Recent decades have seen the dual trend of increasing digitisation of content, and of growing access to tools that allow us to produce, manipulate, publish and distribute that content.
Advertising campaigns, like the iTunes ad below, openly encourage users to 'Rip. Mix. Burn.' and it has become part of our culture to share our thoughts and creations with the rest of cyberspace. The Internet has completely transformed the way we consume information, and the dominance of the traditional producer > publisher > distributor value chain has weakened. Marshall McLuhan's dictum 'everyone's a publisher' (McLuhan 1964) is on the verge of becoming a reality - and more to the point, as the Wikipedia proudly proclaims, 'anyone can edit.'
The effect of these changes is that users are becoming active producers of content in a variety of open and collaborative environments. Whether it be audience participation (such as user comments attached to news stories, personal blogs, photos or video footage captured from personal mobile cameras), full-fledged participatory news sites like OhmyNews, or collaborative and contributory media sites like Slashdot and Newsvine, internet users are now no longer producers or consumers, publishers or audiences, but both at the same time.
This ability to create content so easily has created an environment of abundance, although the ‘abundance of information leads to scarcity of attention’ (Kelly 2008). The internet offers free and easy access, no quality filters and little risk, creating a wealth of user generated information. Does this type of information-heavy community benefit users or does it just become a major problem for those wishing to gain attention and break through the clutter?
This conundrum is encapsulated well in Kelly’s statement, ‘when copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable’ (Kelly 2008). So should we spend more time valuing the scarce- also known as the traditional media, the shop fronts, and the content which can’t be made up by a twelve year old girl posing as a professor on Wikipedia? Or should we embrace the produser and the clutter that derives from it?
My personal view is that if we don’t embrace the produser we will never get the truths, creations and revolutions that do not get exposed through the typical publishing route. I say this with the thought of Asmaa Mahfouz fresh in my mind. Let me know your thoughts!
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.
Kelly, K. (2008). Better Than Free.[URL: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html]
I agree, the sheer abundance of everyone's thoughts and feelings and the ease to which they can be published make it hard to know between fact and fiction. Despite being published on "credible" sites many people can simply post utter bull and thousands if not millions of people will read and share it.
ReplyDeleteIt will interesting to see what "old wives tales" there will be in the future that spawn from the ramblings of the internet.