through an endless stream of tweets/videos/reddit posts stopping and then moving on.

It's just like watching a movie vs watching TV, reading versus paging through the newspaper, etc.

If people called that specific phenomenon "consumption", it wouldn't bother me. But they use it much more broadly.

> Many people really don't watch videos, they consume content, ie. scroll or swipe through an endless stream of tweets/videos/reddit posts stopping and then moving on.

How is that different from plopping down the sofa, turn on the TV and watch the endless stream of content being broadcast to you? This isn't really a new thing, most people consumed TV that way before digital consumption became a thing.

> It's just like watching a movie vs watching TV

yet here you use the same word without problem, don't you?

I guess an appropriate word for "casually reading" would be "browsing" ?

I'm really ambivalent about Stallman's language crusades. Similarly to how I dislike the focus on the newest politically correct terminology.

Why is "creative" OK, when "creator" isn't?

I think it's more about the fact that adopting the enemy's language is seen as a kind of submission, a recognition and acceptance of their power over you, even if their words themselves aren't "bad" intrinsically.

Not sure if it's the right hill to die on. Eventually words and meanings readjust to describe reality. Map and territory, you know.

Well, there's also the theory - articulated best in Orwell's 1984 of the places I've seen it argued for - that language also shapes what thoughts can be held or shared. Given how much impact choosing the programming language has on a technical project I'm inclined to think there's something to that idea, and Stallman may be more sensitive to that than the average bear.

In this case the language crusade prompts us to think about our assumptions more deeply. The comment did bring my attention to concepts I had not noticed before.

There is an adversarial aspect to it, but it's no different from debating ideas. You're just questioning certain premises, it doesn't mean you have to discard them afterwards.

Good point. We should notice such shifts in language and what they imply.

Most of these terms came from marketing

My pet peeve is User Generated Content. Generate is often used when an inanimate object gives rise to something, so UGC is dehumanizing in addition to being devaluing.

that's a surprising complaint. "generate" has a strong etymological connection to birth and creation more generally, particularly by/of humans.

I don't love the terminology either, but it's like a lot of evolving linguistic culture: it tends to stick in the craw of those of use who grew up using different words, not because it is "wrong" per se but because it is different. I think the linguistic shift actually does map on to a notably different attitude toward the way cultural products are produced and consumed, as other commenters have noted, as well as the democratization of the resources for creating things like video due to the ubiquity of smartphones.

lol, "please let's not call them creators, they are not gods"

In fact, they sort-of are, in the worlds that they have created.

GRRM is de facto a creator god of Westeros, and Tolkien of Middle-earth.

Gurm in this case would be the deist type of God that spun the universe into existence and then stepped away...

What is wrong with "content"? It's the opposite of "without content".

Stallman expanded on this somewhere else. The argument was that it uniformizes, degrades the work and focuses on just the mere aspect that it can fill up some container. Like the contents of standard cargo ship containers. Video, podcast, article, whatever it is, the important part is that we can serve ads alongside it and we can market it and we have all these "interfaces" that have nothing to do with the ideas conveyed or the artistic effects or intents etc.

It's the epitome of wooden language.

Your example is very good for proving my point; the expression "without content" talks about what? about the content? So you would say "content without content" to speak about a text that does not have substantial content?

> It's the epitome of wooden language

Exactly. See the comment elsewhere about Orwell's 1984. In which Newspeak [0] is "a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak