It makes me wonder

The pedagogy of content creation: part 1

There is a line in a Led Zeppelin song that has been stuck in my head for reasons that turn out to be less random than I thought. It is “Ooh, it makes me wonder.” It appears in Stairway to Heaven, a monument to rock’n’roll mysticism and very good guitar playing, and it has always seemed to me the emotional centre of the song. It comes at the moment when the noise quietens, and something more open takes its place.

What I have been thinking about is what that phrase actually means for someone who makes content for a living, as I now do. And I think it might be the most honest description of what I am trying to do that I have yet come across.

I am not explaining when I create content.

I am not seeking to persuade.

I am trying to make people wonder.

The distinction matters.

Explaining implies the audience arrives ignorant and leaves informed.

Persuading implies they arrive wrong and leave converted.

Both are rather condescending models, if you think about them, and neither captures what actually happens when a piece of content works.

What does happen in that case, and what I notice when something I have written or said seems to have landed, is that someone’s certainty has shifted. Their opinion might not have done, but their certainty has. The thing they had taken as given, or even certain, is suddenly, and however briefly, available for inspection. The door they didn’t know was there has opened a crack.

That is what I mean by wonder. And it is harder to produce than either information or argument.

The questions that seem to do this most reliably are not the ones with the most dramatic answers. They are the ones that make an assumption visible.

What if government debt is actually national savings?

What if taxation doesn’t fund spending but instead manages the consequences of spending?

What if scarcity is not the neutral backdrop to economic life but is, in many cases, deliberately constructed?

None of those questions requires a particularly dramatic answer to be worth asking. The asking itself is the point. Because once the question has been genuinely entertained, the old certainty doesn’t come back quite as solid as it was.

There is a philosophical tradition that treats wonder as the beginning of all serious inquiry. I will not go into all the classical references. The point is simply that wonder is active in a way that information is not.

You can receive information passively.

You cannot wonder passively.

Wonder requires you to hold two things at once. They are what you thought you knew, and the possibility that it might be otherwise. That tension is uncomfortable in precisely the way that productive thinking is always uncomfortable.

This is why I think the standard tests for whether a piece of content has succeeded are too narrow.

Did people agree with it? Did it go viral? Did it generate traffic? All of those can happen with content that produces no wonder whatsoever.

The better question is, did people leave it thinking differently about something they had previously stopped thinking about?

Did someone, somewhere, put their phone down and look at the ceiling for a moment or reflection?

That is the moment I am aiming at when creating content. It doesn’t always come, of course. I am quite realistic enough to know that. There wasn’t a Stairway to Heaven, after all, as far as we know. And that last point is key. Considering possibility is what the work of content creation is for. It is about creating the moment when we wonder.

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Parts 2 and 3 of this series will follow soon.