The evolution of digital technology, the integration of social media in daily life, and pressure to focus on quantity over quality by leveraging AI have commoditized content. You might be asking yourself, what defines content?
Content is the packaging of information to convey an idea or argument to a specific target audience. Typically, content is tied to a business objective. The most common forms people interact with daily include videos, photos, graphics, podcasts, case studies, and memes. Understanding your experience with content to discern the form it assumes (digital or physical), define how you catalog and index it, and decide whether AI is a superpower or hindrance will enrich your life, educationally and emotionally.
The Push and Pull of the Content Seesaw: Digital vs. Analog
The saturation of digital social media platforms, coupled with an extreme pressure to lean into AI, is going to create an explosion in analog. Analog forms of media were never extinct, but the shift started in 2007 when the first iPhone was released. It gained more traction in 2010 when Instagram launched, and then grabbed the world’s attention in 2020 when TikTok took off because of the COVID-19 pandemic. To ground these time stamps with some perspective, according to The evolution of AI in content strategy, a blog published by Quibble, “People, especially younger generations, are no longer relying on Google, and 74% of Gen Z’s use TikTok as their primary search engine.”
Fast-forward to 2026, and within less than a decade there’s already a new noticeable shift happening: the explosion of analog.
People are starting to struggle with how much digital there is. People are anxious. People are self-regulating their digital consumption. People are opting into “touching grass,” instead of growing their Rolodex of followers to send memes to while they doomscroll.
Image Source: MemeAnalysis
For the last decade or so, digital hasn’t pushed its feet up on the seesaw to balance out with analog. But now? It’s beginning to happen, and evident from the resurgence of analog technology including vinyl, wired headphones and point and shoot cameras from the 2000s.
My relationship with analog starts and ends with consumption vs. creation. I have a sincere appreciation for physical media and always opt to buy video game cartridges instead of digital files. I also make a concerted effort to self-regulate my digital screen time using an app. ScreenZen overrides my iPhone’s screen limits and only allows me to check specific social media platforms a set number of times per day for a specific number of minutes. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re looking for a tool to help you self-regulate digital consumption.
Once you understand how to balance this seesaw, the next step you can take to leverage content in a way that enriches your life is to define how you index and organize it.
Creating a Personal OS
Image Source: Created by Author
Having an idea of how you’re going to get from point A to point B goes a long way. When it comes to working on a project with multiple people, you must create a single source of truth and lean into sharing bits and pieces of your personal operating system with your team. Meghan Casey, author of “The Content Strategy Toolkit,” explains how teams get on the same page by creating a project charter. This document contains components of a project, including a lexicon (a list of words or phrases with their definitions), a timeline, a budget, and a clear project team matrix that outlines roles and responsibilities. This connects directly to content strategy, specifically organization. SAAS tools like Monday.com, Airtable, and Asana are some of the most robust options that lean into flexibility. Users can create project boards with tasks in any view you can think of, whether it’s a list, calendar, Gantt chart, or Kanban. Because my career is in content marketing, I use a combination of Microsoft OneDrive for file storage and Airtable for content management. This combination enables me to leverage Airtable to collaborate easily with various teams inside and outside my department. I can also reference OneDrive months later to find final files if I ever need to reuse a piece of content or repurpose it for a new project.
In my personal life, I use the knowledge database management tool Notion to create a repository where I manage my finances, plan trips, and store content. I usually organize this content by the month it’s happening. So, when you dive into my finance tracker, for example, you’ll see months organized in color-coded columns and individual cards within each column. You click on a card to expand the details. I’ve included a screenshot below so you can see what I mean.
Image Source: Created by Author
In terms of what defines a content hoarder? A content hoarder, in my mind, is someone who holds on to a form of content (whether that’s pictures, videos, writing, or something else) and it no longer serves any purpose or is duplicative. However, I need to acknowledge a caveat to my previous statement. If we are talking about digital content, the phrase hoarding is subjective. If you have a clear system organizing everything by using a folder structure, and it’s not preventing you from doing your day-to-day work, more power to you for having a graphic you made in 2018 when you started your first job as a content marketer. Being able to see the progression of your work, understand its evolution, and unpack what you learned is a superpower in and of itself. Especially as we enter this new era of AI.
Artificial Intelligence: The Good. The Bad. The Opportunity.
Image Source: Pete Sena
The role content strategy plays involves both project and operational frameworks. It helps to define, prioritize, integrate, systematize, and measure content. Brain Traffic, a marketing consultancy open for 25+ years, created a “Content Strategy” quad to split out the two core concepts and discern the different tactics that happen within each process.
“More than anything else, effective content design requires knowing your audience—their needs, preferences, and expectations. Systems design is the process of defining the architecture, modules, interfaces, and data for a system to satisfy specified requirements.”
AI plays a role in both content design and systems design. If you can understand and clearly define what its roles are, while still maintaining the integrity of the fundamentals of content marketing that demonstrate creativity, expertise, and clear strategic thinking, you’ll turn it into a superpower instead of a hindrance. The evolution of AI in content strategy, a blog published by Quibble, lists some great “Do’s and Don’ts” for AI, including the following.
“Do’s: Use to speed up research and processes, create proper, detailed briefs, add your own insights and examples, keep content structured and clear. Don’ts: Publish AI content without reviewing it, rely on AI for strategy, ignore tone of voice, chase quantity over quality.”
Using these recommendations as a starting point is exactly how I’ve tackled integrating AI into my professional and personal life. I often use AI as a thought partner to converse with. I have a conversation with it that spans anywhere from 2-4 prompts before I take the output it gives me and use it as a starting point for the piece of content I’m creating.
The growing pressure companies have forced on their employees has exacerbated the public image of AI and led to a vast number of people using it as a crutch. This is why content has become commoditized.
In my opinion, the problem isn’t AI. The problem is forgetting the fundamentals and using AI to replace them. The best content understands its audience, uses strategic thinking, creativity, and informed judgment. It has a human touch. Sure, AI can accelerate these processes, but it can’t replace them.
I think about my relationship with content like a seesaw. I don’t have to choose between analog or digital. I have to learn how to be intentional with my choices and not lose sight of the fundamentals. Whether it’s organizing my info in Notion or using AI to brainstorm captions, the goal is and always will be to use content intentionally.
Works Cited
Blazer, Liz. Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps for Creating Animation & Motion Graphics. Peachpit Press, 2020.
Sena, P. (2026, March 24). My chief chaos officer left. so I built one. My Chief Chaos Officer Left. So I Built One. https://petesena.substack.com/p/my-chief-chaos-officer-left-so-i
Traffic, B., & Halvorson, K. (n.d.). New thinking: Brain traffic’s content strategy quad – brain traffic blog. Brain Traffic. https://www.braintraffic.com/blog/new-thinking-brain-traffics-content-strategy-quad
Morrish, A. (2026, June 8). The evolution of AI in Content Strategy. Quibble. https://quibble.digital/insights/the-evolution-of-ai-in-content-strategy/
Casey, M. (2015). The Content Strategy Toolkit. New Riders. 2026, http://www.newriders.com
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