User Generated Culture

Date: 08/07/13

What is User Generated Culture and how does it influences us?

User Generated Culture

Internet is made not to be being controlled. The fact of controlling internet is very vague as it’s used by a huge mass across the globe. It is very difficult for anyone to control the information in the internet. The concept of user generated culture comes from the reality where an internet user is both serving the roles of a user and a consumer.

On one hand new media technologies have lowered production and distribution costs, expanded the range of available delivery channels and had enabled consumers to achieve, annotate, appropriate and re-circulate media content in powerful new ways. Earlier almost all the communication models were one way communication model. In TV channels, the feedback from the audience is very strong. There are some attributes which needs to be discussed in that context.

• Annotate – One can reproduce it with the help of another interpretation.
• Appropriate – The appropriate content inside a website.
• Re-circulate – All the information available on the website which does not fall under any copyright can be shared by anyone and at any point of time. For example, many small video clips can be taken from YouTube to make another video clip and again this newly formed video clip can be used by someone else to make another one. So, the information or the data is always in the recirculation phase.

On the other hand, there has been an alarming concentration of the ownership of mainstream commercial media, with a small handful of multinational media conglomerates dominating all the sectors of the entertainment industry.

The knowledge condition on convergence

‘No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity’- Levy’s notion of collective intelligence.

Communities are defined through voluntarily, temporary and tactical affiliations, are reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments and are held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge.

Idea of convergence

Converge of media is the coming together of old and new media. Media convergence is more than simply a technological shift. According to Henry Jenkins convergence is “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries and the migratory behavior of media audiences.” Convergence here alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_convergence#Media

Henry Jenkins, an American Media Scholar had extensively worked in the media and communication research field and had come up with the concept of media convergence. According to him a whole range of new technologies has enabled the consumers to achieve, annotate, appropriate and recirculate media content and in that process, the technologies have altered the ways that consumers interact with core institutions of government, education and commerce.

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/converge.html

It represents a reconfiguration of media power and a reshaping of media aesthetics and economics. The French cyberspace theorist Pierre Levy uses the term ‘collective intelligence’ to describe the large scale info. Gathering and processing activities, that have embedded in web communities.

The knowledge condition on convergence

The impression of collective intelligence comes from this media convergence. Levy’s notion of collective intelligence says ‘No one knows everything, everyone, knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity’. Collective intelligence is a shared intelligence that develops from the association and opposition of many individual’s ideologies. This intelligence eventually helps an individual in the process of decision making. New Media is considered to be a product of collective intelligence. The amount of knowledge or information stored through new media is immense and the best part is that it can be shared anywhere with anyone and at any point of time. In new media there are some veracious communities and some fraudulent communities too. However, at the end of the day irrespective of different attributes which they carry they have the same objective of exchanging knowledge.