How Do We "Consume"?
It is ubiquitous these days to describe reading books, watching movies, playing video games, or listening to music as "consuming media" or even "consuming content" (the latter of which may especially apply to reading posts or watching videos on social media platforms). On the one hand, the single word "consume" is certainly more concise than having to list off "read/watch/play/listen" whenever you want to refer to multiple formats at once. But on the other, the term can carry implications about what it actually means to read a book or listen to a song or otherwise interact with a creative work, implications which may or may not be considered by many people who say it.
"Consume" has two main definitions outside media-related contexts: the literal sense of eating, drinking, or otherwise using up a physical resource; and the metaphorical sense of economic consumption, that is, exchanging money for goods or services. Compare each of those behaviors to a common example of "media consumption": reading a book you checked out from a library. Reading it does not use it up or physically diminish it in any way, nor is it associated with buying anything. The same applies to reading a website like you are now, and even to watching a video on YouTube. Why, then, would many people still describe those activities as "consuming"?
Interestingly, as with "content", the first real analysis of the word I encountered came not from an artist or author per se but from a computer programmer. Richard Stallman, a leading advocate for "free as in freedom" software and founder of the GNU Project among others, considers terminology very important when discussing systems he deems unjust, including so-called intellectual property. GNU.org's page "Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing", which I referenced previously for its entry on "content", has this to say about "consume":
"Consume" is associated with the economics of material commodities, such as the fuel or electricity that a car uses up. Gasoline is a commodity, and so is electricity. Commodities are fungible: there is nothing special about a drop of gasoline that your car burns today versus another drop that it burned last week.
What does it mean to think of works of authorship as a commodity, with the assumption that there is nothing special about any one story, article, program, or song? That is the twisted viewpoint of the owner or the accountant of a publishing company, someone who doesn't appreciate the published works as such. It is no surprise that proprietary software developers would like you to think of the use of software as a commodity.
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The narrow thinking associated with the idea that we "consume content" paves the way for laws such as the DMCA that forbid users to break the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) facilities in digital devices. If users think what they do with these devices is "consume," they may see such restrictions as natural.
Stallman argues that describing interaction with published works as "consuming" reduces them to interchangeable commodities (similar to "content") and justifies suppressive restrictions by corporations. As for why people still use the term, Stallman suggests it may sound "sophisticated", or help to generalize about multiple forms of media as I mentioned earlier, but some people would disagree; there are, according to some, additional shades of meaning the term can invoke.
For instance, a friend of mine said she uses the word "consume" to describe becoming engrossed in a work of fiction that she greatly enjoys and that has a lasting impact on her, an interpretation seconded by Tumblr user gonsfreecss: "i personally always liked using the word 'consume' for the media I watch and read bc in my eyes i am taking it in and a lot of the times it says with me, but i do see why it would not be a preferred descriptor," they said in a reply to ultraviolet-techno-ecology's post on terminology. Similarly, one response to my class survey described the phrase "content consumption" as "Diving into a subject and looking into it for a period of time."
But ironically, some people use the word to invoke the exact opposite implication: shallow or passive engagement, like scrolling through Instagram as opposed to thoughtfully reading a book. Several other responses from my survey endorsed this shade of meaning, such as "watching or reading something while not even really thinking about it. Just having it enter your brain with no thought provoking," or "just looking at something face value [...] without really getting a chance to appreciate it or understand all the nuances," or even comparing the connotations of "content consumption" to snacking on empty calories. Likewise, on another Tumblr post discussing the phrase "media consumption", user dilfhamlet commented: "reading books isn't consuming media [...] to consume something implies there is no depth to the interaction between audience and text/film/art/etc [...] it's a one-way exchange to consume media. to interact with art is not to consume it."
So unlike "content" where a relatively consistent pattern emerged from the analyses I found, the term "consume" seems to have at least four separate connotations: (1) a catch-all term for interaction with multiple formats of media; (2) particularly in-depth interaction; (3) particularly shallow interaction; or (4) corporate commodification in the same vein as "content". (Those, of course, in addition to the non-media-related dictionary definitions mentioned earlier.) Calling back to Mitski's discomfort with the music industry and fans "consuming" her, I think it's reasonable to say (4) and perhaps also (3) was what she meant, but people using the term in other contexts might mean (2) or (1) instead.
Does the validity of (1) make this whole discussion moot? An opinion I came across on Tumblr quite frequently (example) was to the effect of, "I don't like the implications of saying I 'consume' media, but I don't know what other words I could use instead." Personally, when I noticed the potential negative connotations I tried to use phrases like "engage with" or "interact with" instead, which I think sound a bit more organic and less confusing than Stallman's suggestion of "attend to", but nonetheless require conscious effort to replace a common and widespread term.
Rather than getting hung up on the word itself and replacements, it might be more productive to analyze and challenge the attitudes underlying its usage in certain contexts, particularly the corporate commodification that's so prevalent not only with "consume" but also "content" and even "intellectual property" itself - treating creative works as the property of corporations, interchangeably mass-produced and sold for consumption. That's not an attitude that aligns with my values, nor with the values of the many authors I've cited, even ones who continue to use these terms for other reasons.
On an individual level, I think a good start could be to imagine your favorite work of fiction/art (book, movie, show, song, theatre, video game, etc.) and think deeply about what it means to you and how you experience it. Is it really comparable to (3) or (4), or does it mean more to you? What do you think is the best way to discuss it? These are not rhetorical questions; I think it can actually be insightful to think about it.
And that brings me to the last segment of the project: asking people directly for their thoughts on this matter.