Reflection becomes Content and Content is not Contentment

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She is the first one that would prefer her content to be food for thought and she is addressing the difficult issue of content marketing, that in order to be relevant we can't assume that we can sell when we are using content as a cover for that selling.  She is basically saying to content writers to take a real interest in their audience. 

Yet content does not finish because we are writing for others, we are producing content when we are writing for ourselves.  The content of our thoughts is the metacognition because here we are questioning why we are writing as well as what we are writing - and we also know that reflective thinking is just a sampling from our own river of thoughts.  The other half of trying to master content is mastering our own thought.

Content is thought and what shapes thought most is whether we are conscious of our reflective thinking, our creative thinking and our critical thinking.  Otherwise thought becomes content and that is like saying food becomes content for our stomach, but food is not necessarily nutrition.  How our minds yield nutrition is not the same thing as how our stomachs yield it.

If content can fill our stomach then thought can upset it.  In this regard there is a physical and biological relationship between mind and gut, so content can have physiological effects because it is still thought.  Out of this a new relationship emerges.  This relationship is between writing for others and writing for ourselves.  We can improve both significantly but we tend to think of our writing as broadcast or a message for others, less so than thinking about thinking.

Renaissance for me is creating flows from my mind and into my mind that are governed by my own exploration.  As far as I am concerned everyone has unique flows and can explore their own flows in unique ways.  Since we live in a product world where consumption is king, we pay little regard how thought turns into a product that defines the ways and nature of our world, instead we focus on improving content, without necessarily dealing with its effect on thought.

There is a cycle here I relate to, in which how we choose to relate to content is our own individual will and choice, but it is also a ritual and social practice that we conform to.  Breaking that conformity is not the point for that is thoughtless.  Learned helplessness, not questioning content and not examining the nature of our own thoughts is more dominant because we want answers and we welcome others to engage in thinking, for it might not be our strength.

There is a point of where division of labour has an effect of building the structures of society, so I certainly celebrate the creation of civilization, but the atoms of that civilization exist not in content we have access to, but the thinking that is now concrete.  Architects have in the past created inhuman urban spaces because we were thoughtless - but then we discovered that architects had created buildings but not human spaces to live in.  Content is the same thing.

To complete the cycle of content, content becomes thinking again and the thinker needs to own the thought.  So it is interesting that feedback and food for thought both deal with feeding, though feedback stems from the world of signals and not the world of food.  We are well fed when it comes to the creation of content but very fat in mind when it comes to consumption.  A system predicated on attention is not a system that serves mind-spirit-body nutrition. 

To get our own attention back is not a mission or a message for others, it is simply a personal choice.  That I can experiment with this is the first mode of personal learning.  We are content driven because the machinery of media is what drives this conveyor belt of information and product.  If we want new ways of selling or new ways of seeing, anything new is what is new to us, not what is new to the world. 

I don't advocate renaissance for a society where division of labour is what makes things happen, so I do not reject the need we have to learn from one and another, but I do see that I must question the very nature of my own learning and exploration, because that nature is as old as Socrates - both in knowing thyself and questioning things - though here it is one's own thought.   So it is I say that Amy took us halfway to the promise land, it is we who complete the journey and then begin again - thus it is appropriate to call this a personal cycle of life.