This need to corral an audience in advance by succeeding on social media can be explained by the useful phrase “content capital.” Established by the scholar Kate Eichhorn in her 2022 monograph Content, it describes the Internet-era state in which “one’s ability to engage in work as an artist or a writer is increasingly contingent on one’s content capital; that is, on one’s ability to produce content not about one’s work but about one’s status as an artist, writer, or performer.” In other words, the emphasis is not on the thing itself but the aura that surrounds it, the ancillary material that
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