Special Guest Post - Why User-generated Content Mostly Isn't

At Penguin we're lucky to come into contact with some of the finest minds around - our job, when it comes down to it, is to get the product of those fine minds into as many hands as possible. So it's been a real pleasure to see how enthusiastically early proofs of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky have been spreading round the office and how the ideas he espouses have become part of our conversational currency in Penguin.

It's also very appropriate for Clay to write a guest post here on the blog - as a teacher, writer and consultant on the social impact of technology we can certainly use his advice! Here Comes Everybody is concerned with the social changes we are witnessing today as the technology which allows individuals to rapidly disseminate and share news and views becomes more common and more sophisticated by the day.

We want as many people as possible to read this book, and we've got some advance copies to send out - so if you are a UK blogger and if you want to read Clay's book and share your views on it with the world, send us an email with your name, address and blog url and 'Everybody' in the subject line and we'll get a book over to you.

Now, over to Clay...

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

Here, on a random Friday in January, is some of what is on offer from the world's mass of amateurs.

  At Livejournal, BlueDuck says "ok a bottle of wine later, i wish i hAd vodka...or something. damnit."

  On Twitter, a user going by nsaum75 says "looks like another sleepless night is coming to an end. 5:30am...need to be up in an hour... ::sigh::"

  At YouTube, bishow1808 has just uploaded a blurry 30 second video of a fish swimming in shallow water.

  At MySpace, Jonathan (M, 24) tells us "you cant say happiness without saying penis"

  At Xanga, seedsower has posted several photos of a doll with different styles of Play-Doh hair.

And that, of course, is a drop in the bucket.

The catch-all label for this material is "user-generated content." It's easy to deride this sort of thing as the nadir of publishing -- why would anyone put such drivel out in public?

It's simple. They're not talking to us.

We misinterpret these seemingly inane posts, because we're so unused to seeing material in public that isn't for the public. The people posting messages to one another, on social networking services and weblogs and media sharing sites, are creating a different kind of material, and doing a different kind of communicating, than the publishers of newspapers and magazines are.

Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this content than it would to call a phone call with your mother "family-generated content." A good deal of user-generated content isn't actually "content" at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot of it is just part of a conversation.

Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking of any group of people as an audience. Audience, though, is just one pattern a group can exist in; another is community. Most amateur media unfolds in a community setting, and a community isn't just a small audience; it has a social density, a pattern of users talking to one another, that audiences lack. An audience isn't just a big community either; it's more anonymous, with many fewer ties between users. Now, though, the technological distinction between media made for an audience and media made for a community is evaporating; instead of having one kind of media come in through the TV and another kind come in through the phone, it all comes in over the internet.

As a result, some tools support both publication and conversation. Weblogs aren't only like newspapers and they aren't only like coffeeshops and they aren't only like diaries -- their meaning changes depending on how they are used, running the gamut from reaching the world to gossiping with your friends.

When BlueDuck is blogging drunk at LiveJournal, he's blogging a communal context, and mostly for the amusement of his friends. As I'm writing this post for Penguin, I am self-consciously working on something for broad public consumption. When my students post to a class blog, they are operating in-between; they are members of a small academic community, and they are writing drafts of things that they may someday make public. This is new. We have never before had a single platform which could scale from conversation to broadcast and all points between, but social media gives us that -- it's like your telephone could turn into a radio, depending on how you configured it.

The internet is in a way the first thing that really deserves the label 'media'. It is a truly general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold multiple types of content, created and distributed for a huge variety of reasons and in a huge variety of ways, ways that can't be fit into the old mode of "content", where one group creates and another merely consumes. What I've discovered both as a participant and observer of social uses of media is that no one pattern of use is as interesting as the incredible flexibility and re-combinability of all the patterns together; one of the reasons I wrote this book, and one of the things I most hope readers get out of it, is an excitement about how much experimentation is still possible, and how many new uses of our social tools are waiting to be invented.

Clay Shirky

23 January 2008

Comments

[Thomas Darius Hawthorn, FSB]

What an excellent blog! I'd be very interested in contacting your Digital Publisher, Jeremy Ettinghausen regarding plans for new media in book publishing. I'm a literary agent working with a published rocket science author, and we're currently developing specialised digital media plans in line with book publishing. My background is in IT and within my computer company (based in Scotland)I have gained a wealth of experience in digital delivery. I would welcome discussing this with Jeremy.
Very best, Thomas

[Adriaan]

Jeez, I'm really impressed with the clarity in which you've presented the disctinction between audience and community. Already very interested in the book!
Greetings, Adriaan

[Seedsower]

Hey! I liked that play-doh hair!
It was drivel to be certain but it was for fun.

[Charon]

I for one would rather view the “drivel” Seedsower produces than that by drivel Clay Shirky. You won’t like everything on the internet, but I suspect few people are so foolish as to expect to do so. And if being light hearted fun makes something drivel then the world should have more of it.

[Male Female Herbal Products]

This blog is very very informative.

[Amyobus Key]

Because most of the published data is unfiltered, it appears to be drivel, lacking a level of interest we would expect of published material. I remember in the late 70s (even before PCs, never mind the Internet) finding a diary, written in the 1920s, by a lady recently deceased. It was most intriguing, despite its relating of ordinary events: what she wore, what she ate, what cute guy she thought was ogling her, as if I were peering over her shoulder, half a century later. I don't know why I was so intrigued, nor why a kind of snoopy audience likes to view Blogger drivel. I guess we humans just like seeing what other humans do.