On Tuesday night I attended the first-ever New York Content Meetup. Meeting at Archway Cafe in DUMBO, around two dozen writers, musicians, artists, and strategists came together to drink beer and chat about content.

First speaker was the endearingly ill-prepared Stuart Tracte, a strategist at Definition 6 and host of Beer Diplomacy. Stuart made one major point:

-People need to stop talking about tech on tech. He led this off by asking how many of us in the room still use Google+. There were very few hands up, and Stuart claims this is because the only thing people talk about on the platform is Google+. I agree that there tends to be an overabundance of meta conversation when new tech ‘things’ come out, but I’m skeptical that the reason Google+ has run out of steam is because of that. (I think it’s probably just because Facebook is light years ahead right now.) Of course his point is true but it’s also inevitable, as customer bases grow and people become expert in a software. When the iPad first came out, it was a device for early adopters; now it’s being billed as an accessible device for less tech savvy users of all ages, young and old. And now apps are being developed to serve that new target market – it’s just part of the natural cycle of development, and it will effect the content of conversation over time.

Next up was Ron J. Williams, founder of SnapGoods and Knodes. He spoke about the importance of curation, a subject we’ve written about before and read about constantly. I did like a few of his lines, which seem pretty self-explanatory and valid on their own:

-Rock my mind with relevance. Cuddle me with curation.
-What was once appreciated is now annoying. (i.e. cat videos)
-Stream fatigue makes social suck.
-Content is king but curators rule.

When I brought up tech’s hot topic du jour – the danger of the filter bubble and suppression of relevant information in the face of hyperpersonalization – Williams clarified that he did not mean curation in lieu of discovery, which is still important. It’s up to product designers to make sure algorithms and recommendation engines are smart enough to give you a balance of the cat videos you love with the information articles you need to read. (And yeah, I get that it’s all subjective, but I think we know when something is informative versus when something is junk food, right?)

The second half of the evening focused a bit more on content creation.

Dan Savage shared his project GIF SHOP, an iPhone app that lets you create animated GIFs on your phone. He showed off some examples of artists using the format as a new medium for creation. Pretty cool and definitely more sophisticated than the animated GIFs we send around at Barbarian.(Not that I’m hating on those because those make my day.)

Risa Shoup, a curator, talked about a few artists doing innovative things in the social media space. She mentioned Jill Magid and Man Bartlett, who use social media to ‘produce’ art. We talk a lot about social media as a medium for curation but I think it’s also an interesting space to discuss how it can exist as art on its own and serve as a medium as real as paper or video. (Think about our Hudson installation that we debuted a few weeks ago.) I think the challenge for this kind of art – especially Man’s – is to prove its timelessness, the standard a lot of art is held against. It was cool think hear this perspective, since so much of social media is used as a promotional tool, especially for creative organizations which low budgets.

One of the coolest examples I know of an artist using social to produce creative work is composer Eric Whitacre. Watch this and this. You’ll see what I mean. He’s a composer who held auditions and put together a 2,000+ choir of voices entirely on YouTube to perform two of his original songs. It’s powerful to watch. Perhaps the next step in this is group composition, something more tangible and permanent than a string of rapidly changing tweets. Or perhaps I’m privileging permanence, tangibility, and timelessness too much when I think about art. What do you think?