Content and Apps

This story will be about two fictional characters - Content and Apps. Computers and other technical contraptions will feature as little in this story as it is nowadays possible to abstract oneself and invent a somewhat credible narrative that is not detached from real life and is well removed from technology.

The story will be about characters with real hallmarks of the age, different personalities and views on life, views on things, phenomena, and information. These characters, as well as this entire story, are not quite a random invention, but rather an association that arose at a seminar. The seminar addressed a topic affecting everyone - WEB 2.0. In itself it is not a standard, but rather an assemblage of technologies that allow the manipulation of information, presenting it in various cross-sections and arrangements. Technologies thanks to which social networks, blogs, feeds, casts, and goodness knows what else were born.

So then, two characters - Content and Apps. Content is older than Apps. Content was born at the moment when the World Wide Web - now more widely known as the internet - emerged from military and educational institutions and entered the computers of ordinary housewives and students. That was the time when the World Wide Web began to be actively filled with diverse information. At first it was text, then images, then sound and video. So Content is a content-oriented character for whom the most important thing in the world is substance. He creates it.

Apps was born later - in fact, when Content was already in full maturity. There had accumulated a great many of his kind, and the ordinary mortal person needed a messiah who would now come and sort, categorise, rearrange, and group all these Content pieces. This messiah was Apps.
Apps did not create content himself, but rather took what Content had created and arranged it so that it would be convenient, fast, and easy for people to navigate information. So Apps is a kind of librarian who tells you which shelf to look on for the literature you are interested in. In reality they are several, even very many librarians, ready to help you at any time.

All was well until the moment when people began to see Content in Apps and completely forgot about Content...

This story has no end yet, because another messiah will come to help humanity. And their task will be - to find the right librarian, or Apps, for people. Even after that, people will hardly become happy, and another messiah will come. And so on without end or limit, for as long as photons and electrons crackle through the universe and wires, and somewhere beyond your computer the heart of the internet pulses.

Remark -

Content is a person who through their work creates substance. That is the farmer who produces a harvest, the weaver who creates cloth, and the fisherman who catches fish and brings them ashore.

Apps also creates something through their work. Only not something tangible and graspable. Apps is a manager who stands between Content and Consumer.

In reality all people resemble either Content or Apps. Strangely, it is as if these people were from different planets, because they rarely understand one another, yet also rarely can manage without one another. Those who create content feel that Apps-types steal work from them and "rise to the top" through speculation. The Apps-types, in turn, consider "the deal" to be the foundation of success.

Often Apps-types forget that creating content requires investment of effort - real effort, sometimes even physical. And that means both time and energy. In contrast, Apps considers work to be a chain of combinations, which is largely mental effort that to an outside observer is easy to confuse with luck or pure chance. It is very possible that Apps believes all work and content arises as a result of combinations, and the only difference between its own combinations and others' is that Content has already worn a path down this track and it comes naturally to them.

By continually creating combinations, Apps does not become emotionally attached to any particular combination and believes that Content operates on the same principles.

The fruit of Content's created work also has an emotional component. Each piece of content created is something special. It should be noted that Content often forgets that their created content would not be worth a penny if there were no one willing to pay for it, or simply no one who needs it. In spite of everything - with pride in their breast, ready to stand by their own created content.

Apps is more versatile and able to adapt and work with different types of Content. Content, in turn, is more independent and able to create content even without Apps. Go figure now which is better? :)