Anatomising User-Generated Content

Posted on behalf of Professor Jonathan Dovey.

In the preparation of materials for this symposium Sam Kinsley & I realised that we were working from quite different interpretations of the term ‘user generated content’. Given our different perspectives (ageing media academic & young ‘digital’ geographer) this is hardly surprising but prompted an interesting genealogical exchange. What follows is a first pass at recording the genealogies of user generated content (UGC).

First, there is the popular effluvia of UGC, from Leadbetter and Shirky to Tapscott & Williams (on Wikinomics), which is reflected in style columns, in the likes of Radio Four “In Business’ and, indeed, in the 2010 Conservative Party manifesto. The Big Society apes and reflects the libertarian roots of the DIY society we are all (again – for others have done so before) enjoined to build, now in the circumstances of a global economy only just out of recession, a national economy still close to recession, and many calls fora post-CDO, low-carbon austerity.

Second, there is ‘crowd-sourcing’: the institutions of journalism using the material of non-professionals (or semi-professionals) to illustrate stories that the paid camera crews didn’t get. YouTube defines this through its ‘Eye Witness’ category. Amazon’s Mechancial Turk perhaps goes further by offering this as a method of crowd-sourcing any form of labour.

The implication of crowd-sourcing for UGC overlaps with a much more diffuse application of UGC to YouTube in general – again, the amateur, non- or semi- professional ‘prosumer’ creating content that demands attention. However the attention demanded, according to some rare research with users themselves, is mostly understood as the attention of one’s immediate friends: your class, year group or peers, as well as the broader attention of the ‘whole world’. This is, in a sense, local communication figured in a form of broadcast to, or sharing with, the world at large in the hope that it might just go viral. Its also worth remembering that in Burgess & Green’s analysis of their YouTube sample they estimate that as much as 40% of its content is mainstream media cut up into clips that are recycled and repurposed. Of the rest (of the UGC) there is an inestimable percentage of karaoke-style mashup media. These are lip syncs and swede-ings that say as much about the continuing colonization of user consciousness by popular culture as they do about human creative or participatory potential.

These two versions of course overlap and feed into broader debates about the mediated public sphere – as both a political and cultural assemblage – and how access to public(s) is mediated. For example we can look to Andrew Keen’s arguments around ‘dumbing down’ on the one hand, and Henry Jenkins’ celebrations of user-generated content on the other.

A parallel inter-related discourse also feeds in here: within the commercial practices of digital media/ web design over the past few years, the terminology of UGC has more particular meanings. The WWW in its first generations spawned a plethora of teenage homepages, long before Facebook (see Daniel Chandler) and indeed, in a broader sense, the whole internet is an example of a user generated system ( for inter alia the dissemination of user generated content). Interactivity has demanded and continues to demand different relationships with users. For example, ‘content management systems’ have ceded to users a significant portion of control of the space and means of production of ‘content’. The emphasis upon ‘relationships’ and the building of ‘community’ became instrumental to the dot-com boom aim to create ‘sticky websites’. Normative understandings of UGC thus grew from a more generalised sense of ‘relationships with users’. This arguably began with users sometimes being allowed to upload content via content management systems controlled elsewhere and has developed into social media, ‘web 2.0’ and ideas of ‘the cloud’.

At the same time, the computer games industry was learning how to exploit the power of its users through the commodification of ‘mods’ (modification of games) and the growth of cultures of ‘modding’. Instrumental to the growth of these forms of user-generated production were ID & Valve were, I would argue, the first holders of I.P to release it in a form that invited ‘users’ – gamers and fans – to legitimately recreate it. (Obvious really when one thinks about the application put into ‘play’ of all kinds – we also ‘play’ music, arguably another veteran at the commodification of user passions.)

The advent of ‘web 2.0’ into the general public conscious, via the likes of Facebook, MySpace, and Wikipedia crystalised the realisation that the metaphorical genie of ‘the user’ was well and truly out of the gatekeepers bottle. Social networking and the production and distribution of UGC through peer-to-peer and user-created knowledge networks started to suggest an unprecedented force for the distributed and widespread production of cultural artefacts, movements and value. However, Tim O’Reilly’s formulation of ‘web 2.0’ clearly illustrates where this energy becomes commodified – for O’Reilly, data was the new ‘Intel inside‘ and by data he means US – our data traces and patterns. So here the user generated content is not simply those intentionally produced cultural artefacts, realised as images, music and text, but the vast quantity of data about ‘life online’ that is captured, which describes in intricate and dispassionate detail all of our digitally mediated activity. The figure of the amorphous ‘cloud’ of data, as a capacity for access, distribution and storage, is not necessarily benign. Various forms of UGC have acquired significant value, which we perhaps have no idea we are generating as casual users of websites and services.

These various and inter-related understandings of user-generated content reveal for us that social and cultural implications of ‘content’ no longer being discrete, easily packaged and controlled artefacts that have been carefully and intentionally produced but which are instead transmutable and promiscuous ‘stuff’ demand further critical scrutiny.