Content, context? No contest … probably

How important is context? Consider a November 2011 article in Journal of Physics A by the very eminent physicist Sir Michael Berry (et al.) (easily found on the Internet – discovery is so easy these days, if you have a clue, isn’t it?). It has, probably, the shortest abstract on record – simply ‘Probably not’. Pretty good material for the metadata, right? As in another example I found, not quite as short (‘There are none’),1 the title of the article is in the form of a question2 (which gives the context) so to give the answer as the abstract is both neat and clever. But context was quite important, you could say. So then all becomes clear. And as in scholarship, so in life. Just one of my peculiar habits is to look out for signs that seem strange out of context. For many years, in the drive leading to my local tennis club, was a large sign professionally painted on the ground saying ‘ONE WAY’, which is fine, except that it had two large arrows leading from it at right angles to each other – none of my tennis-playing friends ever mentioned it, I suppose because when you were there it was quite clear what was meant. After I did mention it, it was changed, before I had taken a picture of it. Or what about these signs (see photograph) very close to the headquarters of some scientific societies near Holborn in London? When you are there, you know what they mean, and there’s no real suggestion that you can play football without a ball. Becoming just a little more scholarly, just a few years ago I was so taken by this newspaper placard (see next page) that I went into the newsagents and persuaded them to give it to me. It is from London’s main newspaper the Evening Standard – not, as you might be forgiven for thinking, from an advertisement for a new Wallace and Gromit movie. If your nation had not been in a state of near panic over a possible ‘bird ’flu’ epidemic, it might well have been more generally thought of as a little odd. So context is important – but is it ‘king’? I was prompted to muse on this topic when my co-editor, Diane Scott-Lichter, began one of her recent editorials in Learned Publishing with the statement ‘Content is king. I still believe that.’ The implication was clear. Some do not believe that, and the notion of the prime importance of content in our world is under attack. Indeed it is. And not just from ‘context’. There are other ‘cons’ too. Even in this current issue we see a book review quoting the author who says ‘Content is not king, if it ever was. Connectivity is more important.’ So where did all this debate come from, and how relevant is it to us? Somewhat surprisingly, given that his Microsoft would appear to have made its business on the basis of operating systems rather than content, Bill Gates is often credited with the first use of the phrase ‘Content is king’ in an essay in 1996. Mind you, I can see there are areas where Microsoft itself could do a bit better on context. A few days ago, when in Word, I used the term ‘googling’ which didn’t seem all that novel to me – but the Word help system did not like it3 (you know, that little red squiggly line), and suggested I might have meant, amongst other things ‘go ogling’ – now where was the understanding of context in that? As Editorial 163