Curating/rating Content

As media production moves more towards becoming a common user activity than an exclusive, professional field, one side effect will be that huge volumes of content will be produced. A negative consequence of this is that some high quality productions may be drowned out by a swarm of mediocre and repetitive content. Giving users a way to find relevant, high quality content will become increasingly challenging in the future.

While some platforms are leaning more towards user-based rating systems, others trust algorithms such as recommendation engines – or a combination of both. A solution for individual content relevance assessment without the creation of hermeti-cally sealed-off user bubbles would most likely help content production and usage immensely.

6.5. Technology

Whilst technology will continue to be an obvious major driver of increasing user-generated content, it is the second-order impact of technological innovations that will be even harder to predict. Here we discuss some areas of interest that likely will

have a huge impact on the media landscape in the future. When photos and online video become more searchable in the near future, finding relevant visual content will become much easier than it is today, and this likely will lead to a rise in video con-sumption. Similarly as translation technologies advance, and as languages begin to be translated automatically in real time, these technological innovations likely will also make content more accessible to more people around the globe. This also will open the door for new producers from small language areas like Finland.

One of the most crucial technological changes will come when software will un-derstand natural language input, before other sensory inputs such as eye movements will be available. As human computer interfaces become more natural, it will make our interaction over the Web more seamless. It will also counter the ‘digital divide’ as the interaction between content and people over the Web will become less obstructed and more effortless.

7. Conclusions

We have seen massive changes in the media over the last twenty years, owed largely to digitalisation, which has made distribution costs come close to zero. However, there are no free lunches either. As Lauri Kivinen, CEO of YLE, stated recently, “Someone always needs to pay for the content in one way or another” (Kivinen, 2013). Together with steadily dropping production costs, this has led to a global rise in media content production, as exemplified by the rising amount of content being produced. Many new players have entered the production landscape, and, even though many of the old players are still around, their days of stable growth are over.

Today, media users are increasing in numbers and increasingly are collaborating amongst themselves and with professional producers. They are making more use of growing numbers of participatory media platforms and generally have a bigger choice of media content and platforms in which to consume this content. Given all this, their individual and collective power over media content and media producers themselves is growing exponentially.

Before all this began taking shape, skills for media production were mastered by only a relatively small group of experts. However, today these skills are becoming a normal part of our basic skill set, and more and more people are expected to master them. Indeed, these skills increasingly are being taught in elementary schools (e.g., shooting and distributing videos). Anyone can become a medium, producing and broadcasting content on different platforms. For companies, this presents a unique opportunity to have fast and direct access to clients and customers without the (once high) cost and mediating role of delivery media, the traditional media institutions such as television or print production.

With better access to tools, knowledge and distribution channels, a new group of entrepreneurs has emerged. These pro-ams, who often have no formal training

in media production but are passionate about their subject matter, have managed to gain more and more influence in recent years. Their influence can be seen in the emergence of more diverse content and formats, but also as they invoke general changes in production practices, as they are effortlessly involving their fan base in their production and funding processes as well as openly sharing their knowledge.

All these changes create tension and power plays amongst media players, such as through ongoing, unresolved debates on censorship, privacy, piracy, control over content and so on. But these changes also offer great opportunities for entrepreneurs (i.e., pro-ams) to fill the void where traditional producers do not yet dare to tread.

They also give hope to professional media producers, for we assert that more power to the people may, in actuality, lead to more power to media producers who are pre-pared to adapt to the changing times.

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